Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram who sold his popular photo-enhancing company for a record $1 billion to Facebook, is in trouble lately with California state regulators. California Corporations Department is seeking to determine if Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was in the best interest of Instagram investors, the New York Times reports. He says Twitter -- from whom he his locking up everybody's pictures lately -- never made him a firm offer. In any event, even if it kinda sorta did, he preferred going to the more viable Facebook. I don't see what's wrong with this, but I'm not a tax and regulation expert, so we'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, all the techocommie and techolibertarian geeks (they are in the same camp now, trying to liberate our content for their piracy-based business models) are screaming and saying Systrom should turn this whole thing into yet another Creative Commons licensing scheme and just keep skimming content.
I say, no, Kevin, you have a historic moment to turn the corner on the early Internet's hippies and socialists in web 1.0 and web 2.0, to leave behind the Howard Rheingolds and the Clay Shirkys and the Joi Itos and the Mitch Kapors and all the rest, and make a buck for yourself -- and everybody else.
I've already written about how Anil Dash is in the way of history and how we don't need more Creative Communism, we need to add real dollar Commerce to the model to make it viable. Not this dead-end UI that only leads to more ad dollars for Zuckerberg with our free content, and nothing but loss of time for us:
But this more viable mode where we can GET PAID even for amateur pictures and blogs:
But what this depends on is Kevin Systrom, and whether he can turn the corner from being just like every other script kiddie with a big idea and become like every other oligarch who will be dead in 10 years, or make history, leaving the pastoral, collectivist communist past of the Internet far behind in the dust and moving to the modern age.
It's good that Kevin has already declared the opposite of "liberation" of content for Twitter and others, and decided that private property needs to have digital rights on it. Good!
Now go the extra mile and figure out how you do get content out of the box -- you enable people to sell it! Maybe for pennies, but you sell it!
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