Intellectual Property in the Web 2.0 age

I was going along minding my own business this morning, catching up on the mail, when I got this message:

Sir, it appears you are republishing content from the Bankruptcy Law Network under your name. Do you have permission to do so?

The sender had been kind enough to leave me with the thread that had preceded his missive to me, and so I was able to ascertain that the “republishing” in question was this post. Now, I am not sure in whose universe a hyperlink constitutes “republishing content,” except perhaps that of Lewis Carroll where words can “mean exactly what I want them to mean.” I had, in fact, picked up on this article in my Twitter stream. I thought the article would be of sufficient interest to my readers that I wanted to point it out to them. Precisely so that I would not be “republishing content,” I only used the link, so that anyone who was sufficiently interested in the headline would have to go to their site in order to find out what the difference between Chapter 11, Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy is. That seems like a win-win situation to me. In fact, it seems like a no-brainer to me.

But lawyers are trained to play “mine is bigger than yours” at the drop of a hat. So no one on the other end (there were half a dozen people after me at this point) seemed to see it that way. Even though the only possible consequence of my action was to drive people to their site, they were convinced I was invading their property rights. I attempted to ascertain how, precisely, what I had done was any different than retweeting. Well, no one could quite say how it was — but they were absolutely sure what I had done was not OK, while retweeting was. So I said, “My posts and my Twitter stream appear in the same column on my site. The only difference is the background color. Is that the difference? One background color is acceptable but the other isn’t?” I still haven’t gotten an answer to that one.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: conventional notions of intellectual property cannot survive in an internet age. If you put it out there on the web, it’s going to spread, and you aren’t going to have any control over where or how it spreads. The most you can hope for is that it continues to be attributed to you.