The site’s decay rate—the rate at which community members become less devoted to a site over time—is just one part of Goldman’s larger argument. At his blog he pulls up some data regarding Epinions, which relies on paid community member reviews.

On his blog, Goldman writes, “I looked at Epinions’ top 20 most popular authors in 1999 to see if they were still active on the site, which I defined as writing at least one opinion in the past 12 months (i.e., in 2008). I manually reviewed each of the top 20 reviewers’ profile pages. According to my definition, only seven of the top 20 (35%) still actively contribute to Epinions, meaning that 65% of those early power users have turned over in 9 years."

The crux of the argument seems to be that if users who actually are paid for and get credit their work lose interest over time, what hope does Wikipedia have when relying on anonymous and free content labor?

It will be interesting to see Goldman’s conclusion once he’s finished his study. He readily acknowledges in his blog post that Wikipedia is a different animal from Epinions and thus might be subject to different laws of community nature. A foil for the comparison could lie in the book Predictably Irrational, a great outline of which you can read at The Book Outline Wiki.

According to the studies mentioned there, humans don’t behave rationally when it comes to economic matters. For example, people don’t mind working for free via volunteer or charity work, but balk at doing the same job for a discounted rate. Lawyers, in one instance, wouldn’t work at a discounted $30 per hour rate to help the poor, but were eager to offer pro bono services for the same cause.

It seems to me, then, that it’s possible Wikipedia works on a different level because it is work for the greater good—for which humans require neither pay nor recognition—while Epinions may offer a discount on a person’s valued opinion. Even if everybody knows it’s only worth two cents. 
 

Does Open License Mean Open Season?

Slashdot blew the whistle on John Wiley and Sons (Wiley) and author George Orwel (note the one "L") for publishing a Wikipedia article on the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The article appeared without attribution in Orwel’s Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors as though they were Orwel’s words, and not the collective writers of the article on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia contributor "Ydorb," who prefers to remain anonymous, says he wrote much, but not all, of the text that appeared in Black Gold, and provides a side-by-side comparison at Wikipedia. Ydorb says he was informed of the situation via another contributor who had read the book, prompting him to put together the comparison page.

In response to a WebProNews inquiry, Wiley’s Susan Spilka issued the following statement:

"In Black Gold by George Orwel, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., published a credentialed author and a thoroughly-sourced book.  However, it appears that a specific passage from Wikipedia was inadvertently added by our author to the text without attribution. George Orwel has assured us this was not intentional and has asked that we rectify the situation. Wiley will provide corrections to all future reprints of this book and make the changes to the ebook version.

"We take this situation very seriously.  We earn our readers’ trust by producing quality works by reputable authors.   On rare occasions, mistakes happen.  When they happen, we appreciate being alerted and do what is necessary to rectify any problems."

While it appears that Wiley will be doing just that, the incident brings up some important issues regarding open licenses used for collaborative works, including software, on the Internet. Because of the terms of the licensing agreement and the nature of the work, Ydorb and other contributors may have had no other recourse aside from media coverage.

Like much open source software, Wikipedia content is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, also known as "copyleft." This type of licensing says that content can be reused or repurposed verbatim, either commercially or non-commercially "so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement)."

But what if the attribution requirement is not met? Who will pursue the matter of infringement?

 Wikipedia says not them. Though the staff at the Wikimedia Foundation found the situation "frustrating," spokespersons agreed the company "doesn’t really take any position on this. It is not the copyright holder, the individuals who wrote the article in question are. They have licensed their contributions to the Foundation to get them into Wikipedia.

"Realistically all these folks can do if they feel aggrieved is appeal to public opinion via the media, it is expensive to pursue a copyright infringement case, and for material under GFDL the process would not be to extract money from the plagiarist, but to make them release their work under a compatible license."

And then there’s the problem of multiple anonymous contributors. "That it’s been edited raises very big factual questions," Technology and Marketing Law blogger Eric Goldman tells WebProNews. "Who did what to whom?" And because it’s under an open license, "it’s a little hard to object if somebody actually takes it."

At least in the case of the Khobar Towers article, it is clear that non-attribution is cause for infringement of the license. But there’s nobody willing to pursue the case, and if attribution is made eventually, it becomes a sort of no-harm-no-foul situation.

"This is a really great example of some of the problems with taking content off the Internet," says Goldman. "The publisher may not realize they’re giving their stuff away."
    

Who Has ‘Metaphysical Jurisdiction’ In Second Life?

See, I warned you.

This conversation comes courtesy of the Association of Internet Researchers‘ annual conference, which happened recently. Virtual worlds were a focal point at the meeting, as people are investing real time, energy, and money in creating and maintaining virtual worlds and virtual economies.

