Owning your own online content

In this article I'm going to draft some points on the topic of "owning your own online content". Before getting to the point I'll mention three incidents that recently passed through my radar.

§ A few incidents

A while ago I was commenting with a friend of mine this post found on the Mastodon instance https://aus.social (link) in which the author complains that Duolingo took ownership of their contributions. Here's a screenshot of the post at the time of publishing this article:

I'm quoting (with permission) my friends' comment:

It's weird how people contribute to products made by for-profit companies, and at
some point are surprised because the company are using the data as input into their
product for whatever they want.

That's the main reason I always try to separate what is a real community and what
is a company and their product.

These words came back to me after reading another article (link), in which the author (a streamer) describes how Twitch is becoming worse and worse for them (mostly for technical reasons, some of them geared at keeping users on the platform). The article's author moved their streaming content to YouTube¹. The author also points out that they cannot afford the time to explore other solutions. By reading the article, I am not sure if the author record and post-processes videos offline, he says a video editor is too expensive.

The third episode I want to mention comes from a Forum of Amiga retrocomputing enthusiasts. One forum member complains that YouTube terminated their account "due to repeated claims of copyright infringement" (link). This person has been publishing videos for years (+1700 videos) and, according to their story, YouTube always approved the content being published. Lately the author has received three copyright claims in a short time, YouTube then decided to block the whole account. Their only recurse is to counter claim, with unclear outcomes. This person has uploaded +1700 in about 10 years, does not have a copy offline nor has uploaded them anywhere else. This person has lost years of work and has no clear path to a resolution.

Note: I do not condone piracy of any kind. What I am focusing here is how these online platform handle disputes over user-generated content.

Let's recap the points raised by these small episodes:

1. Content donated by volunteers to a commercial product ends up being used in a way that contributors did not explicitly consent.
2. A video streamer struggles to navigate streaming platforms (he pays for) while trying to not kill his source of income.
3. A (perhaps naive) content creator is hit by copyrights claims, loses years of work without a clear path to fixing the problem.

§ Really, who owns your content?

Videos are a huge part of user-created content that people are happily giving to YouTube (or other streaming platforms) for free in exchange of the promise of a network effect, trusting that everything will be fine. But Google is not gifting anything to us. It's us that are handing them a big fat gift.

An interesting question could be: what happens when Google or Twitch (i.e. Amazon) will change the terms and conditions to make the services a pain or prohibitively expensive to run? What would streamers do, when their income depends on that platform?

When will people realize that trusting the YouTube algorithm is a dangerous bet, that you're putting your work (and possibly your income) in someone elses' hands? Some are already expressing worries but it looks like that we are still in what I described as the third step in the lifecycle of a service that wants to take over the market (my thoughts inspired by Cory Doctorow writings).

In comparison, my life is relatively easy. My website is hosted on Sourcehut, I have my own domain. If the day comes I want to move it elsewhere, I just need to click some buttons and I'm done. My content is completely and fully under my control.

For video content creators life is a bit more difficult because almost a bigger infrastructure is needed. I would like to suggest checking alternatives (like Peertube or Owncast) and see if they could work. And in general being aware of the liability of trusting these platforms with their own content. At least ensuring being able to move it somewhere else.

I believe one thing is sure, though. The day will come when we will realize that we have given away our content to companies that will turn against us. It happened again and again and will happen again. It would be wise to support today alternatives to avoid the "surprised_pikachu.jpg" face when a fatal change in the terms and conditions will hit.