[okfn-discuss] Creating a Universal Content Liberation tool

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 1:14 AM, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>

One non-universal example might be last.fm->various export tools->libre.fm
(there's a central instance but you can run your own). I ran one such tool
long ago but am not sure what is current and the info seems hard to find. I
suppose http://tools.wmflabs.org/flickr2commons/ is another.

ArchiveTeam is somewhat similar -- but your idea is at individual user's
behest and because they are likely to be copyright holder, can be asked to
make saved material under an open license even if it wasn't before.

The https://indiewebcamp.com/PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your)
Own Site) pattern is also somewhat similar but ongoing syndication rather
than export/import, but you mention syncing below, which maybe makes it a
superset of syndication and export/import?

Another concept that I don't know anyone has made any attempt whatsoever to
tackle is a universal "personal Digital Asset Manager" which would include
integration with wherever a user wants to publish, and wherever user wants
to save stuff from.

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.
>

Seems like a great idea. Another motivation, giving this is an OK list,
might be to save and migrate government data in proprietary clouds.

Your motivation is wonderful, I share it. A narrow personal motivation for
me would be copying stuff from Flickr and Slideshare (latter a particular
embarrassment) to somewhere useful (Wikimedia Commons is great for stuff
that is in its scope, but lots isn't). An obvious destination is a
self-hosted GNU MediaGoblin instance since I run (but barely use) one, but
I'm not super excited about self-hosting; not feasible for vast majority,
and very long way from having community curation facilities that I like
from wikis. I suppose lower barrier to creation of more useful (for me
roughly meaning open services, open data and content, some form of
wikinature, with some form of federation as a bonus) destinations would be
an outcome of your idea.

Don't know if/how I can help but quite interested in the idea.

Mike
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