Case Story: Copyright Propagation in Social Networks

Summary	Copyright Propagation in Social Networks
Group / workshop	Digital Identities	Status	seed
Project details...	This is for the Digital Identities Workshop. This work case was first suggested to me by the W3C's Policy Language Interest Group Discussion.

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

A young student has her picture taken and uploaded by a friend to Flickr with a Creative Commons license that allows commercial use. A major company friends the photo on Flickr and proceeds to use it in an advertising campaign across the country where the student lives, with an unflattering logo beneath the photo that says "Dump Your Pen Friend". The young student feels emotionally damaged and sues the company in court.

More details of this actual case are here:

http://ipandentertainmentlaw.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/update-dumb-your-pen-friend/

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The problem at hand can be confronted one of two ways. The first is to assume that the owner of the photo perhaps did not fully understand what situation they were putting their friend in by releasing their photo under the Creative Commons License, in which case all that is needed is to offer a more full explanation of the license. However, it is more likely to assume that the original owner of the photo understood Creative Commons, but did not notify their "friend" that an unflattering picture of them was being uploaded that could be used for-profit by a company.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

What is needed is that the social networking platform, Flickr in this case, needs to have the ability to notify people when photos of them have been uploaded under licensing conditions they object to. Assuming that the photo is tagged, while social networking sites like Flickr already implement this to a limited degree (without licensing updates), this problem is much more widespread. For example, what if the young female student was not a member of Flickr, and so could not be easily updated if a photo of her is published.

However, she is likely to a member of some social networking site, so with the proper combination of identity technology (like OpenID) and cross-platform embedding of licensing information (such as the use of Creative Commons licenses embedded in RDFa), as well as some cross-social networking site communication protocol (XMPP perhaps), this problem could be solved in a distributed manner based on Open standards.

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Of course, as no technology implements this yet, there is no clear result from which to judge or test the technology. However, it shows that there is a very clear use-case and need to prevent this sort of incident from happening in the future.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

The problem at hand can be confronted one of two ways. The first is to assume that the owner of the photo perhaps did not fully understand what situation they were putting their friend in by releasing their photo under the Creative Commons License, in which case all that is needed is a

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.