Thou Shalt Not Steal. Hey, that’s catchy.
Facebook tried to change its terms of service last February. The online community quickly lashed back with protests and concerns over what was perceived as an attempt by Facebook to take ownership of the users’ archived content. At that time Facebook was still trying not to break its collective arm while patting itself on the back for getting Obama elected to office. Perhaps in an effort to save face or wanting to prolong the afterglow, Facebook quickly reversed course and restored the previous TOS.
This raises a series of important questions about the things we casually post online and their importance. Do users need to license “newsfeeds” and “status updates” or their “moods” and “headlines”? Does any random thought or musing merit a copyright? Is all user generated content copyrightable? The answers, in short, are yes, yes, and ummm… yes.
The First Amendment gives us the right to speak freely. You have the right to state your opinion, even if you’re a moron. I don’t have to like what you say but I do have to defend your right to say it. Taking this one step further is the right to claim ownership or authorship of what you say. If Bob Bonehead updates his Facebook status with “Is wondering how my belly button gets so linty,” he should be able to protect this “addition” to the collective knowledge pool.
Willy Shakespeare is probably spinning in his grave right about now. The Bard of Avon wrote thirty-eight plays and one hundred fifty-four sonnets and is pretty well known. LOL Cats wrote “I can has cheezburger” and is pretty well known as well. Perhaps this is true progress and advancement of the human condition, fame in 140 characters or less. But you can rest assured that if Bob realized he could make a buck from his random thought while contemplating his navel he’d be protecting his “original works” faster than you could say “hashtag.”
It is likely that had the Facebook TOS been challenged legally it would not have held up in court. When content is created in fixed form it is copyrighted by the author. Even content created or uttered on the fly by users of social media falls under the realm of intellectual property. However, in what Wired magazine described as the “cut and paste culture” where “ownership” is something to be distributed and shared in a collaborative manner, there was no way for an individual user to designate to the public how they wanted the content on their Facebook profiles to be used.
A lasting work of creativity does not need to be a three act play to have value and staying power. Social media, blogs, and YouTube have made everyone a potential publisher. Shakespeare might be considered long-winded by Twitter standards but he is also who first said “brevity is the soul of wit.” You may never have heard of Clara Peller. But you can probably picture her instantly if I told you she is the lady that said “where’s the beef” in Wendy’s commercials. Clara would have had one hundred twenty-six characters to spare on Twitter.
News broadcasts and radio programs have a copyright. Anything that is said during the broadcast, whether spontaneous or scripted, is protected. But how do we create the same protection for ourselves? Enter the solution: A Creative Commons license for social networking content.
The nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons, has created such a blanket protection for Facebook. Creative Commons refers to it as the “Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application” acknowledging that it is first attempt to help users license profile content. The tongue in cheek title might be indicative of the difficulty of the average Facebook user to find this app on the site. Searching Facebook yields no results for the App. Instead it is currently only linked from the Creative Commons Facebook page and the organization website. Finding the link is probably the hardest part of licensing your profile.
The application is an easy way for social networking enthusiasts to select how they want their intellectual property to be used. It’s basically a Creative Commons license generator formatted for a Facebook profile. It generates a badge just like the original CC license site. It offers six attribution options, and allows the user to place the badge on their Facebook page. The user has the option of licensing photos, profile text, status updates, and videos. Content can be licensed for commercial or non-commercial use. The author can select various options for how the content can be used by others. The entire process takes less than two minutes- perhaps longer if you are unfamiliar with the Creative Commons licensing options.
While the time has definitely come for creative commons licensing to move into the social networking realm, there are a few issues that are inherent in Facebook that makes it difficult for secondary users to know what CC licensing a profile has. The first issue is the various privacy and security settings available to users. If your full profile cannot be viewed by others many will never see your badge. Technically, a creative commons badge should apply to your comments made on other profiles or in groups; however the formatting of the site means it is probable that most will never see your CC designation.
In addition to being unable to see the licensing attributions, a second limitation of the app is the current options for licensing. As it stands, it’s all or nothing. A great improvement of this app would be to allow specific licensing on individual items. A better option would be if the license could be applied to specific photo albums or individual entries. That way, users could designate licenses as they upload content. While it would not ensure that everyone could see the licensing badge, it would allow users to place relevant badges with particular content. According to the Creative Commons Facebook Application page, this is one of the things they would like to change in the final version.
This application will help raise awareness of the creative commons philosophy amongst casual users of social networking. The more robust final version of this app in the near future will be worth considering. It will be interesting to see how much of the collaborative nature of Creative Commons licensing is incorporated in forthcoming revisions of the Terms of Service. While Facebook espouses the rhetoric that its users will be greatly involved in the revision process, one cannot help but wonder if the corporate or the community model of copyright will dominate the new policy.
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