Hey Tumblr Users, Why Is This Man Smiling? Because he sold your content and you worked for him for free.

“Loser Generated Content…”

Music Technology Policy

Great news for Tumblr users–the eponymous Mr. Dave Karp just sold your content for $1.1 billion!  In cash!  And of course, he’s sharing that money with you, right?

No, he’s not.  But then again, record companies, movie studios, newspapers and music publishers don’t share the proceeds with their artists, journalists, songwriters or actors, when they’re sold either.  Of course…that’s not an apt comparison because all those companies paid for the “content” they’re selling.  As Francis Cianfrocca noted adroitly on Coffee and Markets, much of the value of companies like Tumblr is based on the appropriation of user content (and I think you could add YouTube to that list).

I really enjoyed the part of the Copyright Principles Project that dealt with artist rights issue of compensating users when the product of their free labor is sold for big bucks…no wait, that wasn’t covered.

So meet the new boss…worse than…

View original post 32 more words

One thought on “Hey Tumblr Users, Why Is This Man Smiling? Because he sold your content and you worked for him for free.

Comments are closed.