[okfn-discuss] Creating a Universal Content Liberation tool

Wed Oct 14 08:14:36 UTC 2015

Hi all --

Millions of people contribute content to sites with restrictive terms of
service. This content is typically under traditional copyright, with
license granted to the site to redistribute, but to nobody else. Bulk
download is often against ToS, and if any re-use is permitted, it's
frequently in the form of excerpts or "for non-commercial purposes".

When I say "content", I mean everything from Yelp/Amazon/IMDB/... reviews,
to Instagram photos, to tweets, essentially what's often described through
the lovely phrase "user-generated content".

What can we do to begin to dramatically shift the balance of power in favor
of users, giving them control over their content?

Google did something pretty cool a while ago through their "Google Takeout"
tools: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

I think it would be great to have a universal "Takeout" style app, with
plugins for specific sites like Yelp/Amazon/IMDB, that lets users download
content, synchronize their local copies, and upload to remote repositories
under a free license. As more people hear about it, more plugins would get
written, and eventually we could cover all the top sites. This tool would
have to just scrape the content in many cases, due to lack of APIs that
give you the goods without restrictions.

Does such a thing already exist in some form? If not, are folks interested
in working with me to build it?

A bit more:

I don't know how many people would care to use such a toolset. I do know
that campaigns like Philip Neustrom's http://i-am-cc.org/ got thousands of
people to care about using CC licensing for their content. And I suspect
that many folks who spend hours writing reviews of products would like to
make sure that their work doesn't disappear with the next dotcom implosion.
The combination of "local backup + easy re-licensing/re-publishing" could
be very powerful, IMO.

My personal motivation: I think this could be a way to break the network
effect that keeps proprietary efforts to monetize communities in business.
If we make it easy to migrate and re-license data, then community forks
become plausible. We've seen this time and again in the world of wikis,
where free licensing is the norm and migrations are often straightforward
(MediaWiki->MediaWiki). But how would the community of Yelp or IMDB or
Instagram users fork -- if we don't give them the tools to make that
migration possible? Building these tools seems entirely feasible to me: we
can automate anything a user with a web browser can do.

Warmly,
Erik
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/attachments/20151014/266612de/attachment.html>