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On persuasion, perfectibility, and the abolishment of academic copyright

July 22, 2009 – 8:01 pm

Despite what Dan Cohen averred yesterday, Steven Shavell is apparently not arguing that we should abolish copyright for academic works. His title is a question — “Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?” — and it is a question that he claims to explore, not answer:

On the basis of a number of empirical judgments – notably, that universities and grantors would tend to subsidize publication fees – I suggested that ending academic copyright would be socially beneficial. The reader may, of course, make different empirical assessments and come to a different conclusion. My principal goal was not to persuade the reader that my empirical judgments are correct but rather to identify and clarify the factors bearing on the social desirability of ending copyright of academic works. (54-5)

It’s a good thing he’s not trying to persuade, because he hasn’t. I could wish that he had met his principal goal, but I’m afraid he hasn’t met that, either. There’s not much that’s clear about this article.

What is it that bothers me so much about this piece? It can’t only be the style: it’s not fair to judge someone for writing in an approved idiom, no matter how idiotic that idiom may seem to others. I am not, after all, a lawyer. It can’t only be the suggestion that ending academic copyright would be socially beneficial, because I’m predisposed to be friendly to that view. I think perhaps that what most bothers me is the discontinuity between the style and the argument. The proposition that copyright should be abolished for academic works is a dramatic one, and yet Shavell writes as though the question is, well, merely academic. Just a suggestion, not an actual persuasive argument that might have human consequences. For instance, Shavell’s list of the “social benefits from eliminating academic copyright – deriving from the free availability of academic works” is limited to some very dull things:

Faculty and students do not have ready access to all articles on the Internet and often face costly-in-time hurdles to locate what is in theory freely available. The assembly of teaching materials from articles and the printing of them is often seriously constrained by copyright. Further, many academics and students in institutions without substantial resources (including many small colleges and junior colleges in the United States and teaching institutions in other countries) cannot afford to pay for more than a narrow segment of journals. Additionally, there are numerous individuals who are not members of the university community but who wish to read academic works. When one takes these observations into account and aggregates the benefits of a copyright-free world over the relevant populations and the huge number of articles that are published, my supposition is that the sum would be substantial. (36)

These are “social” benefits? These, only these, are the “social” benefits to be brought about by an unprecedented and extremely unlikely transformation of U.S. law? They hardly seem worth it. They seem largely limited to universities, moreover. Let’s see some rhetorical life, here, some blood and spit! The ill, cured by free medical research! The inconsolable, cured by free philosophy! Climate change skeptics startled by a sudden rain of environmental studies! Cultural criticism at last ungated to the culture it critiques! Rivers in India cleansed of bacteria! Wells in Africa dug! Global dissemination of enlightenment!

I see that irony has suffused those last sentences, which just shows the bad karma of mocking another’s writing style. Suffice it to say that one can believe that academic research should be given to the public while also believing that both academics and the public are human and thus resistant to perfectibility.

Well, if it’s difficult to make a significant contribution to human perfectibility through the production or consumption of academic research, it’s fairly easy to summarize, and everyone’s always grateful for that. Shavell’s argument runs thus (the following is redacted but verbatim, save for material in brackets, which I have added):

[1] Academic authors would still have a strong affirmative motivation to publish in the absence of copyright – to gain scholarly esteem and to advance themselves professionally.

[2] Publication fees, however, would probably be charged by publishers in the absence of academic copyright, and the fees would be more than nominal.

[3] If academics would have to bear publication fees in the absence of copyright, their incentive to write and to publish would fall.

[4] If, however, academics would not have to bear publication fees – because universities or grantors would pay them – their incentive to write and to publish articles would tend to rise, and so might their incentive to write and publish books.

[5] Universities and grantors would have a motive to subsidize publication fees in a world without copyright. [This motive, according to Shavell, is that library costs would fall dramatically, since libraries would have to pay a dramatically lesser amount for books and journals.]

[6] The effect of elimination of academic copyright on the level of publication depends on the extent to which universities and grantors would subsidize publication fees. Because of the motive of universities and grantors to subsidize these fees, it is plausible that the number of published works – especially articles – would increase, and in any event, would not decline substantially.

[7] To the degree that publications would be discouraged by the elimination of academic copyright, the social losses would be limited because the publications would not ordinarily be of high quality.

