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Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms of Service for Online Content Creation

Published:27 February 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

From amateur creativity to social media status updates, nearly every Internet user is also a content creator-but who owns that content? Policy, including intellectual property rights, is a necessary but often invisible part of online content sharing and social computing environments. We analyzed the copyright licenses contained in the Terms of Service of 30 different websites where users contribute content, then conducted a survey to match perceptions of copyright terms to the reality. We found that licensing terms vary in unpredictable ways, and that user expectations and opinions differ by license and by type of website. Moreover, the most undesirable terms, such as right to modify, appear more frequently than users expect. We argue that users care about how their content can be used yet lack critical information. Site designers should take user needs and community norms into account in creating and explaining copyright policies.

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  1. Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms of Service for Online Content Creation

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
      February 2016
      1866 pages
      ISBN:9781450335928
      DOI:10.1145/2818048

      Copyright © 2016 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 27 February 2016

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