A free-culture web site sponsored by the CE industry likes to point out this:

Digital technology enables anyone and everyone to be an artist and an innovator – to produce music, to create cutting edge films and videos, and to reach new audiences.

I agree. And I think we can all agree that not all of us will achieve equal market compensation for our music, films, photographs and other works; I’ll certainly be a lot lower than most. But we at the Copyright Alliance like to point out that copyright isn’t about whether one is making a lot of money on one’s work. It’s about one’s rights. Fundamental to copyright are these principles: 1) When you create a work, you automatically have a copyright for the work. 2) That copyright gives you broad say over the work’s use.

Facebook realized how passionately non-commercial artists (i.e., all of us) feel about their rights recently when a kerfuffle arose after Facebook quietly changed its Terms of Service in a way that Consumerist.org and others thought meant Facebook was claiming ownership over their photos, their videos, their words. An occasional Facebook user myself (where do the power users find the time to post as often as they do?), I quickly joined the “Facebook Owns You” group, which overnight hit 5,000 users and now stands at about 6,500 as of this writing, even though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been spinning madly to ensure users that Facebook has no desire to deny us our rights.

This is not a new issue, it has circulated around YouTube’s Terms of Service regarding videos posted to their site, and it will continue as long as we have tech services that spend more than they earn, own no original content, and have no choice but to try to monetize the content that others are putting on their system. Buyer beware, social networkers.

But of course there’s a broader concern here. Terms of service documents are, by and large, difficult to read and understand for most of us. They are, let’s be honest, a necessary evil, allowing ISPs, software companies and others to create parameters on what they can and cannot do and what customers can and cannot do. We do not live in a digital utopia, as anyone who has been solicited to profit from a Nigerian bank transaction knows; we need rules, to keep everyone honest. But all of us, as the owners of the works we create, must be vigilant and not allow tech companies to flip the rights regime so that by default they own our works, and we must somehow navigate our privacy settings or other controls to win those rights back.

Flipping the rights regime from opt-in to opt-out is the natural and logical path for any networking software platform to follow. ISPs transfer bits but they get paid through monthly subscriptions. Facebook, Twitter, et. al., transfer bits but are free. One doesn’t have to attend as many Digital Hollywood summits as I have to know that even the brightest minds haven’t figured out how to make money off of 99% of the cool things we can do online.

The good news is, those of us posting photos, videos, blog posts and poems on our social networking sites don’t need to worry about how the operators will make money, AS LONG AS WE ARE ABLE TO RETAIN OUR RIGHTS. People wax rhapsodic about the “wisdom of the crowds,” and the curmudgeon in me tends to encourage these people to slow down before they hyperventilate. But the fact is that the Internet is an amazing enabler of rapid response, and we saw that with this Facebook episode. Let us all remain vigilant for future threats.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 4:49 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.