[8] The social loss from a discouraged publication would also be limited because an unpublished work could be posted on the Internet.

[9] To the degree that publications would be encouraged by the elimination of academic copyright and subsidy of publication fees, either social gains or losses could be engendered. The latter problem might be offset by university and grantor efforts to condition subsidy on quality.

[10] Summary – the effect of elimination of copyright on authors’ incentives to publish might not be negative overall – it might lead to more publications, due to subsidy of publication fees – and to the extent that it would discourage publications, the loss in social welfare would probably be limited.

Without going through all ten points above (though I’m tempted), I’d say that the chief problem with this argument is how puppetlike the motivations of the interested parties seem. Academics, publishers, universities, all have rational motivations in the above argument, which they certainly do not in the academic world I live in (bless our imperfect little hearts). Take point 5, especially, that universities would have a motive to subsidize publication fees for faculty members if the library subscription costs were to plummet dramatically. That, my friends, is logical, which means that it’s entirely unrealistic. If library costs were to plummet dramatically, “the university” is just as likely to take the money and spend it on a football stadium or scholarships for need-based students or the salaries of upper-level administrators or health insurance for its protesting and about-to-strike graduate student lab assistants and teaching assistants. A university is a complex place, with the left hand frequently strangling the right hand. It’s already the case that “the university” simultaneously a) requires junior faculty to publish before it promotes them, and b) strips funds from its university press if it has one, thus making it harder for anyone and everyone to publish. There’s a great deal in Shavell’s argument that depends not on law, but on organizational policy.

Another of my general objections to Shavell’s piece is his unquestioning and undefined use of terms such as “an academic.” As someone who would like to reserve the right to write academic works without necessarily being an academic, this bothers me. Think of “journalist”: we never quite realized until recently that we defined a journalist as “someone who is employed by a media company”; those were the only people who could be journalists, and therefore we never thought much, as a culture, about it. Now, of course, when almost anyone can start up a blog and do a form of journalism, we’re starting to realize that we might need some kind of content-based, purpose-based definition of journalism, so that we know who can have journalistic privileges such as the right to keep a source private.

Similarly, it seems to me very unwise to tie a law of this magnitude to the assumption that “an academic” is a definable entity, not to mention “a publisher” or “a university.” Is a grad student an academic? Is a library with an institutional repository a publisher? Is Tech U of America a university? Is the law going to be asked to determine these things? According to Shavell, an “academic work” could be known by “whether its authors are usually academics; whether its readers are mainly academics; the degree to which its content is academic in character (displays sophistication and knowledge of prior learning); and, most important, the magnitude of any royalties received by authors (low or no royalties would favor classification as academic)” (48-49). Great. Another four-factor test. To be administered by an “expert extra-judicial body” (49). And, as you’ll note, dependent on definitions of “academics,” which to my knowledge are not already legally determined. I might be more receptive to the argument that works produced by non-profit entities should be without copyright; that’s an existing legal structure. Finally, how would the amount of royalties (or, in the case of journals, other money not paid) be a factor in determining whether a work was academic given that if the law were passed, no one would receive any royalties?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has outlined what I think is a much more realistic proposal for scholarly publishing, one that takes into account real human and institutional motivations and behaviors. In her paper at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, she argued for a “hybrid” economic model for the university press, a model that is “neither a wholly commercial nor a wholly gift-based economy, but rather one that creates value for users by offering services they desire, thereby encouraging them to contribute their labor to the enterprise” (106). She outlined a persuasive model in which “presses return to their earlier, service relationship to authors within their own institutions, in order to more firmly cement their position within the heart of the university’s overall mission” (106). In other words, since universities do indeed want their faculty to publish, universities might be persuaded to turn university presses back into what they used to be: a means of disseminating their own faculty’s work. This, granted, is also an ambitious proposition, though it’s not on the level of abolishing copyright for academic work. But Kathleen is aware of that: she writes that her argument is a “radical shift” for presses. She clearly knows that part of her job in writing such a paper is indeed to persuade. Thank heavens for that. (Not to mention her clarity.)

