On the sidebar to the left, you can see my claim of copyright for the content I generate. This is an antiquated instrument used to control many things, including your persona in a world of distributed data. As we all know, it does not do this very effectively.
Google is very smart, because they have created a brand and search capabilities that have generated a nearly singular market. If you do a search on the internet, you use Google. After succeeding in capturing their market and establishing their brand, they began to branch out, offering other applications and services, “for free”; email, word processing, 3D model making, drawing, blogging, and most recently financial capabilities through the Google shopping cart.
By entering into and using these services and applications, you supply Google with access to and control over things such as your shopping habits, your search habits and your interests. If you enter a search term, Google has the capacity to return a custom set of results, based on the information you have provided. If you have a Google account, you will notice that there is now a “Web History” option. This means Google has the capacity to keep track of your search history, and use it for their purposes.
When you generate any kind of content on another site, and you no longer want it propagated, if the site owner is not Machiavellian, you can ask that they remove it. Most site owners will do this. But there may be a time when it is useful for the site owner not to remove the data you generated on their site. Maybe it attracts many visitors to their site… In these cases it becomes a struggle between you and the site owner to get the information removed.
I mentioned I found the quote by Eben Moglen to be of great interest to me. The reason it is of interest is because it describes a new instrument which replaces copyright. The concept of copyright in these times is not needed just to protect content so you can make a profit, (as in the music industry). But it now concerns what governs your distributed persona. Eben describes a new method where an infrastructure is developed for the internet, by programmers, that divides a location, (metaphorically you can think of this like a single web site), into chunks of data that no one person owns. This would mean that the Google model would not really work. There could not be a single colossal owner of data. Instead, each participant owns their own data when it is created. If it added to the content of the site, the site owner would not be able to reproduce it, and have it appear on their site, unless you were in agreement, at any time, including in the future. This is a brilliant strategy, because it allows content to be a living, viable source, and not something based on maintaining dead artifacts, and placing them in “useful” contexts which serve those who have a need to control information.
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