The response was very divided. Many supported Scoble for what he did while others accused him of being dishonest about the whole issue.

Personally, I feel ambivalent about the matter. Though I am not comfortable with data lock-ins, as they artificially pad a company’s customer retention, I do not support Scoble knowingly violating a TOS and then complaining when he is banned and working to obtain reinstatement.

However, Scoble-gate, as it is being called on some sites, highlights a larger, much more worrisome issue. What would happen if the data involved wasn’t the information for his Facebook contacts, but rather, his blog postings or photos?

That would be very different and it raises some difficult issues.

I did some looking around and it became clear that many sites are executing a form of reverse content theft, locking in your work to their site and making it hard, or even impossible, to get out.

No longer do we have to just worry about our content appearing where we don’t want it, but also getting it where we need it in the first place.

The Premise

The idea of content theft itself is pretty simple. When you post a work to the Web, you have a choice in what sites it appears on. You can make that choice explicitly, by posting it yourself or directly granting permission, or implicitly through a license, such as a Creative Commons License, or other broad transfer of rights.

Most of the time, we worry about our content appearing where we don’t want it it. Spammers, scrapers and plagiarists can take content almost instantly and post it all over the Web, often times confusing the market and diluting the search results.

However, what happens when we post content to the Web, want to move it or copy it to another site but are prevented from doing so? It is a form of content theft in that it is a loss of control over placement. However, it is not traditional content theft but it is still a limitation on the rights of a copyright holder, in this case the right to share his or her own work with whomever he/she pleases.

As we become more and more reliant on third-party services, many of which we use for free, this issue of “reverse” content theft becomes more and more serious. As we add data to our various presences on the Web, our ability to export and move it around becomes critical.

However, what I discovered when looking at many of the popular services is that most don’t offer much in the way of portability. Here is a wrap up of some of the better known services and what I found when trying to export my data.

Blog Hosts

Blogger: Blogger does not have any export functionality. However, you can modify your Blogger template to convert the site itself into an exportable format. However, that does nothing to help move images or videos, just text.
WordPress.com: WordPress.com has the same import/export functionality that stand-alone installs do. Though, once again, it doesn’t help with moving media, this is at least an example of how to do exporting correctly.
LiveJournal: Offers an easy Web export tool as well as downloadable clients to make the process easy. Does not appear to be able to export comments and no word on moving images.

Note: With blog hosts, you can do a great deal of importing and exporting through the RSS feed. However, RSS feeds typically only cover the past ten entries, don’t include comments and don’t help with obtaining media. In some cases it can help, but is not a viable solution for large blogs.

Social Networks

MySpace: Myspace is a member of OpenSocial and allows a high amount of data portability. However, no clear way to export blog entries or photos.
Facebook: As Scoble discovered, Facebook, despite having a robust API, places severe limits on the amount of data that can leave the service and bans users that attempt to take it by force.
LinkedIn: Also a member of OpenSocial, LinkedIn allows you to export your connections into a variety of formats. Another good example of making data portable. However, LinkedIn hosts very little content produced by the user and most exportable data deals with others on the service.

Image Hosts

Flickr: Exporting images from FLickr can easily be done via their API. Though it is not an ideal solution, it is easy enough to work around.
PhotoBucket: Has no documented API and Flock does not support downloading to the hard drive (at least in my tests). Pro users, however, can download their images via FTP and others can order a CD for ten dollars. Sadly, all export options come at a price.
ImageShack: No simple way of retrieving images in bulk. Their tools only put files onto the service, not pull them down.

Video Hosts

All: Pretty much all of the video hosts are in the same position. They do not offer a means to easily download your own videos but hacks exist, especially using the Download Helper Firefox Extension, to get around that obstruction. The video sharing sites do not seem to be hostile toward such downloading. However, there is currently no means to go from a Web video to the original work as originals are destroyed shortly after conversion. It is important to save your original videos after upload.

The Problem

The issue with this limited portability of data is simple. The more you invest into a service, the harder and harder it is to get all of your own content back out.

For example, if you run a blog on a service that does not allow easy extraction, the longer you run that blog, the harder it is to move. When it is just a few entries it is feasible to hand copy/paste the text, but after a few months or years, it grows to be a monumental task.

Similarly, it is easy to save and download a few dozen images by hand, but what happens if you have hundreds, or even thousands, in your account? Should the service close down or a newer, better option come along, you may be stuck.

With paid hosting, you can always download your databases and grab all of your files via FTP. Moving to a new host is never a fun process, but it can be done without losing any data.

However, that is not the case for many of these free services. Many times, you are at their mercy. Unfortunately, as these services play a larger role both on the Web and in our lives, that lock in could be especially dangerous.