What, then, divorced from Shavell’s treatment of it, of the idea that copyright ought to be abolished for academic work? Let’s also set aside its feasibility, which is minimal at best. On the whole, I don’t particularly like it. I want to retain my copyrights, if only to give them away with my own hand. I CC-license my work for non-commercial purposes only (although that too is an elastic term); however unlikely it may be, I don’t want someone taking my work and selling it directly, which can easily happen when there’s no copyright at all on a work. Shavell, by the way, seems always to assume that uncopyrighted work means free work, which is simply not true. My favorite example is the 9/11 report, which, as a government document, was and is in the public domain, yet it was a bestseller for the publisher Norton, who made tons of money on it by printing it up and distributing it through bookstores.

And, although I might be risking something or another by saying so, I’ll also admit that I think it might not be a bad idea for tenure-track faculty members to give their copyrights to universities. (With their own hands.) As I understand it, academics’ writings would be considered “work-for-hire” under the law, except that most universities and colleges explicitly disclaim their right to it as a matter of policy. In this changing publishing environment, I think it’d be a good idea to rethink that. It might help Kathleen’s model gain traction, for one thing. Junior scholars, as we all know, often loathe themselves for how eager they (we) are to publish their (our) way into a modicum of career advancement; I’d bet that there are plenty who would be more than willing to give copyright to the university, instead of to a press or journal. This would work best on the “publish, then filter” model of peer review, in which scholars’ work is published and then reviewed. Just imagine how freeing it would be to stop worrying about whether your work will be published. It would give you so much more time to worry about whether your work is any good.

And that can only be good, right?

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The Asimov story in which a mother invents Twitter

May 10, 2009 – 11:01 pm

I was busy this morning seeing my mother off after a weekend in which nothing, it seemed, could go wrong, and a great many things went startlingly, unexpectedly right. Thanks to Graham “Sky” Rowat, Mama and I got to go backstage last night after Guys and Dolls, which is something we’ll both remember for a long, long time. Nothing like hanging out on an honest-to-goodness Broadway stage with the guy who’s just given a terrific performance in the lead role. For once I got to give Mama something a little better than a lanyard in the usual wholly inadequate attempt at sufficient filial gratitude.

However, I’ve got a bit of Mother’s Day left, and so there’s still time to share with you all a little 1962 Isaac Asimov story called “My Son, The Physicist,” in which a mother invents Twitter. Or sort of.

The story isn’t online anywhere; it’s short enough for me to type the whole thing in for you — it takes up only three and a half pages in the edition of Nightfall and Other Stories that I got from the library — but of course that’d be infringing copyright, so I won’t. The gist is this: in the future, a mom comes to visit her hotshot son at “a huge government building” just as a furor has broken out. A space expedition has sent a communication from Pluto, the outermost, erm, dwarf planet, even though they were only supposed to get as far as Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, and even though the expedition left four years ago and only had enough supplies for a year. The eponymous physicist and some others believe that the expedition had help from extra-terrestrials, and so they’re desperate to have a conversation with the folks on Pluto.

Unfortunately, as the physicist explains,

“At the present moment Pluto is just under four billion miles away. It takes six hours for radio waves, traveling at the speed of light, to reach from here to there. If we say something, we must wait twelve hours for an answer. If they say something and we miss it and say ‘what’ and they repeat — bang, goes a day.”

The physicist wants to get the Army’s Multivac computer to solve the problem — but instead, his sweet little old mother solves it for him in an instant:

   ”Just one moment, General,” said Cremorna. “What are you getting at, Mother?”
   ”While you’re waiting for an answer,” said Mrs. Cremorna, earnestly, “just keep on transmitting and tell them to do the same. You talk all the time and they talk all the time. You have someone listening all the time and they do, too. If either one of you says anything that needs an answer, you can slip one in at your end, but chances are, you’ll get all you need without asking.”
   Both men stared at her.
   Cremorna whispered, “Of course. Continuous conversation. Just twelve hours out of phase, that’s all.”

Of course. Continuous conversation.

I went through a big Asimov phase in, oh, I don’t even remember, but it was probably high school. I read I, Robot and a whole lot of short stories. I’m not sure what made me remember this story in particular, but it might have been the casual sexism, which I think I remember noticing with mild distaste even back then. It’s a little retchy, Mrs. C’s explanation of how she thought of continuous conversation:

“But Gerard, all women know it. Any two women — on the videophone, or on the stratowire, or just face to face — know that the whole secret to spreading the news is, no matter what, to Just Keep Talking.”

