On a whim, Hiroko queried Google Maps for directions from Tokyo to Washington DC. Rather than an aircraft, it advises kayaking across the Pacific, with a brief stop in Hawaii -- just like common sense would indicate. This is too awesome to not be intentional... I think? The direct water-to-highway connections would assume ownership of a vehicle akin to 007's hover-gondola from "Moonraker." Google Maps
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.
Update March 24, 2008: in an apparent response to user protests, Mixi has backtracked and revised the offending Clause 18 of their TOC to definitively state that "all rights (including copyright and personal-usage rights) for content belong to the user that created it."
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