Minority Report: The Facebook Copyright Controversy: I See 404 Pages

(Yes, I know I'm mixing two movies in the title. Deal with it.)

By now, you've probably heard all about how Facebook first changed their Terms of Service, and then in response to outrage in blogs, traditional media, and on Facebook itself, changed them back.

I recently reconnected on Facebook with an old friend from MIT, John McCrea. John heads up Marketing at Plaxo, where he is a major player in the Social Networking industry's efforts to work together better for a better user experience.

John posts what I consider the Majority Report: The End of “Social DRM” is in Sight

In this entry, he covers the history of the forces leading up to this change, and concurs with the majority that this is a struggle between differing ideas over what control users should be able to exert over their content.

My take, as you might guess from the title, is different. I think the problem here is not about copyright terms, how clear they are, or a power struggle over the user's content.

I think the problem boils down to a more fundamental question: What is Facebook, anyway?

I don't think a lot of users really understand what Facebook is and is not. As a result, they often misuse it. I've seen several examples of this recently, including one person trying to post a link to a nice article he'd written in his Facebook Notes area to a wider forum -- who then could not read it. Others make the reverse mistake -- they post things they'd rather be seen only by a more narrow audience.

For their part, I don't think Facebook well understands what their users think they are, and want them to be. And even if they did -- users want so many things, it will be hard to avoid making things even more confusing.

Let's consider some teenager, trying to impress her friends, posting about bad behavior -- perhaps real, perhaps exagerated. She thinks only her friends will see it -- but it's likely that many others will see it, likely including her parents, college admissions officers, law enforcement personnel, school rivals.

It doesn't stop there. I've been on the Internet since 1972. Sometimes things I wrote back in the 1970's turn up in Google searches, such as an email Kent Pittman and I sent back in 1979, which he has copied to a current web page.

So things you post today have a life of their own. Email sent does not always remain private, and recalling it in Outlook doesn't really do it. Back in the 1980's, a young man sent a very amourous email to a lovely young coworker. Unfortunately, he sent it to the entire company. Several of us worked hard to eliminate the email from the email system -- yet it was too late, and I bet several readers of this will still recall the incident.

So things you post to Facebook in your wild teenage years may be read years later, by prospective employers, prospective mates, your children, your grandchildren...

Even if Facebook does allow users to delete items, and even if Facebook deletes all copies it has made for other users (violating those user's expectations), it still only amounts to an "Outlook recall".

So what is Facebook?  To avoid getting all Socratic on you, I'll try to give you my answer, incomplete though it is. Facebook is a publishing/broadcast medium. You can't reasonably expect to withdraw a published letter or book, nor unbroadcast a broadcast program.

Even if you could track down all the copies -- should we allow that? We always tell our children -- actions have consequences. One of the consequences is that what you've published may become part of the permanent record.

All too often, we find people who should know better -- major news outlets, major internet figures, even presidents of the United States -- lose track of this. As a result -- we are all of us, all too familiar with the dreaded '404 page' -- dead pages. Pages that either no longer exist, or simply have been reorganized into a new location, without regard to all those links.

People cease publishing a blog, for any of a number of reasons. They have content that someone valued enough to link to. If their blog is deleted, the dreaded 404 page results, and someone else's work is devalued or destroyed. Or they are forced to rely on a fallable memory for details they thought they'd carefully preserved.

I don't think this is about legalistic Terms of Service and Copyright. I see it as being about archivism -- preservation of the archive of human thought -- whether within a particular social context, or within a wider context. My concern is not that Facebook promise to delete content if asked, but rather that they promise not to delete content, even if asked!

In the education community, there is currently much controversy over the idea of teaching "tech literacy". I think this is largely a red herring -- that the true goal of education is teaching people how to think, not teaching them a particular medium. That is, rather than teaching kids "don't post embarrassing stuff to Facebook", teach them to consider their audience when they write, both formally and informally.

Just under 100 years ago, my great-grandfather built a sod house that served as a way station for travelers. He began keeping a log book in which travellers recorded notes, and perhaps communicated with old friends who might later travel through -- just as I've reconnected with John McCrea after 30 years.

I don't know if this log book still exists -- it might still be in the family archives, possibly in my aunt's posession. What's different now, is that after 100 years, a wider audience now knows of this book.  And if they had computers back then, you'd probably be reading those notes back and forth.

But I do believe it comes down to education. Educating users about what to expect when they write via different channels. That's partly the role of the Terms of Service, but that's an awkward medium for conveying the message. It's partly documentation, and partly marketing, and partly a matter of social precedent.

And I think Facebook needs to find ways to accomodate the various types of communication needed and expected by users. That's a difficult topic. Facebook is currently a mishmash of entertainment and serious business and social reconnects.

But I think the critical step is ensuring users know what to expect about their content and the life it can take on. Bridging the gap that lead to this controversy will be difficult, and will require adjustment on all sides -- the user and their understanding of Facebook, and perhaps Facebook can accomodate aa need for explicitly short-lived communications. But even there, users must understand that, once they've written something -- it is no longer under their control, copyright law, or no.

Comments

[Bob Kerns]

(By the way -- while I don't know if the log book still stands, the sod house itself does, although it has fallen into disrepair).

[Coleen McCrea Katz]

As I have been told by my husband, an attorney, and have told my children many time; be careful what you put in writing. If we keep that in mind in all of our writings, electronic and otherwise, we will be better off.

[Joseph Smarr]

Bob, this is very well written and articulated! I'm glad that you reconnected with John and that that led to you write up this post--we could use more thoughtful voices in this discussion! :) js