I've been thinking about Karl's post on Slavery 2.0:

Companies are making money off of the information provided freely by individuals. In most cases, this information is intentionally made available, as is the case with blog posts, photos shared on Flickr, etc. In other cases, the information is gathered by capturing an individual's online behaviour. This can be anything from tracking search keywords in Google, to monitoring the contents of my email (in a freely-provided service like GMail, for example), tracking what product pages I view, to tracking what products I actually buy. In this post, I'm going to focus on the first scenario exclusively.

In the first scenario, the problem is one of the companies using the intellectual property of the individual for commercial purposes without the consent of the individual. Few of the cases involve clear-cut repurposing or plagiarism of information, although that certainly does happen. Much of the business activity around Web 2.0 involves advertizing, where companies publish an individual's information at no cost to the individual. In return, the company wraps the information in advertizing and generates revenue off of that. Flickr is an example of this. (Note: With Flickr at least, users can purchase a Pro account to do away with the advertizements around their photos.) There are other ways that companies could and are making use of the information published by individuals, but using their content to drive advertizing is the primary business model.

Individuals who use a free publishing service to publish their content are or should be conscious of the trade-off they are making. While someone can publish their photos on Flickr, for example, with a non-commercial Creative Commons licence (or full copyright, for that matter), their Terms of Use agreement with Flickr presumably gives Flickr permission to use their photos to make money (in a limited way i.e. through ads) (update: Flickr's ToS doen't contain any such reference... anyone care to explain that?).

Individuals who publish the information themselves (i.e. by paying for their own web hosting) retain full IP rights to the information they publish. However, Google still indexes their site and using the metadata derived from that site to generate ad revenue. While it is possible for an individual to get a site like Google to not index their site in this way, the process can be problematic. Some sites will ignore traditional methods (ex robots.txt), and harvest the individual's content regardless of their wishes. The argument goes something like this: by publishing their information/web pages/rss feeds on the web, the individual is implicitly stating that they want their information to be accessed by others. Many companies (ex Technorati) position themselves between the individual publisher and the information seeker, providing services that allow information seeking to find the information they are looking for, that allow the individual publisher to find their audience, and that generate some revenue for the company in the process.

The core arguement against this business model, an arguement I myself have made in the past, is that while my agreement to participate in such a system is (convieniently) assumed by the companies involved, I have never explicity agreed to such a thing. And while I'm not a lawyer, I believe that makes a difference. (That's why, for example, the EULA two-step we have to do every time we install a piece of software asks me directly if I agree to the terms of the licence. Someone decided that just installing the software could not be seen as have agreed to the terms of the licence.)

Furthermore, if I explicity state that the information that I publish is not to be used for commercial purposes (either through CC or just ©), you would think my wishes would be respected. But they aren't. Any? Because I don't have a lot of money and/or access to a small army of lawyers.

Individually, our pieces of information hold little value. It is in the aggregate that they can be used to generate revenue. SImilarly, individually we do not have the power to get the companies to change their behaviour. Ideally, our governments would represent our collective will and ensure that our individual rights are respected, but that doesn't seem to be likely. The only response available to the individual at this time appears to be to take steps to remove one's self from the system, so to speak, as Karl has started to do. This of course means reducing one's visibility to the 'Web', but that is the trade the companies are making.

We can argue about the morality and the legality of this until the cows come home. Until the courts determine that the companies are breaking IP law, companies will continue to exploit individuals and do whatever they can get away with to make money.

Having said all that, I think that at the end of the day, this issue boils down to trade-offs and choice. We, each of us, need to be aware of how our information is being used. We need to understand the benefits and costs of participation, and make our choices accordingly.