Nobody own the internet. Clear.
But websites are created by individuals and companies that dedicate time and effort to their creations. In the past, we all accepted that the content is owned by the publisher. Fair use policies and intellectual property rights were respected.
With the advent of web services, the idea of making mashups became popular. People who *choose* to do so can open up their data for others to reuse it. This is driven by the idea that giving away your data wil result in increased usage of your services, thus capturing more user attention and generating more business.
Recently we see a revival of screen scraping technologies like the ones from http://www.dapper.net or http://openkapow.com that enable mashup developers to use content that is not opened up to use by third party. These tools effectively turn simple human readable HTML pages in a more or less structured data source. The importance is that this is happening without the original content author being aware of it.
Is this theft or just an acceleration of technology? Maybe the original content author would benefit from opening up his website, but doesn't has the time or resources to implement the technology. Maybe he also doesn't want his content to be reused elsewhere, without permission, payment or even reference to the original source.
IPR and ownership rights on data has generated discussions for as long as the internet exists. But what the screenscraping tools show us is that there is a desire to reuse content, irrespective of the author's whish. The good thing is that this might bring us a bit closer to the utopic "semantic web". When people want to keep control over their publications, they will have to structure the data and offer it in web service with a certain usage policy embedded in it. Otherwise, people will find their own ways to achieve what they want.
Like science is advocating the proliferation of knowledge, the web is advocating openness of data.
I'm convinced that someday our society will laugh at the idea that there once was a time that you could legally prevent others from duplicating and reusing intellectual creations.
Once we get rid of IPR, human knowledge advancement will know no limits.
I think this is an interesting critique of what's going on in the "content ecosystem" with regards to the different data mapping services out there. As one of them (I'm from Dapper, conflicts-of-interest be known..) I do have to say that we're one of the first to approach this problem from the standpoint of giving the content owners a way to create AND control new ways in which users can use their content.
ReplyDeleteCheck out www.dapper.net/control-access.php
This is an important step to turning screen scraping into a content marketplace that empowers both the users and the content providers the way we see it...I hope many follow suit.
-Paul (paul@dapper.net)