As a follow-up to my [Last Post](http://jimdelaney.net/?p=181 “Facebook and copyright”), you may want to take a look at Twitter’s much more enlightened (and easier to read) copyright, from their [Terms of Service](http://twitter.com/tos “Terms of Service”)

–SNIP–

Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.
2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.
3. Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:
1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

–SNIP–

Where would you rather post your content? This all has me thinking about the need for open social networking tools that allow us to keep in contact without being in a walled garden. Wired recently ran an [interesting story](http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net “Slap in the Facebook”) that reviewed different ways to replicate Facebook functionality with more open tools. They’re not there yet, but they’re [close](http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?page_name=replace_facebook_using_open_social_tools;action=display;category=Live “Replacing Facebook Using Open Social Tools”)

From [Facebook's Terms of Service](http://utoronto.facebook.com/terms.php “Terms of Service”)

–SNIP–

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

–SNIP–

There is more to this that bothers me other than the silliness of the prose. If I read correctly, by posting photos of my two year old daughter on Facebook, I give them a full and transferable license to use such content. This goes for other content as well. I doubt that they would, but they *could* sell anything on my profile on Ebay.

Strangely, I have never been concerned about copyright or ownership over content, and avoid publishing in places that restrict access. But to give Facebook this leverage just feels…dirty.

I have become quite accustomed to using Facebook, mainly as a realtime address-book of sorts, but this is too much. Photos going down as we speak, and perhaps the rest will go soon.

This is interesting in more ways than one. First, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School has just released what looks like a very interesting book on networks and social production. The Book, titled: “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” is set to make a significant impact on economic and political theory. Second, the book is offered online in complete form and free for download – even though it has been published by Yale University Press and does not seem to carry a Creative Commons License or any similar open copyright. But finally, and most interestingly, the author has developed a Wiki site for people to write summaries and discuss the book. Think of it as a seminar online:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

To see the book and the Wiki, visit: http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year exploring how different tools can assist dispersed groups in the nonprofit sector to better collaborate with each other. My experience has been mixed. Multiple languages and cultures, chronic overwork and a general unease about technology often dominates workgroups in international development.

There is an ever increasing amount of basic how-tos on the web that can be useful for nonprofits who want to make better use of communications technology. Social Signal has a good overview of how the many tools of Web 2.0 – RSS, tags and social bookmarking can be used in the non profit world. See the link here.

Unfortunately, the Achilles heel of many of these ventures is that many (though certainly not all, or even most) in the nonprofit world don’t read very much! Online collaboration and knowledge sharing tend to work when the collaborators are intellectually curious about their field and when they are interested in engaging. For those who do not feel that they have the interest or the time, RSS simply offers a flood of more information that is of limited use.