Hkkkzh. As someone female who has always rather disliked both gossip and the telephone, I find this especially irritating.

Ahem. I’m okay now, so now we can give Asimov his proper kudos for correctly predicting that continuous out-of-phase communication would become (how about that!) a great way of spreading the news. And while I’m not suggesting that Mrs. Stone or Mrs. Williams was the real brain behind Twitter, I still hope the Twitter guys gave their moms a nice Mother’s Day.

Posted in General | 10 Comments »

Where marketers would never want to tamper

May 4, 2009 – 6:46 pm

Here’s the thing: English professors don’t usually get asked to test drive and review cars. I’ve reviewed books, grant proposals, even web sites. Never cars.

Ah, this blessèd plot, this Internet.

Granted, I’m not an “English professor” — I have a Ph.D. in English literature, which means that I trained to become an English professor, but I’ve never made it even to the interview stage at the MLA convention. When people ask me what I do for a living, I often reply, “I have a Ph.D. in English literature.” Which is dodging the question. If I feel obliged to say what I actually do, I reply, “I work in various capacities on various projects having to do with technology and the humanities.” Or, of course, I describe my current project and position.

Really, I think, people expect an answer to the question of what I do that identifies who I am, an identity marker: “I am an assistant professor of English.” Honestly, even when I had a one-year teaching position at North Carolina State University with the words “assistant professor” in the title, I never claimed that as an identity. I’d say, “I teach English literature at NC State,” because I didn’t have a tenure-track position. What I am, professionally speaking (besides perennially underemployed, which condition applies to at least 50% of people with Ph.D.s in English literature) is still undefined.

Sometimes this lack of definition is decidedly stressful — I’d certainly like a permanent job with a permanent job title that I and others can immediately understand — but at other times, times like these, it’s actually kinda fun. I’ve never liked being categorized. (“Don’t LABEL me, man,” she said with a beatnik sneer.) I’ve been called a “poet” and a “musician” and a “singer-songwriter,” and those labels never feel right, either. Those are just things I do sometimes, and they don’t define me. “Grad student” was my label for a long time. I got used to that one, comfortable with it — too comfortable. Recently I’ve claimed “digital humanist,” though that term is arcane and hard to define. I define it as “someone with a humanities degree who’s interested in computers.”

Most recently, I earned another label: “blogger.” Someone named “Blogger Amanda French” was frequently cited in February’s hoo-hah about Facebook’s Terms of Service. Facebook, by the way, has since asked its users to vote on the new Terms of Service, and they (or some of them, anyway) approved the new ones. Gotta be honest here: I don’t much care. This was a good thing for Facebook to do, I think, and I’m especially glad as a former teacher of Intro to Composition that the new Terms are written in much clearer English. But who cares about my opinion? Not me. No pundit, I. I just like keeping up with technology news, and I do think that it’s important for us all to keep an eye on the tech companies (and all companies), especially as regards intellectual property and privacy.

What interested me about the controversy over Facebook’s Terms of Service was simply whether or not it was justified — whether or not the Consumerist’s claims that the Terms of Service were scary and horrible were true. That’s what led me to blog about it. I concluded that yes, the Consumerist’s claims or implied claims were pretty much true, and the hullabaloo therefore just.

I have reached, by the way, exactly the opposite conclusion about the swine flu hullabaloo, but fortunately there are already plenty of rational people protesting this particular viral mania for misinformation.

One label that I secretly like a lot and hope to deserve is “scholar,” and that’s what scholars do, I think: find out and tell the truth. Journalists do that too (ideally), but scholars get a lot more time to do it than journalists do, and scholars can seek out the truth about stuff that very few people care about at the moment. We scholars, bless us, can be as verbose and sesquipedalian as we like, and we can duck the current daily frenzy and spend our days humming through frenzies long turned to dust. That was my very favorite part of graduate school. While I was writing my dissertation, I got my investigation on, big time. Such fun.

