Are they really "social"?

I have deep interests in FLOSS, open standards, social media, online communities & social CRM. And this is pretty evident even in this blog of mine.

I am a staunch believer that knowledge is a wealth that grows by sharing unlike other wealths, that can only diminish. And probably that's why I have a more than passing affinity to the stuff mentioned above.

And web 2.0 driven by social media (or is it the other way?) is supposed to be a paradigm shift mainly because of "user generated content".

What that means is that with advent of some new ways of using existing technologies, the users (as opposed to the web masters) can now create or generate content in the form of blogs, comments, tweets, ratings, reviews, polls, links, images, videos, etc.

The whole web 2.0 world is supposed to be one "free" space that is enriched by the concept of crowdsourcing, which believes that people in the online community are usually as good or even better than experts!

The basic premise of all these:

• the ease of producing content 
• the freedom to share them
• the trust to connect with the community.

However, we still have the demon of copyrights & intellectual property rights to deal with. Add to it the concerns of privacy, DMCA, et al. and it starts getting pretty dark & forbidding! A lawyers heaven.

And this has been responded to in two major formats. One that allows freedom, other that prohibits it in theory but not always in practice.

The individuals on this "writers' web" are pretty open & contribute their stuff mostly as per one of the Creative Common licenses. This usually means that you can share & redistribute their content with varying degrees of restrictions. But, share & redistribute you can. Many provide stuff using the GNU Free Document License, like the wikipedia, that allows you lots of freedom with the content. These and some other such licenses are called progressive licenses.

The most commercial sites & communities however adopt the overly protectionist means w.r.t. content. They all seem the same & predominantly mean the following:

1. You cannot share or distribute any of the content we own & provide on this site, ever, anywhere. You cannot also create derivative stuff from them.
   
2. Any content that you submit here are ours for ever & everywhere. We can deem use it in any form, either in original or in any derived means.

The above terms are what I like to refer to as the "All your base are belong to us" (AYBABTU) terms. ;)

So heres a list of Terms of Use from various social media & community sites, where content is shared and how they seem to treat user generated content (If I am wrong, please do let me know. I am willing to stand corrected):

Twitter (What's Yours is Yours) - User is owner of their content. Suggest users to contribute to public domain or use progressive licensing terms.

Facebook -  AYBABTU. You still own your content though.

Mashable - AYBABTU.

Wikipedia - Copyleft. GFDL. Content is free to share & redistribute.


SAP Developer Network - Mine is mine, take permission to use it. Yours is yours.

IBM Developer Works - Pretty complex for my limited brains!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer & the above opinions are to the best of my limited knowledge & are not meant to serve as a legal help or to slander any body or entity or concern.


What other sites should be evaluated? Please let us know through your comments. :)