59ideas

Over the past 2 days I had an interesting exchange of email ( 11 13 at last count) with a guy that appear from nowhere. The content of the exchange can best be described as frustrating and a case of not seeing eye to eye.

Upon pondering a litter deeper however, I realise that it is not just an isolated incident but really a generic case of Web2.0 meeting the real world.

Many people, like me, live on the net, feeding on a diet of opensouce, mashup and all the fuzziness and overlaps that had became known as Web2.0.

Most of the time we are not too concern about other people using our work. This is not to say that we are condone those that blatantly steal work but rather, we prefer to embrace the idea of sharing, of community and a virtual closeness.

As much as we want to think that the whole world know what web2.0 is about, it is may very well be just 53,651 people.

So back to my story.

The story began with Mr H going to Squidoo. Squidoo, as some may already know, can be describe as a typical Web 2.0 mashup.

Squidoo provides widgets or modules of functionalities to users, Squidoo allows users to pull together content from sources such as Amazon.com, Flickr, dmoz, RSS and mix them into what they call a Lens.

Now this is where the fun or horror (depending on what you eventually get) starts. These these mix and match mashup is a potential mine field especially when someone come stomping around.

True enough, Mr H did came stomping and and a somewhat pyrotechnical exchange ensured.

You see Mr H is quite an accomplished photographer. He uploads his photos onto Flickr and in his personal introduction highlighted that his work are all copyrighted. Fine and well.

Of course in the Web2.0 world of RSS and web services, programs do not read text and is not aware of written copyright statement. This is not to say copyright is not respected. It means that some methods has to be used to tag or tell the program what to do. Programs after all respect what you tell them to.

Squidoo at one point offers the Let Flickr Pick option in the Flickr module. What it does is it let Flickr select, based on the tags the photos has, and return the photo. This is dynamic and the user has no control whatsoever on the selection. I do not know the inner algorithm but I suspect that Squidoo just receive a list of photo ids from Flickr.

All these explaining is not meant to be an excuse but to show how all these things work in a mashup kind of way.

I have a Len on Squidoo and I use the Flickr module.

You can start to imagine what happened next.

Mr H, angry (as he rightly should), shoot me an email claiming that I had used his photo without permission and is not allowed and want me to remove them. (Italic his word.)

In my first reply, I told Mr H that I do not have control over what appear except providing a keyword. (At this point I have not checked that Squidoo had stopped the Let Flickr Pick option.) I suggested that he could go into Flickr and set the necessary settings so that Flickr, not me or Squidoo, will not select his photo for display.

Mr H, who shoots and writes for an well-established news agency, took my suggestion as a challenge to his rights and claimed that I offended him, rip off his hard work causing him injury. His word wasn’t too kind which harden my resolve to stand up to it.

Nevertheless I went into Squidoo and found that that they had discontinued the grinned. I grinned. Squidoo, like me, must had came under similar fire, from “their friend at Flickr” no less.

Reviewing the situation, I decided to take down the Flickr module totally since the option does not exist anymore. I wrote back to Mr H, apologising even, that I had taken down the module. It didn’t end there of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have spend even more time writing this post.

Mr H decided to take this opportunity to lecture me copyright and using of other people’s work. It didn’t stop there. He even claimed that

… insisting that you were right to have used someone else’s property, simply because you did a random search, and were told by a third party that it was ok.”

What preposterous bigotry! In nowhere did I insisted that I have the right to use others property. In all counts, he got each of his fact wrong. He decided to attack and accuse me instead of finding out for himself how ,through his tag on Flickr, his photo ended up on Squidoo.

More email exchange ensured and I was determined not to take this sitting down.

Anyway so much for my story.

While agitating for me, this incident in the bigger scheme of things is but a perturbance in the greater contention between what is enabled by web technology and the challanged notions and concepts.

Music and video, filesharing, blogging and rss, podcasting and of course photo sharing, the assault are coming from all direction.

Can the problem be solved by demand, threats, accussation and suits? Or can there be a more positive way

To sum up I quote Flickr

it’s important to remember that if people see your photo, they can copy it and/or blog it anyway. That’s where you can use privacy settings, if you’d rather this didn’t happen. Hiding your photos from public view is really the best way.

When Web2.0 meet the real world, it is really more about sharing, tolerance and amiable resolution of contentions.

I wish Mr H can see my point as much as I can see his.

ps. Read Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace