the creation of a media-type-specific collection (such as an archive of public Facebook content or You Tube videos); associated hypotheticals in our surveys tested varying limits on access;

Permission. In our early studies, open-ended questions revealed that some participants thought permission was the essential bridge to fair use, although a legal approach to fair use does not require one to seek or obtain permission. Our later studies tested the mitigating force of permission with hypotheticals; that is, if permission is sought or obtained, does it drastically change participants’ attitudes about reuse?; and

Venue and purpose. Our surveys used hypotheticals to compare reuse of the same content in varying contexts. For example, do participants’ attitudes change if an Amazon book review is republished on a blog, on Facebook, or on another online bookstore? Because purpose may be entwined with venue, hypotheticals we spelled out in our studies specified a similar purpose so participants would judge them against the same baseline. Of special note are the hypotheticals in which user-contributed content is reused as data. This practice is common, as personal information is analyzed to draw conclusions about users as a group or to target advertising. Reuse hypotheticals also distinguished between a positive or neutral purpose and a distinctly negative purpose.

Our study results confirm the widely held user expectation that attitudes toward reuse crucially depend on circumstances and may stray far from what is legally permissible under systematized U.S. fair-use provisions. 17 Aufdeheide et al.’s work with journalists1 shows that users’ stated attitudes are often more conservative than the law dictates, not less. Nonetheless, our participants’ attitudes also confirmed Fiesler’s and Bruckman’s observation4 of the emergence of a rich set of reuse heuristics, norms, and self-policing tactics within communities, as reuse becomes not only commonplace but lauded in the creative arena. 5

One of the more notable of our re-
sults is derived from commercial reuse
hypotheticals, especially as they propose
social media content that is reused as
big data. Big data is often used in aggre-
gate to profile community behavior and
individually in personalization mecha-
often disagreed with these imposed
limits. In an extreme case—a hypothet-
ical that limited saving tweets to saving
only one’s own tweets—58% (100/173)
of the participants disagreed at least
somewhat. Figure 1a contrasts saving
all tweets in a Twitter conversation
and saving just one’s own tweets. That
is, participants like the way content is
controlled now; for example, if users
are downloading content and saving it
to local storage, they should not be lim-
ited to just the content they clearly own
(such as photographs they have taken
and posted, bon mots they have typed,
or their own side of a conversation);
instead, our study participants feel the
norm is unfettered saving.

There are exceptions to this rule that also characterize norms associated with saving content. The strongest effect stems from the introduction of social networks. Participants respect explicit boundaries set by their social connections. While it seems perfectly acceptable to save any content encountered on the open Web, once one is inside Facebook, for example, different rules seem to apply. Our survey participants expressed a strong negative reaction to the hypothetical that one has the right to save the profile of a friend of a friend, even given reasonable motivation for doing so. Figure 1b contrasts one’s right to save one’s own profile and friends list (197/244, or 81%, agreed) with the right to save the equivalent content for one’s friends (only 74/244, or 30%, agreed). This reaction is surprising, given the laissez-faire attitude about saving in general.

Two weaker effects also appeared in
our survey results. First, saving to the
cloud is viewed differently from saving
to local storage. As a test, study partici-
pants judged two hypotheticals that
differed only in where the downloaded
content was stored. In the first, a re-
corded job interview—a Skype-based
video—was stored to the user’s local
hard drive and in the second to a cloud
storage service. In the first hypotheti-
cal, 18% disagreed with an individual’s
right to record the video and save it; in
the second, the disagreement jumped
to 30% (see Figure 1c.) Study partici-
pants may feel local storage is more pri-
vate than cloud storage or are perhaps
concerned that terms and conditions
give one less control over the ultimate
disposition of the content. This effect
may diminish as people become ac-
customed to cloud storage but may also
grow if privacy breaches continue to be
reported in the news.

A second effect stems from users’ expectations that certain media types associated with communication will remain ephemeral. Some of our study participants were uncomfortable with the idea that a conversation may be recorded and stored locally for an unspecified period, even without intimations of reuse. Hypotheticals in a multiplayer-gaming scenario in one of our surveys revealed that participants were generally undisturbed by the thought of players saving recordings of other players’ public avatar appearance, gestures, and other movement we refer to as “activity”; only 24/241, or 10%, disagreed with the right to save this content. Comparable recordings of public in-game conversations were regarded more skeptically; 58/241, or 24%, disagreed with the right to save this content. Communication carried on in public still carries with it an expectation of ephemerality that could change as standards for recording others in public grow increasingly lax.

Reusing Social Media

Reuse is one of the more contentious aspects of current legal interpretation of copyright and fair use. Some major social media sites (such as YouTube) receive numerous take-down notices for content that copyright owners feel has been inappropriately reused or reposted. Meanwhile, as Tehranian predicted in 2007, 22 nuanced social norms have evolved to handle reuse of different media types and genres in a variety of circumstances.

Our reuse scenarios and hypotheticals examined at least eight features: the five described earlier—original context, the user’s relationship to the content, commercial concerns, genre-derived properties, and disaggregation of constituent content—plus three additional concepts salient to reuse:

Public good. Public good scenarios seek a balance between individual rights (such as to privacy and to be forgotten) and the countervailing public interest (such as the right to preserve, access, and reuse historical content). Each of our studies included an insti-tutional-archiving scenario that posits