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Another day, another DCMA takedown notice issued by a company's attorney that takes an opportunity to build brand value and actually destroys it. The picture (you can find it on Flickr here) is a DCMA takedown notice sent to a MIT educational program about a student who built a replica Pac-Man game from the programming language Scratch - a simple programming language designed to teach people how to program. Again, the attorney probably acted by the book in issuing the takedown notice, but did NAMCO, its marketers, and the attorney miss a brand building opportunity?

It's been a few years since I got in the middle of some IP law, but from what I remember IP law does not require that you demand the takedown of every potentially infringing piece of content, you just need to demonstrate you are exercising control. Control can take many forms. They could just grant the student permission for the purpose of this educational exercise. If there was a real threat to their game built on more robust computing languages, then they could limit the permission for a specific period of time. Problem solved. Now think about the wasted brand value building opportunity?

How much free press would they have received if they congratulated the student for embracing their iconic game in their pursuit to learn how to program? What if they granted an open license for any student to build Pac-Man replica games in the pursuit of their learning? People may actually see Pac-Man everywhere. What a tragedy for the brand?

This new age of content manipulation should force any brand marketer/content owner to rethink their playbook on how they will build brand value. Those who don't and keep doing what they did for the past 20 years are negligent in their duties (IMO). If you are a marketer and these situations make you unsure of how to act, start asking questions. Get your key stakeholders (including legal) into a room and explore "what if" scenarios. Ask your attorney what is the "minimum" that you must do to protect the brand's legal rights - Minimum being the key word. Then discuss the potential upside of different responses. Takes some risks. Learn. You may surprise yourself with the results.

We need to stop using the 20 year old playbook in this new world!

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On Nov. 18, Citysearch.com announced it was launching a beta site that used Facebook Connect as an optional identity system and immediately became relevant again in its competition with Yelp and Yellowpages.com. Facebook Connect allows websites to give site visitors the option to login with their FB credentials rather that keep a unique profile for that site. Going forward we will see alot more of this.

1. Single Identity - Site visitors have spent alot of time building their identity on Facebook. Why shouldn't they be able to contribute to that identity on other sites?
2. Facebook Integration - FB Connect is more than an identity system, it will allow tie backs into Facebook. For example, when a FB user leaves a review on Citysearch it will create an entry on that person's FB timeline allowing the user to inform his network.
3. Network Contextual Information - Interested in reviews from a local restaurant? A site with a large number of reviews of that restaurant is great, but a site that gives you the reviews by your FB network, the people you trust, is awesome! No more asking people what they think of this place; you can find their opinions on Citysearch.
4. More Visitors! - This is the bottom line for any web site trying to get traffic. FB Connect integrated sites create a compelling value proposition for FB users to use the site over competitors and, more importantly, tell their friends about it. This means more traffic.

The sound you hear is Yelp scrambling to integrate FB Connect before Citysearch steals their visitors.Citysearch is just the tip of the iceberg, the power and possibilities are endless. Here are some of the FB Connect integrations that I want to see.

1. SKYPE - Do I ever want to see my Skype account be linked to my Facebook account! That way I can see all of my FB Network in my Skype Contact list (with their profile photos). Even better, integration gives us a better chat utility and adds voice and video communication to my FB network. Yes please!
2. AMAZON.COM - When shopping I want to know about the reviews of my FB network on specific products.
3. TICKETMASTER/LIVE NATION - Concerts are a big part of my leisure time and it would be great when I buy a ticket that my network is immediately notified that I am going to a certain concert (and vice versa). Furthermore, I would be more likely to give reviews of those concerts that I saw.
4. LOCATION BASED SOCIAL NETWORK - Another service slow to take off due to another login and identity. If I was a mobile social network I would integrate this yesterday, buy a swath of Facebook banner ads, and suddenly have a massive new audience for my location-based network. Imagine being notified that your FB friend with a GPS phone is having coffee down the street. That is relevant information that I want to know.
5. DELICIOUS - Delicious is difficult to expand beyond early adopters precisely because people don't want another login. Social Bookmarking could be huge if it could come to the masses; FB Connect may do this. If it takes off, it could create a real competitor to Google search.

It was nice to see the recent Robert Scoble - Facebook email-scraping incident re-engergize the call for facebook to open up its user data, but it also brought to the forefront an more interesting side issue:

"When you 'friend' someone in social networking sites, what permissions do you give them to use the data on your profile pages?"

Jeremiah Owyang, Michael Arrington, and Loren Feldman have raised the issue that taking the email of a Facebook "friend" and exporting it to another contact web-app violates the "friend" privacy. Their underlying argument goes that a Facebook "friending" only gives the friend permission to use the data within Facebook. I argue that this is not realistic and that the "friend" permission should be considered more broadly to connecting in a number of different ways.

I argue that Facebook information is no different from a business card. When I hand you a business card, it serves as identification and a call to contact with me for business purposes. Facebook is a connection medium; common sense demands that the permissions extend to connecting. There are practical reasons supporting a broader definition of permission than advocated by the above people. If we put conditions that everytime we try to anything with our "friend's" personal data that they made available to us we need user permission, the system will become unwieldy.

I am not arguing for broad use rights; just a call for common sense. If someone "friends" you on Facebook, you can use their information to connect with them (even using another service like Plaxo). They may not spam you or sell your email addresses to a third party, but certainly they can connect with you. And that is what Plaxo would allow Scoble to do. I think these calls for user permission are a knee-jerk reaction to the automated nature of scraping 5000 Facebook friends. What is the difference from manually entering the email address listed on Facebook and scraping it using a Plaxo tool? I think this is a good discussion, but I don't want to see it dominated a immediate gut reaction.