USER-CONTRIBUTED CONTENT plays an increasingly important role in the Internet’s evolution, overtaking professionally created and curated resources. Sophisticated recording technologies allow non-professionals to produce high-quality photos and videos. Improved editing and sharing applications facilitate other aspects of media creation, including larger-scale collaborative efforts. And social media venues give their users new opportunities to publish, curate, and recommend content. Every phase of the creative process—from recording to editing to publishing—has become more popular and interactive. At the same time, content ownership has become more complicated. Any distinct item may be associated with a virtual web of stakeholders. Who Owns the Social Web?

DOI: 10.1145/2996181

User attitudes toward online intellectual
property reveal how far social norms have
strayed from legal notions of ownership.
BY CATHERINE C. MARSHALL AND FRANK M. SHIPMAN
key insights

˽ Intellectual property law and social norms concerning content ownership are diverging in conspicuous ways; we find that legally contentious actions (such as downloading and saving content) may seem benign to most Internet users.

˽ Managing rights relies on content owners’ ability to envision plausible reuse scenarios, including commercial reuse of their content as data, and predicting which are most likely.

˽ Everyday reuse of social media content is opportunistic, pragmatic, and highly contextual; users reason about the fairness of reusing other people’s content but do not necessarily trust them to do the same.

contributed articles