Ownership of Data

[Andy]

This site: http://www.movemydata.org/ proposes that all user submitted content must be freely retrievable and be able to be moved around.

I don't think it would work for forums where if you take away the starting post of a thread, then the following posts may not make sense anymore. Also, if the content is re-posted somewhere else, it is duplicate content and may damage the search engine rankings of the sites.

But, it would be good for blogs where you should be able to easily move your blog posts from one place to another or transfer videos that you uploaded to places.

[donecweb]

I read the site and I don't understand the problem they seem to be trying to address. If I post something on a site and want to remove then I just delete it. There may be some sites that don't have a delete button but I don't know of any. Also if I post something in a site and someone else copies it then I can't see how this Move My Data community will be able to do anything about it. It seems to me that this community is just trying to get a listing of anything you post possibly for their own use.

[Andy]

The problem they want to address is the difficulty of deleting or moving your content from some sites after you uploaded it. I think it mostly applies to social networking sites and photo/video sharing sites.

For example, you may lose some of your photos after a hard disk failure and want to download them again from one of these sites. The site may only allow the download of a compressed version but they may have archived your original high-resolution upload. A good way to backup data is on external servers, but if you can't access your data then it's a problem.

Related to this problem which I really don't like is where start-up companies get people to market their service and then stop because they ran out of money. But they keep all the leads (email subscribers) that you sent them. Recently one such company (Agloco) did this and walked away with a million person subscriber list which would be worth at least $1 million. But the people that built the list can't get a download of their leads.