When is it mine?

With the barrage of new and exciting Web 2.0 services, the question “who owns my content” is becoming more and more relevant. Especially with RSS.

As with any debate, there are answers that are fairly clear. A repeater blog that grabs your feed, reposts your content, and tacks on some ads for dollar value is clearly stealing. That’s your content, that’s your money.

But what about services like FlickR? FlickR has a free service base supported by advertisements. When I upload my pictures to FlickR, I’m giving them permission to display my work alongside ads, and keep that revenue for themselves. It’s my pictures, though, right? Shouldn’t I be making some money off of those?

Well, in that case, no.

Here’s the line as I see it: if FlickR provides me with a useful service. If I use them to host my pictures, and they pay for the bandwidth I use displaying them…however much that is…it’s perfectly legitimate for them to use my pictures to try to make up that investment. That’s the way the deal works. They give me something useful, I give them something useful. They don’t (or at least I don’t think they do, and if they do they shoudn’t) own my pictures. I can take them down any time I want. But I certainly license the images to them so that they can stay in business.

On the flip side, if a site wanted to syndicate my content as part of a service to others, (as I touched on here) I would definitely feel entitled to a portion of any profits they made. The relationship has changed — my content is a service to them. Imagine if newspapers didn’t pay their writers?

That service relationship is the key difference. You do own what you create, and you shouldn’t give it away without compensation. Be it service or money.