Very interesting post by Lawrence Lessig, which highlight another dimension than the monopoly of corporate monetization that many of these participatory websites are based on.

So we are arriving at a more fuller P2P critique of the Web 2.0 sites, which has five elements. (are we forgetting something?, please do let us know!):

– where is the ownership? Privately owned corporate sites certainly will have to abide to a different logic than commonly owned infrastructures (which can have various formats such as nonprofit ownership)

– do they really use open applications, open standards, open infrastructures, this should be the result of a technical analysis

– do they allow for true sharing of content; it is related to the former, but probably not exactly the same

– do you retain the rights to your intellectual content; this was the basis of my critique on the Third Enclosures

– and finally, related to the former but also distinct conceptually: is there a sharing of the revenues that come from the user-generated value creation?

here’s the quote from Lessig:

“The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google

So there’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.”

A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.

A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.

In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites.

Fake Sharing Sites

YouTube gives users very cool code to either “embed” content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded. Of course, many have begun building hacks to suck content off of the YouTube site. (On the Mac, I’ve used TubeSock to do that). But this functionality — critical to true sharing — is not built into the YouTube system.

True Sharing Sites

By contrast, ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing.

• Flickr, for example, makes it simple to download Flickr images. (See, e.g., here.)
• blip.tv explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares. (See, e.g., here.)
• EyeSpot (a fantastic new site to enable web based remixing of video and audio) permits the download of the source and product files. (See, e.g., here.)
• Revver (the site that enables an ad-bug to be added to a video so the creator gets paid when each video is played) builds its whole business model on the idea that content can flow freely on the Net. (See, e.g., here.)”