DostPost.com is an interesting idea with great potential – a platform, they say, for sharing notes, projects, news, events, and collaborating across universities. They’ve sent out invitations to the IITs, the IIMs and IISc.
However, DostPost has one fatal flaw: this point from their “Terms of Use” page:
By posting Content to any public area of DostPost, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to DostPost an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, translate, reformat and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Scary, almost.
This kind of licence goes beyond forcing you to put your work in the public domain. The only sweetener (if you can view it as that) is that the license is “non-exclusive”, meaning not only DostPost, but anyone at all can do whatever he/she likes with your content – without needing to give you, the creator, any credit at all for the work.
Isn’t it voluntary, though?
Of course, DostPost could quite easily argue that if a user’s agreed to put his/her work up in public in the first place, he/she is willing to let anyone use it – so all that DP is doing it formalizing it in its Terms and Conditions. I’m not sure if that argument washes: one, the simple act of making it publicly accessible does not imply that the author permits anyone to make any use of it. Simple analogy – books in print. Two, the author may not, in the first place, intend to make it available to “the public” – if he/she wanted to share it with a set of disparate people? With different permissions for each? Does DP allow that kind of flexibility? What if the author wishes to put his/her works up under his/her own license (or terms and conditions?) Will DP’s terms and conditions allow this?
Content lock-in is dead.
Sadly, DP’s creators display the same intent to control content that have characterized the old, pre-Web-2.0-era applications. Audiences don’t buy lock-in any more. Flickr and Google Photo Albums will prevail over Webshots not just because they have a snazzier interface – but because Webshots will not allow you or your users to access the photos in their original format, original size. DP would do better to pay more careful attention to what is happening around them. What companies that have bet their future on “social applications”(or to use Yahoo’s disgusting term “user generated content”), are doing. DP needs to take a closer look at the licenses under the Creative Commons umbrella, and “permit” its users to define their licenses, if they wish to.
DP needs a change in the approach to their business – their revenue model, ought to make money by being a platform where this kind of academic content is shared – not to make money using that content. The revenue will come from the platform, not the content.
Repeat, platform, not content.