04 January 2008
Who owns content anyhow?
I just read about Robert Scoble's attempt to download contact information from his Facebook page using an automated script. This has resulted in Facebook disbaling his account for "violating the terms of service".
Facebook may have picked the wrong example to make. Scoble is a prominent and well-respected tech blogger and has clearly chose to make a point about the rights that users of social networks have (or rather don't have) over their own content. He has already joined www.dataportability.org, an organisation working to develop open standards for porting data between services, and a Facebook group has been formed to protest his expulsion from the service.
This example got me thinking about the "scraping" of classified content by aggregators such as Oodle that many publishers have long deplored. The accusation that the aggregators were "stealing our content" has withered away as publishers have realised that putting up walls and trying to defend their information silos against all comers was counter-productive and if they couldn't beat 'em, they should join 'em. And so whilst there's been no great deluge of content-sharing agreements bar a couple of direct uploads to GoogleBase, it's become clear that content wants to be free, and if we want to serve our advertisers and readers well, we need to release our content onto the world wide web and wish it well.
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