The good news is that there are ways to mitigate against this problem and prevent it from being the death of your content.

Mitigation

If you are worried about your content being locked in to a service there are several steps that you can take to prevent that from happening.

Granted, most of this is purely common sense, but it pays to think about these issues before you are setting up a new account or before you delve too deeply into it.

After all, most people don’t think create an exit strategy for an account when they are creating it. As with other things in life, when something is new, most of us are one only thinking about the potential while assuming it will last forever.

Sadly, on the Web, that never seems to be the case.

Conclusions

The idea of a lock-in is nothing new. Companies have been throwing up obstacles to leaving for centuries.

However, one thing that history has shown us is that companies do not lock in users because it is difficult to allow them to leave or burdensome to create features that make transitioning easy, but because it is better for their bottom line if they don’t.

The problem with this is, unlike cell phone contracts that simply hold our plan hostage, Web services are holding our content, something we spent a great deal of time and energy to create, to their whims.

Whether it is family photos, a blog or a collection of witty videos, the content we upload to these services is a part of who we are and the fact that companies would withhold it from us as part of their business model is offensive.

This is especially true since our uploading of content is exactly what makes their business model possible in the first place. Though these sites are a symbiotic relationship where we receive a free service and they get content to advertise against, one has to wonder about any partnership where one half tries to trap the other.

To be fair, none of these sites use technology to actively prevent you from moving your content elsewhere. They all leave open the possibility of hand copying/saving and don’t prevent you from doing that.

However, without automated tools to speed the process up, doing so is impractical to the point of being impossible. Considering that many of these sites prohibit users from creating their own tools for the purpose, such as what Facebook did, there is no practical way to escape these services.

This can be a big problem for content creators and, in some cases, can actually be a much bigger issue than traditional content theft. This will be something to discuss and follow in the weeks and months to come.

In each case we will evaluate their policy, look for weaknesses and, as necessary, recommend steps for improvement.

However, as you can see below, for most of these sites, there is a lot of room for improvement. Worse yet, some have very critical issues that make it almost impossible to report copyright infringement, or other abuse problems, to the host.

Format: Email
Email Address: copyrightagent at myspace dot com
Location of Policy: Item Nine, Terms & Conditions
Registered with USCO: Yes (outdated)
Comments: Inconsistency is the word of choice for the Myspace policy. There are actually three different versions of it on the Web. First is their USCO submission, linked above, which is no longer valid. Second is the one provided in their terms and conditions, which provides the email address listed above. The third is the information provided under their “Contact” page, which directs you to yet another policy and a form to send your notice. Though the email address above works best, there is clearly room for confusion here. All in all though, the policy itself is the bare minimum and strives do enough to get by and not much else, a practice reflected by how they handle claims on the back end. Their policy provides only the basics for filing a DMCA notice with no mention of a counter-notice and does so in a very bare-bones way. The bottom line is that MySpace needs to clean up, update and unify its DMCA policy before serious problems emerge.
Grade: C-

Format: Email
Email Address: amac at google dot com
Location of Policy: Google’s DMCA Policy
Registered with USCO: No (registered as Google)
Comments: Orkut is Google’s social networking site and it shares its DMCA policy with the rest of Google’s services. Unfortunately, as I’ve commented before, that is not a good thing. Google’s DMCA policy is notoriously obstructionist and roundly criticized no the Web. Its requirement of a physical signature does not mesh with the law, in particular the ESIGN act, and makes it nearly impossible to email a notice in. You can get around these requirements by scanning in your signature, placing it in a PDF (I recommend OpenOffice) and emailing that, but it is a huge hassle that is unnecessary and adds work for both the submitter and the processor. That issue aside, Google’s policy is very robust, containing the necessary information to file a notice and a counter-notice. It also provides links to several relevant sites and I do agree with their submitting notices to Chilling Effects. However, the policy is difficult to find from the Orkut Web site, buried in the terms of use, and the actual Google policy is more targeted at the search engine, not the hosting services such as Orkut and Blogspot.
Grade: D

Format: Email/Form
Email Address: copyright at facebook dot com
Location of Policy: Facebook’s Copyright Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: Facebook is a trend setter in so many ways, hopefully it can be one here as well. Facebook’s copyright policy is amazingly robust, including both notice and counter-notice information as well as well-worded cautions against sending false notices and providing a useful Copyright FAQ that can answer many of a member’s or a copyright holder’s questions. Best of all, Facebook provides a very easy-to-use form for submitting either a DMCA notice or a counter-notice. The form automatically checks that the notice is valid and aids inexperienced rightsholders in sending a notice in. All in all, it is almost the perfect policy with the perfect method for receiving notices, either via email or form. The only complaint I have about the policy is that the link to it is buried in the terms of use, under “Copyright Complaints” but, beyond that, Facebook sets the bar up to which other social networking sites will be held.
Grade: A

