What Can Intellectual Property Teach Us About Social Design?

I took an Intellectual Property class my last semester of graduate school at Georgia Tech and, while the class was taught on a surface level, I learned a lot about trademarks and their legality from writing a paper on the use of collegiate trademarks by college sports fans. Something else also came out of that paper that was a bit unexpected. That is the idea that we can learn something from Intellectual Property and its governing when designing social media.

As a basis, I’m not advocating a lack of protection of trademarks or intellectual property. Companies/Entities are actually required to show a minimum level of protection in order to maintain their rights to these marks. Also, I am speaking merely from an American law point-of-view. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about IP laws in other countries just yet.

To mark the starting point, I’d like to begin by introducing you all to Twitter. You know, that 140 character thing that seems to bug all the technology-averse people and those who still just think it’s all about telling your friends that you are eating a ham and jelly sandwich. Well, there’s several ancillary sites that augment the usefulness of Twitter such as Twitpic, TwitThis, TweetDeck, and others. Twitter could have very easily pursued legal action with these services on grounds of trademark infringement. Yet, Twitter decided to be very access-oriented and allow these services to exist. Because of this, Twitter has flourished. Allowing third-party developers to spend their time building and developing these tools that increase the usefulness of Twitter allows more people to find their niche use on Twitter and therefore grow the Twitterverse participation.

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Twitter also opens its API to allow people to experiment and create new tools around Twitter. This also allows people to be able to access and display their Twitter status on their own sites. This may draw the curiosity of site visitors and draw even more users into the Twitterverse.

This openness is what allows social media to grow very quickly. Companies such as Apple are known for being on the protectionist end of the spectrum and this can stifle community growth. Although this can also be used as a method of quality control by not allowing subpar products to be built around the original product. However, social media thrives on getting as many users on and using the product as possible. Social media is not useful until it hits its critical mass. That critical mass can be upwards of hundreds of thousands of users. Creating an open development environment slices the time for reaching that critical mass dramatically by allowing others to essentially invent new uses for the product.

Designing social media needs to take this into account. For me, Twitter’s usefulness is not in finding out that my friend is playing Call of Duty with his shirt off again. To me, it’s more like a RSS feed where I can connect and interact with the people and companies I follow. But Twitter was designed originally to act more like Facebook statuses than the product I just described. It’s success lies in the fact that it was designed in such a manner that it created an amorphous quality about it that allowed users to shape and mold it to their particular needs.

Let’s set us up an example to illustrate my point about the connection between an access-oriented position on IP law and the open concept of social media design. Say I’m the Atlanta Braves organization and there is a little league baseball team in south Georgia that is using the Braves logo. Instead of charging some miniscule amount to allow the team to use the logo and show protection as well, I decide to charge some absurd amount of money. Now, the team can’t pay that amount and they can’t afford to get all new equipment and uniforms either and have to forfeit that season. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but it’s certainly a plausible situation. Being in Georgia, it’s likely many of the kids and parents were Braves fans and this could anger them to where they stop supporting the Braves situation. If the team were allowed to continue using the logo then those associated with the team would continue to support and possibly grow the Brave’s fan base. Similarly, allowing social media to be open will keep current users happy as well as help to grow the user base by creating new and novel uses. Closing social media could likely create a similar situation to the one I described earlier and cause the product’s user base to decrease.

Have you ever heard the saying, “You can’t please everyone all the time”? That saying definitely applies to social media, but, at the same time, if you can create an environment where more people can find their niche then you will assuredly please more people. Creating an open environment allows more people to find their own usefulness in a product and allows external developers to create more uses that continues to bring in more users. Eventually, the product might go from reaching that critical mass to being a social phenomenon.