(c/o TL) The Weblog Question
People are starting Weblogs in growing numbers, but the owner of the content isn't always clear By John Foley, InformationWeek Jan. 31, 2005 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=59100462 When Mark Jen started working for Google Inc. earlier this month, one of the first things he did was create a Weblog where he discussed, among other things, his impressions of a Google sales meeting. It was too much information he soon learned, and within two days, Jen removed the sensitive material from his Web site, explaining, "I goofed." As more professionals create Weblogs, those opinion-filled Web sites where a mix of anecdote and insight can stir interest in one person's observations or an entire company's strategy, the complexities and questions are beginning to surface. Who owns Weblog content? What are the risks? And how far should employees go in sharing their thoughts? A growing number of people are reading Weblogs, and their demographics--younger and more affluent than those who don't--make them an attractive audience, according to a November report by Forrester Research. Anxious to get involved, more technologists, marketing managers, and other business people are becoming Weblog writers, or bloggers. "Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, E-mail address--and a URL for their blog," analyst Charlene Li observed in the report. That day is closer than you think. Two weeks ago, Randy Baseler, VP of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, started a Weblog, where he offered Boeing's point of view on competitor Airbus' new supersized airplane, the A380. A few weeks earlier, General Motors Corp. vice chairman Bob Lutz launched the FastLane Blog, where he posted observations from the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The trend is forcing IT, human resources, and legal departments to come up to speed quickly. The issue of who owns the copyrights to Weblogs, in particular, seems to have caught some people off guard. Mark Potts, chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's management software business, says that he would be surprised if his Weblog, which is hosted on HP's Web site, was copyrighted by his employer. "That's an interesting question," he says. But, after checking the company's policy, an HP spokeswoman discovered that the rights to Potts' content belong to the company and not the CTO. "HP owns the copyright for anything written by an HP employee published on an HP Web site, including blog entries," the spokeswoman says via E-mail. For companies that require blogging as a function of an employee's job, the issues of ownership and oversight are easier to establish. The content typically belongs to the employer in the same way that work-related E-mail does, and the Weblogs can be monitored and even edited. Increasingly, however, people are writing Weblogs on subjects closely related to their jobs, yet without official endorsements from their employers. Such sites can fall into a "fuzzy, gray area" of copyright law, says Cydney Tune, an intellectual-property lawyer with law firm Pillsbury Winthrop. Ownership is important because Weblog material has both potential value and liability. "I would think the employer would want to own the content," Tune says. "As a general rule, it's better for employers to own everything that the employee creates because you never know when it's going to become important to your business." Online advertising, a loyal following of readers, and even book deals are among the benefits that can accrue. Conversely, the list of employees who have been fired for missteps keeps getting longer. Related issues include how Weblogs might affect a company's reputation or trademarks, and, as in Jen's case, the potential disclosure of sensitive information. It's also possible that readers will misconstrue personal Weblogs written by employees as a company's official position. "Regardless of how many disclaimers you put on your Weblog that your content is private and not related to your employer, people will treat your statements as representing your company," writes Werner Vogels in a Jan. 6 posting on his All Things Distributed Weblog. A few days later, Vogels, an employee of Amazon.com Inc. who had begun his Weblog while a researcher at Cornell University, disclosed that he had been promoted to chief technology officer at the company. Amazon's communications department didn't publicly disclose Vogels appointment as CTO. That Vogels did so himself speaks to the potential for professionals to reveal new and relevant information that would otherwise have no outlet other than word of mouth. Yet his high-profile position also means Vogels will be more circumspect in what he says on his Weblog. "It is obvious that in that role, I have to be more thoughtful in how I use this medium," he writes. The vetting can reach the highest levels inside a company: According to a recent article in Fortune, Sun Microsystems' opinionated CEO, Scott McNealy, was urged not to blog after showing insiders some of his writing samples. Forrester Research advises companies to provide guidelines not only for company-sanctioned Weblogs, but also for employees who do them on their own time. The IT research firm even recommends that managers occasionally view the personal Weblogs of subordinates to see what they're saying. "Respecting existing confidentiality agreements and companies' secrets is a no-brainer--and not doing so should clearly be grounds for firing," Li wrote. Business bloggers need to consider how their content gets distributed. A growing number of Weblog readers are using news-aggregation services to browse multiple Weblogs from a single source. But there's a simmering controversy over how news aggregators use Really Simple Syndication technology to do that. RSS is a format that makes it possible to automate the process of pushing content from one Web site to another or to an RSS reader on a desktop PC. Intellectual-property lawyer Martin Schwimmer recently cut ties between his Weblog, where he writes about trademark matters, and Bloglines.com's aggregation service. Bloglines "is not authorized to reproduce my content nor to change the appearance of my pages, which it does," Schwimmer wrote on Jan. 14. The issue was compounded by the fact that Bloglines published Schwimmer's entire blog entries, not just summaries, making it less likely that readers would visit his site. As RSS technology becomes a more popular way for people to access Web content, Schwimmer expects other Weblog authors to run into the same problem. RSS feeds