Thus, it begs the question as to whether virtual worlds need real-world regulation, or if they are capable of self-regulating via a type of free market economy and existence. But to answer that question, other questions about the nature of virtual worlds and the people who have an existence in them must be answered.

It’s not too late to get out, by the way, before we get into some really mind-bending stuff.

The gods of these worlds are by no means collectively imagined, nor are they anthropomorphic or democratic. Lawyers don’t deal in world-gods, so they label them differently: the virtual world providers. An example would be Linden Labs, which runs Second Life.

So, before we can get into the nature of the virtual world and the virtual people within it, we first must understand the nature of the creator/provider. The provider has the power to delete anything and everything that exists in the virtual world. As it is not in the interest of the provider to delete everything that exists, the provider holds a power it will not yield.

However, the provider can and has motivation to pick and choose on a singular basis what does exist, including avatars, currencies, and other objects. It is debatable as to whether the provider is held in check or self-regulated by a democratic process – i.e., too much tyranny unmakes existence as avatars choose not to exist in such an environment – or if the provider exists as a sort of benevolent dictator, maintaining an equilibrium that keeps avatars happy and motivated enough that existence proves fruitful.

A reasonable person might think it was a combination of both, but the model only applies to proprietary software-driven virtual worlds where all is controlled and maintained by mono- or even polytheistic entities. Some argue, though, that even if virtual existence were governed by open source – i.e., the avatars creating in concert their reality – " it still wouldn’t solve the normative determination of what’s fair to do to players."

Still with me? Good.

But what if a third party, an evil within, a devilish presence, runs amok as a hacker with the power to strip away virtual assets that could be ascribed value in the real world. Who is accountable? The hacker thief, of course, is primarily responsible, and punishment rests with the provider, who, ironically, created a world where the hacker thief could exist in the first place.

And if so, what responsibility does the provider bear for the allowable existence of the hacker-thief? Some might say the provider is absolved of all responsibility via the end-user license agreement, a document all within the virtual world have access to, but less than one percent have read. The avatars should have known better than to make risky investments in a mostly perception-based world.

Shouldn’t there be, then, some other arbitrator in this equation – a power higher than the virtual world provider to resolve how much responsibility, if any, the provider has to its avatar subjects? And if there is a higher power, who regulates him?

Ahem.

Eric Goldman, who bears direct responsibility for the above virtually metaphysical exploration, says (paraphrased) "that’s just life." His take on whether virtual worlds should be regulated:

• no evidence of market failure. Investments still growing rapidly
• We can rely on existing consumer protection laws (such as false advertising) [to] provide substantial protection for any [virtual world] provider deception

If only it were that simple in the real world.        

A little while back, we explored the idea that RSS, as an automatic distribution agent, could imply permission to republish. But that involves two human parties, essentially, with a technical agent in between.

A court battle in Colorado, however, focuses on claims brought by Suzanne Shell against the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which holds in searchable perpetuity pages that appear on the Web, for future historical reference.

Shell owns the website www.profane-justice.org, devoted to providing information and support for people who feel they’ve been unlawfully targeted by state agents (like police or child services organizations) or unfairly accused of child abuse.

A notice appears on the site stating that users copying or distributing the content on the site automatically agree to the terms of a contract. Failure to abide carries a fee of $5,000 per page copied; $250,000 per occurrence of unauthorized use, and a charge of $50,000 for each occurrence of failure to pay, plus costs and triple damages.

There was no mechanism in place on the site (such as in the robots.txt file) to prevent Internet Archive’s robot from scanning, copying, and storing the pages on Shell’s website. She discovered that the Wayback Machine had reproduced the contents of her website about 87 times in five years, "and displayed her entire website to the public daily during that period." 

Shell sued the company for conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act (COCCA).

As might be guessed, most of these claims were dismissed. But the breach of contract claim is still under consideration, awaiting more information. The question that will be decided, ultimately, is whether a web crawler that is not blocked by a website can legally be bound by a contract posted on the site.

The outcome of that question could also have important impact on Web-crawling and Internet copyright law itself. Search engines like Google have leaned on Fair Use principles when scouring the Web (and off-line libraries) for information. The Google Book Search project defenders have claimed that publishers can "opt out" of their network by letting Google know their desire to do so.

Of a similar vein, then, is Web crawling. Webmasters must opt-out of indexing via the robots.txt file, preventing the spider from crawling the site. If the courts continue to back search engines’ and other Internet companies’ right to copy and index at will, then the whole copyright system, by default, it would seem, goes opt-out, too.

Copyright law blogger John Ottaviani, on Eric Goldman‘s blog, goes into the Internet Archive v. Shell case and its implications in greater detail.