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Dec
9
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.
Dear Rahul Gaitonde,
My name is David Gardner, and I am one of the creators of DostPost.com. I am writing to thank you for evaluating DostPost. We are a small operation and I’m excited that an individual with an immaculate education such as yours has taken the time to review our site.
I would like to briefly address the content of your 8 December post. You are correct that under the Terms of Use, DostPost could conceivably act in the way you describe. This, however, is not our intention. It is our goal to connect academics so that we may all learn from each other. We see ourselves not as “gate keepers” or “owners” but rather facilitators. And in our role as facilitators, we do not wish to benefit financially from the academic or intellectual work of others. Nor is it our intent to allow other members to profit from the work of others. If we have given the impression that we plan to benefit from the academic work of others, then that is incorrect.
I’m delighted that you mentioned the Creative Commons. We are strong supporters for what it stands for and provides. And we are well versed in the works of Mr. Lawrence Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons. In fact, we are such strong supporters of the open source movement that one of the co-founders posted a paper abstract that he wrote to the Project Vault in DostPost that discusses the advantages of open source electronic voting machines. He posted the paper on 1 November 2006.
It has been in our plans to include the Creative Commons licenses as part of DostPost for many months. Right now DostPost is composed of a trio of friends. While we are growing rapidly, we have found ourselves without enough hours in the day to implement everything on the site that we’d like to do. Regrettably, one of the things that had been temporarily been pushed to the back burner is implementing Creative Commons licenses. But I assure you that we will provide DostPost members with the extra “security” that Creative Commons affords very soon.
I understand your point but do not necessarily agree that we are trying to demonstrate command and control over the content of others. We have, in fact, provided a platform for the interaction of academics that puts the power in the hands of the members.
This is evident with the privacy settings on DostPost. Members can decide which type of members can view certain aspects of their profile, for whom their name will turn up for in a search, and of course, who can view the academic work that they have posted. Upon posting an item, members can choose who can view it — only their friends, friends of friends, only other members from their respective university/college, or everyone on DostPost. From these selections, every DostPost member can post items in such a way that it matches their privacy desires, item by item.
I hope that what I have written shows that we have taken your comments to heart and are working to make all parts of the website reflect our true mission and intent – to enable our members to learn from each other.
Best regards,
David Gardner
gardner@ dostpost.com
PS – By the way, have you considered posting a paper that you have written on DostPost? You are well informed and articulate, and we would enjoy reading a piece by you!