are about to become "the next big thing" in information access, he says. "You're going to have the classic 'who owns [intellectual property]?' problem." Blogger Bob Roudebush, a Microsoft employee who writes a personal Weblog, takes his concerns a step further: "Copyrights are going to kill Weblogs as we know them. Plain and simple," he wrote in a posting on the RSS-feed debate. In a follow-up E-mail exchange, Roudebush says, "As we start to consume information in different ways, it becomes very hard to tell how content is being licensed (protected) and what rights I have to use it." Yet many companies haven't drafted formal Weblog policies, including Microsoft, where hundreds of employees blog at various sites without specific guidelines. Microsoft trusts employees to use good judgment in adhering to its employee rule book when it comes to blogging. "When talking about Microsoft topics, I try to stick to the guidance from my manager with respect to blogging, which is basically 'be smart,'" Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble says via E-mail. Scoble sometimes disagrees with Microsoft policies on his popular Scobleizer site. But Microsoft's informal approach may not be enough as the number of bloggers at the company grows, especially since the line between "personal" Weblogs and those done as part of the job can be hard to distinguish. For example, Heather Hamilton's "Marketing At Microsoft" Weblog lists Microsoft-sponsored career events alongside reminiscences of her college days. In addition to such unofficial journals, Microsoft publishes "team" Weblogs on MSDN.com, and a few of the company's executives write Weblogs, too. Bill Gates is considering starting one. And last month, Microsoft began testing a hosted Weblog service called MSN Spaces on MSN.com that has already generated 1.5 million accounts. Despite a corporate obsession with intellectual property, Microsoft's policy is hard to decipher when it comes to ownership of Weblog content. Microsoft allows employees such as Scoble and Hamilton to maintain rights to their personal blogs, even though it links to their Web sites from MSDN.com. On the other hand, the copyright notice on MSN Spaces appears to give Microsoft certain rights over the content hosted by its service. When asked to explain the company's policy, a spokesperson says, "The question of ownership of copyright for blog content is complicated, and the answer depends on a number of factors." Another puts it more bluntly: "It's something that doesn't have an answer." Why the waffling? It's possible Microsoft doesn't want to mess with a good thing. Employees who blog may pour more creative energy into their work when the copyrights are in their name. More than a legal fine point, the rights may act as an incentive--any benefits that accrue, accrue to the blogger. In addition, bloggers may feel a greater sense of independence, and outsiders may perceive Weblogs as being more objective, when copyrighted in the writer's name. That's meaningful because one of the defining characteristics of personal Weblogs is their unfiltered viewpoint. A Weblog with Microsoft's copyright on it might be more valuable to Microsoft but less valued by the people reading it. For all those reasons and more, some employers may not want to be too closely associated with employee Weblogs. "With ownership comes responsibility, and, in the case of blogs, there's very little control in a classical editorial sense," Forrester's Li says in an E-mail interview. The big question is whether Weblogs are done in the "course and scope" of an employee's work or as extracurricular activity, intellectual-property lawyer Tune says. At Microsoft, a few current job openings list "participating actively in the developer community through Weblogs" as one responsibility. The openings are for what Microsoft calls "evangelists." For people like this, where contributing to a Weblog is part of the job, Microsoft may retain the copyrights. Several Weblogs on Microsoft's MSDN.com site carry the company's copyright symbol, though many others don't. The Windows Security Logging Weblog, described as representing "thoughts from the Windows auditing team," bears a copyright only in the name of "Eric." At Microsoft and elsewhere, some Weblogs don't bear copyright notices at all. That doesn't mean no one owns the content, only that it's unclear who does. The Weblog of Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz doesn't carry a copyright notice: "I'm fine with anyone using the content," explains Schwartz, via E-mail. "The broader the distribution and the more people who build on these ideas, the better." Sun's copyright policies are contained in fine print at the bottom of blogs.sun.com, a Web site for "any Sun employee to write about anything." The company allows reuse of Weblog content, but its official terms specify that redistribution is allowed only for personal use and when a permission notice is included, among other stipulations. GM's FastLane blog uses a Creative Commons license, a popular alternative to a standard copyright that lets the licenser set the terms under which content is reused. A blogger, for instance, can require that anyone who redistributes content must attribute that content to the author and not use it for commercial purposes. Yet, it's "not a priority for us to copyright" the dialogue on the site, says Michael Wiley, director of new media with GM Communications. "The FastLane blog is a grassroots conversation with the marketplace," Wiley says via E-mail. "Copyrighting conversations in the blogosphere is equivalent to checking one's credentials at the door." And just because the highly recognizable copyright symbol appears on a Web site doesn't always make it clear who controls what. The terms of use for Microsoft's MSN Spaces service claims "all contents of the MSN Web Sites" are copyrighted by Microsoft or its suppliers and that users grant Microsoft permission to copy, distribute, edit, and sublicense their postings. Does that mean MSN bloggers relinquish some of their own copyrights? Despite multiple requests for clarification, Microsoft has been unable to provide any. For now, few business bloggers seem overly concerned about the legal fine points. But it may be only a matter of time before the copyright question becomes a copyright issue. "It will become important if liability arises out of it or if it becomes extremely valuable," Tune says. Given the soaring popularity of Weblogs, both scenarios seem all but inevitable. Copyright � 2004 CMP Media LLC You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
