Mixi on the Rocks?

In America, you have Facebook and Myspace. In Japan, we have Mixi. Although hardly the world's most innovative social networking site, it is a force to be reckoned with here in Japan, with an installed user base of over ten million people. In fact, it's hard to even find Internet-literate people here who DON'T have accounts. Like any social networking site, it's packed full of communities mainstream and obscure -- and thanks to the fact that registrations are invite only, you tend to get a more modulated, mature version of the discussion that occurs on totally anonymous sites like 2ch.

But a recently announced change in Mixi's terms of use (you need to be a member to open the link) has a more than a few users threatening to delete their online diaries and community posts in protest. Starting on April 1st, "By posting information, including diaries and the like, on this service, users grant the service the unrestricted right to use said information (whether in the form of reproduction, publication, distribution, translation, modification or the like) without compensation." In other words, all your content are belong to us.

For the average, casual Mixi blogger, this may not be much of a big deal, but given Mixi's incredible reach throughout all levels of Japanese society, more than a few professional writers and entertainers are using the site to stay in touch with readers and fans. Muddying the waters are rumors that Mixi has pulled the plug on the blog of Kazuyoshi Miura, whose recent re-arrest in Saipan on murder charges has been front page news in Japan for the last several weeks. Could Mixi be planning to market his content in some form? There's absolutely no way to know, but the new terms of use definitely permit it, and so speculation along those lines is rampant on the site. If left unaddressed, this could have a potentially chilling effect on the content posted there.

Comments

[Ike]

Wow, I did not know that. It's not like I use mixi that much, but that's gotta suck for some people I guess.

Myspace went through a similar thing when Murdock bought it, but I think the Term of Use has been changed since.

[Matt]

It will be interesting to see how Mixi responds to the criticism. It's equally interesting to see that Japanese users are starting to demand the same sorts of digital rights to their content that Western users do.

[Gen Kanai]

The date on the Mixi website is April 1. Some folks are speculating that this is a bad April Fool's joke, but I doubt it. If Kasahara thinks he can get away with this not being a material impact to his business, he's wrong. Gree is doing well recently and so there's a place for people to go if they don't like Mixi's privacy policies.

[WDM]

Will there ever be a SNS service that people do not tire of eventually?

[DJ D]

This is a real issue.

I heard that information in mixi has been used by the police for several cases but the new privacy policies are really not acceptable.

Somebody need to do something. I cannot write well Japanese but I suggest to start create communities against the new privacy policies. We do not have a lot of time. April 1st is not April fool for sure. It is the first quarter of the Japanese fiscal year.

For those who can write Japanese, please start to make communities informing all mixi users about the change and let start to make petitions within those communities. The more petitions we will get, the more media coverage we might have and they might change their privicy policies.

[Gen Kanai]

Slashdot Japan discussion.

http://slashdot.jp/article.pl?sid=08/03/04/0153234

[Luis]

Early this week I read something about how intelectual property rights applied all the time, so when you post or publish something that you wrote anywhere, your copy rights are automatically preserved.

Is this mistaken? Any light in the face of the darkness of blatant theft? Because that is what it looks like.

[Matt]

It's less about a content grab, I think, and more about the fact that legal boilerplate like that just looks bad. It's the digital equivalent of putting up a barbed wire fence around your house right before a party -- it doesn't exactly endear Mixi to the people they're trying to convince to use their site.

[Matt]

Update: as of several days ago, Mixi has backtracked and revised the offending Clause 18 of their TOC to definitively that state that "all rights (including copyright and personal-usage rights) for content belong to the user that created it."

We'll probably never know exactly how much of this change is due to the users making their anger heard on the site and through outside blogs, but it's interesting to note that changes like this aren't slipping through the machine unnoticed. So much for the stereotype of Japanese consumers being a herd of sheep!