And then I also had fun finding a way to write the truth in a way that was accurate, fair, compassionate, and interesting. The trick is always to balance the desire to be witty or shocking or alliterative or otherwise attention-grabbing with the mandate to be correct and thorough and just. Get out of balance one way, and you’ve got a tabloid; get out of balance another, and you’ve got a 1040 form. As a scholar, I want to be, oh, let’s pull a phrase out of the air, “engaging and authentic.”

All of which is a very long-winded way of getting around to telling you that since I’ve been christened a blogger, I am apparently entitled to receive e-mails such as this:

“I see that you like to write and tweet about social media, teaching, and blogging, and I am wondering if you would like an opportunity to document the experience of test driving a roomy and sturdy Ford Mercury Milan or a sporty yet stylish Lincoln MKX for a few days? It’s usually the car journalists who get to test drive the cars, but we’re looking for fresh perspectives and feedback, something a little more engaging and authentic. What do you think?”

I think I love the Internet. Hee hee.

Ah, well. I told her that I was tickled by her offer (it still cracks me up), turned it down (politely, I hope), and warned her that I was going to write about her e-mail. I ought really to have sent her a link to technology journalist Rafe Needleman’s Pro PR Tips and a link to Merlin Mann’s correspondence with a hapless marketing intern. Merlin Mann, who’s one of the hilarities behind the podcast “You Look Nice Today,” is neither a journalist nor a scholar and can thus pull out the snark bazooka.

Analysis of this e-mail? First, the sender (or her boss) doesn’t understand social media and should at once read the Cluetrain Manifesto; second, she doesn’t understand who I am, despite the presence of copious information on this site suggesting that I am not at all interested in cars or car reviewing; third, Ford might want to look for a new New Media marketing firm; fourth, she’s being disingenuous to the point of dishonesty by writing that they’re looking for “fresh perspectives and feedback.” What led her to e-mail me, I know as surely as if I were kicked back with my feet up on her frontal lobe, was the fact that I have those 2,000 followers on Twitter and got those 30,000 views on that blog post about Facebook. Hey, look at me, I’m an influencer! Who needs a tenure-track job in an English department?

Marketers, beware. I like what I like, and I write what I want to write, and I write it on my own schedule. I cannot be bribed. I cannot be persuaded. I have internal tenure, and you cannot take it from me. And I am not the only one, out here on this Internet.

Posted in General, Internet | 8 Comments »

Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Shelley

March 24, 2009 – 11:02 pm

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, in which people are asked to write about “women excelling in technology.”

There are several women I could have written about. I could have written about my former housemate Chris Ruotolo, for instance, who teaches XML courses — we were in the same group in Jerry McGann and Pat Spacks’s class on “The Novel of Sensibility” back in 1995 (gulp), which, I’ll have you know, was where I wrote my very first web page. (Sadly, the links are all broken now: this was before I knew about relative links, and the site has moved.) I could have written about my former supervisor Kristin Antelman, who was the best manager I’ve ever had, who makes sure that the NCSU Libraries continues to build cool stuff, and who showed that people cite scholarly articles that are on the open web more often than articles that aren’t on the open web (amazing that it needed to be proven, but it did). I could have written about technology journalist Molly Wood, who demands daily that the filthy capitalist dogs at the technology companies take some freaking heed of the public good once in awhile.

However, I’ve chosen to write about Mary Shelley: Mary Shelley, who, in 1816, when she was 19 years old, wrote Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818). If you concede that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel (and many do), then it’s certainly worth honoring Mary Shelley on Ada Lovelace day. And, of course, Mary was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, who’s in the Most Famous Romantic Poets club with Byron, and Byron was there at the famed Swiss gathering where Mary began Frankenstein — and Byron was Ada Lovelace’s father.

I can’t write anything about Mary Shelley beyond what’s on the Wikipedia page, and I haven’t read the novel in years (as I recall it was rather turgid, sad to say), but this occasion has led to some pleasant idling around on the Internet, and I figure I can show you what I found.

For instance, did you know that Thomas Edison’s motion picture company made a Frankenstein movie in 1910? I happened to know this because back when I was in college, my uncle Bob David did a remake of it titled “Edison’s Frankenstein.” I helped him out with band-aids and safety pins, thus earning my only IMDB credit (to date). At the time, there was no way to get hold of the actual film — but now you can see Edison’s 1910 version of Frankenstein on the Internet Archive:

I mean, that is some great stuff. Terrific special effects in the creation scene; kinda looks like they burned something and then rolled the film backward. The monster is very creepy looking, and how about that explicit moral with the mirror trick?

