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Etsy's crafty balance: Fans vs. trademark holders

BROOKLYN, N.Y.--It's a languid, late-summer Wednesday afternoon at the offices of online handmade-goods marketplace Etsy, and Chief Technology Officer Chad Dickerson is sitting at a table in a conference room decorated to look like a cartoonish version of the interior of a Mercury-era space capsule.

Surrounded by fake panic-button consoles, plush jet packs, and quilts depicting outer-space views of moons and planets, Dickerson is peering at his laptop screen to report a particularly important number that he's just been asked to look up: "We've got 263 search results for 'Justin Bieber.'"

That's 263 listings at this precise moment in time by Etsy sellers hawking homemade shoelaces, tapestries, pendants, and pillows (to name a few) featuring the visage of the sugary pop singer. Bieber is hardly alone on Etsy; poke through its listings, and you'll find necklaces in the shape of the "Golden Snitch" winged orb from the "Harry Potter" series, cuff links painted to look like the head of "Star Wars" robot R2-D2, and bottle cap pendants featuring the bronzed face of "Jersey Shore" star "DJ Pauly D."

Fan creations are a funny thing. For well more than a decade, the Web has provided an unprecedented gathering space for loyal and zealous followers of literary, cinematic, and televised franchises who might not otherwise ever interact, allowing many phenomena that were once cult hits to achieve mainstream, mass-market success and often phenomenal profitability. Sometimes, as with the sale of unofficial DJ Pauly D pendants and Star Wars cuff links, the fans stand a chance of profiting, too. And the trademark and copyright holders aren't always happy about it.… Read more

Understanding what Facebook apps really know (FAQ)

Do Facebook apps sell you out? Judging by the contents of a Wall Street Journal report last week, one could easily get the idea that a massive lapse in oversight on Facebook's behalf led a bevy of opportunistic developers to start selling user data off to marketers and advertisers. Or not. Plenty of tech journalists jumped to Facebook's defense and poked holes in the the Journal's page-one story.

The result was a rather muddled mess. Because, yes, it's a problem if developers are going behind Facebook's back and selling user data. But even if so, … Read more

Has Facebook lost control of the Platform?

This time around, Facebook may actually have seen its privacy Watergate: A report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday found that the phenomenal amount of personal information that Facebook members put in their profiles may indeed have been sold extensively to marketers, advertisers, and data collectors. The big question, appropriately enough, is what did Facebook know and when did it know it?

Here's what happened: When Facebook members agree to connect their Facebook credentials to any of the hundreds of thousands of applications that implement its third-party developer application programming interface (API), they are giving those developers access … Read more

Skype-Facebook: Like peanut butter and chocolate?

Strip away the tracts of FarmVille land, the politics of tagging and untagging photos, and even the near-vestigial "poke," and you have Facebook at its core: this is what has become, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, the next generation of the phone book.

So it's understandable that even in the age of the text message, telephony would become a part of Facebook at one point or another. Except you won't find it on Facebook.com. Instead, the social-networking site is baked right into the latest version of VoIP service Skype, which was … Read more

YouTube politics: A quest for victory or notoriety?

For a few days this month, with midterm election season heating up, the Internet's army of bored office drones cast aside their usual YouTube fodder of strangely-behaving cats and all things lip-synced and Auto-Tuned. They turned instead to what may or may not have been a completely serious political campaign ad: fresh-faced Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell took to the airwaves, and to the Web, with a spot that began with the proclamation, "I'm not a witch."

There's a backstory, of course. As an evangelical Christian activist appearing on the 1990s talk show "… Read more

Microsoft's Facebook stake: Maybe not so crazy

Three years ago, when Microsoft invested $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook, it looked to be just a bit nutty.

Back then, Facebook was an unprofitable three-year-old company with a business model that the ad industry still wasn't fully believing, and the News Corp.-owned social network MySpace was still bigger than Facebook both in the U.S. and internationally. Facebook's paper valuation of $15 billion at the time of the investment was believed to have been embarrassingly overinflated because Microsoft had been in a bidding war with Google over the stake in question, and indeed, … Read more

The Twitterati very much mind the Gap

You never really know what will get social-media marketing chatter going. Film directors getting kicked off planes, for one, or that Old Spice Man sensation. This week, it was when retailer The Gap--which has lately been getting loads of positive digital press for its use of Groupon and Foursquare--unveiled a complete revamp of its iconic logo, and everybody freaked out. More specifically, they seemed to think it was the worst idea since New Coke.

"Gap" became a trending topic on Twitter, as design- and branding-savvy Twitterers (as well as those who just like to voice an opinion … Read more

'Social Network' weaves a complex Web (review)

"When (Hermes) had driven away the cattle of Apollo and had been caught in the act, to win pardon more easily, at Apollo's request he gave him permission to claim the invention of the lyre."--The Astronomica of Pseudo-Hyginus (2.7) explains the birth of deception, and intellectual property

"For those of you addicted to FarmVille as much as I am there is a glitch in the game that gives you free cows." -- A much-read how-to on the Facebook Platform's biggest runaway success

In one scene in David Fincher's new film "… Read more

'Social Network' raises questions as debut nears

NEW YORK--They're everywhere here: on the sides of buses and along the walls of subway stations, posters for the upcoming film "The Social Network" bearing little else than the three words "PUNK, BILLIONAIRE, GENIUS" and a partial headshot of lead actor Jesse Eisenberg. Likewise, buzz about the David Fincher-directed film about the contested origins of Facebook, based on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires," has been growing now that its hyped premiere at the New York Film Festival is less than a month away. Its wide theatrical release is on October 1.… Read more