Whose idea is it anyway?

One of my favorite pasttimes on the Internet is "wikipedia-ing." What is this verb, you ask? It is none other than the art of following a topic link to its most illogical and unrelated end, or as I like to call it alternatively, the "wow-I-never-knew-Barbie-got-her-start-in-Nazi-Germany" game. (Look it up, it's true :o )

Anyway, the point is that I could spend hours "wikipedia-ing" the results of my Googling (a formal verb now), if I didn't have homework to do and a physical life to live. This afternoon, however, I slacked on the homework after turning in a philosophy paper and put my real life on hold for some quality time with my pop culture digital encyclopedia. And, to my surprise, I actually found something worth blogging about.

Did you know that Facebook, the new golden child of social networking, has a pending intellectual property lawsuit against it (and has since September 2004)? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the private company and evil genius behind many a college student's procrastination strategy during finals week, worked for ConnectU - another social networking site - in 2003. ConnectU, a company also started by Harvard yardigans, claims that Zuckerberg stole its networking code and concept. For more info., click here.

Well, as soon as I read this I had to check it out for myself. Afterall, I had never even heard of ConnectU. How could I, a girl who breathed the likes of Xanga, Bebo, MySpace and any other web2.0 site as a teenager, miss one?

Simple, really, I found out. Because ConnectU is what Facebook use to be - a site whose only purpose is to connect academics (read "non-4yr. institutions need-not apply") with other academics and alumni. When I logged in for the first time (because yes, I had to get an account), it was like looking back into the prehistoric era. "Oh," I thought, "this is what Facebook must've looked like when it was just a digital version of Harvard's ink and paper freshman photo book." Or maybe still, "this is what it looked like when it was in alpha version at Phillips Exeter Academy - Zuckerberg's prep. school" You see, another rumored part of the tale is that the concept to go digital belonged to yet another student, one who went to high school with the young entrepreneur. As an ethical journalist (acting as an ethical blogger - difference), I should note that this is mere gossip and speculation. I have an accquaintance who went to high school with Zuckerberg (but defected to Yale after graduation :o), and he told me that story more than a year ago.

At any rate, the uncertainty behind the creation of one of my favorite Internet sites (because, let's face it, my life and all my friends lives are on it), brings up the issue of ownership in the still heavily unchartered digital frontier. It is fairly easy to gain access to most website codes. One of my teachers even hid test answers in the code of his personal website and said he would give anyone who found it an A - I did, and I wasn't alone. So, how can the practice of "borrowing" from others on the Net be regulated? Who's to say that my blog code infringes on your blog code because we both use #cc6699 as our background color (yeh, I went straight HTML geek for a sec :o ). Back on topic though: as traditional media and advertisers turn to social networking sites and the Internet as a whole for answers, how will they protect their intellectual rights sufficiently? Food for thought...