I also located an image of a page from Mary Shelley’s original manuscript:

Really clear handwriting. You wouldn’t believe how terrible lots of nineteenth-century handwriting is. I did some research on Mary Somerville back in grad school (another great heroine of science), and I had to really work to read her writing. I agree, Mary: “beautiful” is much more effective than “handsome,” there, and “yellow skin” is much better than “dun skin.”

I also browsed through one of the original reviews of Frankenstein, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, and which called the book “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity.” They just did not mince words back then. Interesting choice, that word “tissue” — wonder if the reviewer (who remained anonymous) meant to evoke the medical sense of the term. No one knew that the author was a woman, by the way, so you can’t attribute that blunt opinion to sexism.

Finally, I did a search for the word “science” in the book itself, which produced some interesting results. At one point, Frankenstein’s college professor advises him as follows:

“If your wish is to become really a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics” (66).

This made me think of Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, which I’ve just finished; Johnson argues that Joseph Priestley was a bit of a petty experimentalist but that he, and everyone, nevertheless benefited greatly from the innate interdisciplinarity of the era. Shelley got her inspiration for Frankenstein, by the way, from some experiments with electrocuting worms that Erasmus Darwin did, and Erasmus Darwin was an intellectual contemporary and crony of Priestley’s. There’s also this:

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. (68)

Yeah, I don’t really believe that. I think in all studies there’s “continual food for discovery and wonder.” However, I am mollified by the rather interesting discovery that when we stop getting the story in Dr. Frankenstein’s voice and start getting it in the monster’s voice (did you know that? that the monster narrates part of the story in eloquent Enlightenment prose? It was a shock to me when I first read the book, I’ll tell you.) — in any case, as I was saying, when the monster begins to write, he starts referring to language as a “science”:

So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the old man’s instrument nor the songs of the birds: I since found that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or letters. (155)

Sevearl times, the creature refers to language, to speaking, to writing, as a science. Imagine that.

Imagine this, too: no Frankenstein. Without Frankenstein, maybe no “mad scientist” trope in fifties B movies. Without Frankenstein, maybe no “Rossum’s Universal Robots (R. U. R.)” and no I, Robot from Asimov. Without Frankenstein, maybe no Jurassic Park.

Without Frankenstein, maybe no reminder that science and technology and even language, for all their wonders, have their horrors too.

Posted in Literature, Technology | 7 Comments »

Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter

February 16, 2009 – 2:28 pm

UPDATE 9/27/10: This post has very kindly been translated into Belorussian by an interested reader: Belorussian.

UPDATE 5/8/09: Facebook revised its Terms of Service, aka the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Here’s their blog post about it, and here’s the current policy.

***

With today’s outrage over Facebook’s newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I’d do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn’t justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story.

Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook’s claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant. Here’s the rundown, which I go through in more detail below:

1. Facebook apparently wants to keep all its rights to your stuff after you remove it from Facebook, and even after you delete your Facebook account; they just removed the lines that specified that their rights end when your content comes down. Nobody else (of those I looked at) would dream of that; mostly they specifically state that their rights to your content end when you remove the content from their site or delete your account.
2. This one kills me: Facebook claims it can do whatever it wants with your content if you put a Share on Facebook link on your web page. Unbelievable–and unique, as far as I can tell. People can post links in Facebook to your content just by copying and pasting the URL, but if you want to save them a few keystrokes by putting a link or a widget on your site, Facebook claims that you’ve granted them a whole mess of rights. Count me out.
3. Other sites point out in their terms of service that you still own your content: Facebook doesn’t mention that little fact. Facebook also neglects to remind you that you’re giving other Facebook users rights to your Facebook content, too — YouTube, for example, makes it clear that other people besides YouTube have a right to use and spread around the videos you upload. In general, other sites’ terms of service just have a more helpful tone.

