I think this is great. Ownership of user contributed content is a big open question. Now everything is becoming social and crowd-sourced. If this pushes the

I think this is great. Ownership of user contributed content is a big open question. Now everything is becoming social and crowd-sourced. If this pushes the question to the forefront so an actual judgment is made it will put businesses on some sort of solid ground. Right now a lot of people are building on potential quicksand. I like flickr's approach. Users own the content and define the copyright. Flickr provides an open API and a TOU which makes it tricky and/or illegal to source the content directly from their servers. If a billion dollar business relies on people giving them content for free and them keeping the copyright and re-selling the content, then I think maybe they're the morally bankrupt ones. APIs are everywhere now and API use is becoming quite a big sticking point. I think content API platforms are the future of the Internet and a lot of the big names (Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.) But yes, someone needs to figure out how to monetize being a content platform (in a non-Wikipedia way). Assuming you have the right to take the content, resell it and own the copyright seems like a weak assumption that has only worked so far while people were less savvy about it.