Format: Email
Email Address: ??? (help at friendster dot com?)
Location of Policy: Item Eight, Terms of Service
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: I’d love to talk more about Friendster’s DMCA/Copyright policy but there isn’t much to say. The site denotes one meager paragraph to the issue in their terms of service, of which but one sentence is targeted as those wishing to file a DMCA notice. However, following the “Contact Us” link provided takes you to a page with no clear contact information to report such an infringement. The policy is woefully incomplete, buried in their terms of service, does not provide adequate contact information and offers no guidance on filing a notice at all. Worst of all, the site is not registered with the USCO, so it is impossible to obtain the information through that database. This policy is effective non-existent.
Grade: F

Format: Postal Mail
Email Address: None
Location of Policy: User Conduct, User Agreement
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: As bad as the Friendster policy is, this one is much worse. Not only do the only denote one sentence to copyright issues, but they do not provide information to contact a DMCA agent anywhere on their site or with the USCO. Worst of all, the only means of contact they provide for handling abuse complaints, all abuse complaints, is a postal address in California. Though LinkedIn’s structure makes it slightly less of a copyright danger, there are still many potential problems and their policy is beyond reckless. It is a shame that the social network targeted at business users has such a sloppy policy. Most likely, I’ll be removing my own LinkedIn profile in the coming days/weeks after now that I am aware of this issue. I am officially taking suggestions on where to move to.
Grade: F

Format: Email
Email Address: copyright at bebo dot com
Location of Policy: Copyright Policy, Terms of Service
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: Previously derided on this site, Bebo has taken some solid steps to deal with these issues more appropriately. They have done away with the registration requirement, have posted a full DMCA policy in their terms of use and have designated an agent to handle all such claims. The policy itself is very robust, if a bit hidden, containing all of the necessary elements to file a notice and a counter-notice. However, I do find it a bit strange that the notice and counter-notice go to the same person, but to different email addresses. It is a complete policy that, for whatever reason, is not supplemented by an actual registration with the USCO. Still, the progress has been impressive and I hope that the site will continue to push forward in this area, perhaps bringing it to full safe harbor compliance.
Grade: C-

Format: Email
Email Address: help-dmca at xanga dot com
Location of Policy: Xanga’s DMCA Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: In the past, I have been very hard on Xanga. Initially there was no DMCA information on their site and no registration with the USCO. After letters, calls and emails, I was able to get in touch with Xanga and, at least in a small way, push them toward becoming DMCA compliant. Now their policy is a model for other sites in the field to look at. Though not as practical as Facebook’s they have a well-written and robust policy that details both notice and counter-notice procedures. Their policy provides full contact information, including fax, email and snail mail as well as reasonable cautions on filing a false notice and links to relevant pages. They’ve also registered with the USCO and all of their information is consistent. My only complaint is that their DMCA policy is buried as a link in their terms of use, under “Copyright Infringement” and can be a little bit hard to find. The only other place the policy appears is as a link under “Legal” in the “Help” section. All in all, it is a very robust and very effective policy that, since the initial problems were resolved, has worked very well.
Grade: B+

Conclusions

When it was all said and done, I was very disappointed in how the social networking sites followed the DMCA. Two, Friendster and LinkedIn, outright failed, having incomplete and inadequate policies, one was barely passable, another was below average and only Xanga and Facebook were real standouts.

Given the importance of social networking sites on the Web, it is a great shame that they seem to struggle so dearly in this area. I am going to open up a dialog with both Friendster and LinkedIn to see about addressing these issues, previous attempts to speak with Google have been failed.

But as the Web becomes more and more reliant on social networking sites, their DMCA/copyright policies will become more and more important. We simple can not allow these sites to have weak or ineffective policies, lest they become homes to plagiarists, spammers and others that want to misuse content.

The time to act is now and I intend to start working on it today.

What the Ratings Mean

A – A complete policy that goes well above and beyond what is required. Often shows real innovation.
B – A solid policy that is well-thought out and is very complete. Shows consideration for submitters and users.
C – An average policy, follows the law to the letter but doesn’t go out of its way to help those submitting a notice or its users.
D – A policy that, while mostly complete, still raises severe ethical and/or legal questions.
F – An incomplete policy that fails to follow the DMCA or local laws in a severe way.

Pluses or minuses are used to indicate how the where a host fits in relationship to other hosts in that that tier.

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