So let’s look at what other popular user-generated content sites say about their rights to your stuff:

MySpace’s rights to your stuff:

6.1 MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in your Content, subject to the limited license herein. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace a limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on or through the MySpace Services, including without limitation distributing part or all of the MySpace Website in any media formats and through any media channels, except Content marked “private” will not be distributed outside the MySpace Website. This limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services. After you remove your Content from the MySpace Website we will cease distribution as soon as practicable, and at such time when distribution ceases, the license will terminate. If after we have distributed your Content outside the MySpace Website you change the Content’s privacy setting to “private,” we will cease distribution of such “private” Content outside the MySpace Website as soon as practicable after you make the change.

6.2 The license you grant to MySpace is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace is able to use its affiliates, subcontractors and other partners such as Internet content delivery networks and wireless carriers to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach).

See? MySpace grants itself a “limited” license and carefully spells out what those limits are. MySpace does a terrific job in that second paragraph especially of explaining what’s going on, I think. Maybe your average thirteen-year-old would still need some help, but way to go with the “human-readable” language, MySpace. Getting an explanation about why they need to be able to sublicense the content is terrific, and I’m sure that if they then tried to sublicense it for other purposes, they’d be tripped up by their own TOS.

Yahoo!’s rights to your Flickr stuff:

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Yahoo! Services. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable [...]:

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo! Services other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Yahoo! Services and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Yahoo! Services.

Yahoo! makes distinctions between its Groups and other services like Flickr, but that need not concern us here (Yahoo! reserves fewer rights to Groups stuff than to Flickr stuff). They start by reminding you that they don’t own your stuff, then go on to say that they have the right to copy your stuff “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted.” In other words, they don’t grant themselves the right to use it in their advertising, as far as I can tell. And, sanely, the license ends when you (or they) take the content down. I checked out the Flickr Pro TOS, as well, and there’s nothing extra in there, whew. I also love that Flickr makes it very easy to stick a Creative Commons license on your photos, although to be honest I’m not sure if I’ve done that with mine. Must check.

Google’s rights to your Picasa stuff:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services. Google will discontinue this licensed use within a commercially reasonable period after such Content is removed from Picasa Web Albums.

Sounds reasonable. I don’t really mind their using my stuff in their advertising, though “other Google services” may soon encompass every single conceivable service on the planet. They, too, stop the license when you take the content down.

YouTube’s rights to your stuff:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Website. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable.

I really like it when these paragraphs start with the helpful information that “you retain all ownership rights.” Also note that YouTube points out that “You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website” some rights. Way to look out for the community. Good job. Now add the ability for us to put Creative Commons licenses on our videos somewhere other than in the description, okay? Thanks.

LinkedIn’s rights to your stuff:

License and warrant your submissions: You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any User generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royaltyfree right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

LinkedIn is the one exception to the general conclusion I state above: its language about its rights to your content is at least as strong as Facebook’s, if not more so. The thing is that people don’t upload pictures and videos to LinkedIn; the main user-contributed content is the facts in a profile (where I worked, where I went to school). People usually don’t mind having that information spread around. Also, you can tell that LinkedIn is thinking mainly about the suggestions for improvement that people submit (“ideas, concepts, techniques”) — but still, LinkedIn would be well-advised to revise.

Twitter’s rights to your stuff:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

Isn’t that sweet? Granted, the only stuff people contribute to Twitter are their little 140-character tweets, plus a profile pic or two — these terms don’t cover what you post to TwitPic, for instance. But Twitter wants you to know that your stuff is yours, and it wants you to share your stuff with others. Twitter doesn’t reserve to itself the right to use your tweets in its promotional campaigns — does Twitter even do any self-promotion? They hardly need to; the New York Times has certainly been giving them enough press lately.

Facebook’s rights to your stuff:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Yeah, so I took the Facebook icon out of my Sociable WordPress widget. All my stuff here has a Creative Commons license, so I’ve already allowed everyone including Facebook to use my stuff for “non-commercial” purposes anyway; it’s not quite clear what counts as a “commercial” purpose in a Creative Commons license, granted (though they’re working on clarifying the term), but any use that Facebook would make would probably be commercial. I don’t even mind all commercial uses: I don’t really care if they want to use my profile picture to show that the people who use Facebook are really sexy and good-looking. But the stuff on my blog does not become Facebook “User Content” if I put a link that allows people to share it on Facebook. Come off it.

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