Would you let a social media site sell the content you created using that site?
There’s been a lot of debate lately over the ownership of each little tidbit of content that appears on the Internet. Lady Gaga wants the copyright on any picture an online news service takes at one of her concerts, MSNBC has lambasted those news organizations that used a photo posted on Twitpic without crediting or paying the photographer and the NYT has raised questions about a deal between Twitpic and celebrity news company World Entertainment News Network (WENN) that appears to allow WENN to claim ownership of certain photos posted by Twitpic users.
Many of the main tools of today’s social media – Facebook, Twitter, even Google and Gmail – work on a model wherein they provide a service for free in exchange for your eyes viewing their advertising and, perhaps even more importantly, access to your personal data which allows them to target ads more precisely and sell aggregate information to marketers. That’s a deal you implicitly accept in exchange for the benefits they give you. Yet many sites have struggled to monetize themselves in that way; sometimes advertising revenue just isn’t enough.
Twitpic and others are taking that one step further. They make the offer: use our service, and in exchange we get access to your content, and the ability to sell it if we can. You get to use it too; we’re not going to take it from you – but a piece of it is ours. Is that a fair deal if it helps make such services possible?
On the one hand, authors and photographers – and by this I mean everyone who’s ever posted on Facebook or loaded a funny cat photo with a caption onto Flickr – want people to see what they have to say and to discuss it or repost it. If you put something up on the internet with the intention of having it seen (for free, 99% of the time!), should you mind if the hosting service decides to pass it on, get your work some publicity and make some money off of it?
On the other hand, pictures you take and things you write are, quite simply, yours – and a contract that you have no choice but to sign in order to use the service (and which no one reads) doesn’t seem like a terribly fair way to sign away those rights.
What do you think – should social media sites be able to monetize their users’ content?