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Catherine C. Marshall ( [e-mail]) is an adjunct professor of computer science and engineering and affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX; she lives in San Francisco, CA, and volunteers at the Internet Archive ( https://www.archive.org/).

Frank M. Shipman ( [e-mail]) is a professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.

© 2017 ACM 0001-0782/17/05. $15.00

online behavior: architecture, law, market forces, and social norms. As seen in the overall responses in our studies, social norms seem to have an outsized effect on participants’ perceptions of what they (and others) can do with user-contributed content. Even social-media-savvy participants have little understanding of the relevant legal guidelines. Software-based governance is easy to ignore or thwart. And much reuse is oblivious to market forces. Furthermore, social norms are often nonreciprocal in action; participants in our studies did not always apply the same standards to themselves that they did to others, especially in non-abstract practical situations. This lack of reciprocity is not uncommon in other aspects of online behavior and may be attributed to individual users’ ability to reflect on their own motives and intentions but not those of others.

What are the design and policy implications of these results? For one, they signal certain design gaps when media creators use labeling schemes (such as Creative Commons2); study participants seemed more sensitive to actions like reuse when they are offered examples rather than abstract labels. Hypothetical examples of reuse, especially those based on the media being labeled, may be helpful for extending Web users’ understanding of the abstract ideas expressed by labels. It is no accident that our final norm addresses highly circumstantial factors as the nature of the content (such as “Is it personal?”), the differential scope of the audience (such as “Is the content going viral or is it play-ing to an audience of 10?” and “How different is the scope from the original?”), the type of reuse (such as is the content used in a way that highlights the original intent?), and the way the implied (or explicit) social contract between all potential owners of both the original and derived work is handled (such as “Is attribution or anonymity desired?”).

Note only one of these factors—the
nature of the content—is known at
publication time, or the time when
content is usually labeled. Other fac-
tors depend on how the content is
reused (such as changes in genre, au-
dience, or publication venue). Still
others are not revealed until time has
passed (such as the differential scope
of the audience). That these factors
are crucial to how a labeling scheme
is used makes us think that supple-
mental mechanisms might be desir-
able; scenarios, hypotheticals, and
mixed-initiative dialogs help content
creators better envision many types of
reuse or decide between attribution or
anonymity or triggers that reveal when
the scope or audience has changed.
Still others depend on, say, the moti-
vations for storing content. Past work
tells us that individuals archive work
that is not their own just as surely as
institutions do. 15

Ownership-driven questions need to be approached thoughtfully, lest we impose legal restrictions when none are necessary or fail to anticipate normal actions that will trigger reactions that could have been averted. Gaps between desired policy and current social norms may yet be bridged through education and thoughtful design.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, for supporting the studies on which this article is based. Thanks, too, to the study participants for their patient and thoughtful completion of the lengthy surveys.

 

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