My, Your, or Their? (was Re: [iDC] Re: What you myspace will be held against you)

[Chris Byrne]

Thanks to Trebor for a very illuminating and discursive post: I regret 
not being able to make a suitably lengthy response just now.

In the meantime, continuing the (blossoming) Web 2.0 threads, a quick 
pointer to a couple of recent articles by Andrew Orlowski in the 
venerable IT news/gossip site The Register. Orlowski asks some direct 
questions about what exactly the legal and ownership relationships are 
between the owners of these social networking sites and the terabytes 
of "user generated content" (it even has an acronym now - UGC). The 
quotes give a flavour.

Chris

---

YouTube owns YourStuff, Monday 12th June 2006

"In its Terms & Conditions, the wildly popular video sharing site 
YouTube emphasizes that "you retain all of your ownership rights in 
your User Submissions". There's quite a large "BUT...", however. Not 
only does YouTube retain the right to create derivative works, but so 
do the users, and so too, does YouTube's successor company. Since 
YouTube has all the hallmarks of a very shortlived business - it's 
burned through $11.5m of venture investment (Sequoia Capital is the 
fall guy here) and has no revenue channels - this is more pertinent 
than may appear."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/12/youtube_owns_derivative_works/

Billy Bragg prompts Myspace rethink, Thursday 8th June 2006

"In the much hyped "Web 2.0" world of "user generated content", punters 
are expected to contribute their works for commercial exploitation for 
nothing. While MySpace is pretty unambiguous about copyright, 
exploitation isn't so much a distant temptation, but an integral part 
of its business."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/08/blly_bragg_myspace/