We need a GPL equivalent for websites that accrue user generated content as their main source of value. The way that it would work is that sites could adopt this license, a la Creative Commons, and be able to visibly display a logo that says they are compliant. Then in the event that the TOS (terms of service) of the site changed in any way (for instance, because the site was trying to institute some sort of a paywall), they would have to provide a suitable means of download for all of the data, much like Wikipedia does today.

This wouldn't keep entrepreneurs from building the next YouTube and it wouldn't prevent Google from paying billions of dollars for the value aggregated. It would however protect the content from dumb business model experiments. And more importantly, it would protect the users who contributed the work and effort under a different set of assumptions about the potential impact of their contributions.

I've been thinking about this ever since discovering earlier this week that Instructables.com— one of my favorite sites on the Internet— has decided to hobble their user-contributed database with a clumsily implemented paywall that blocks users from seeing alternative/hi-res images (and a few other things) to the projects written up on the site. This is a terrible move— not because I think Instructables shouldn't try to make money (more on that below), and certainly not because I am against paywalls per se (the Wall St Journal and Zagat are just fine)— but for the simple reason that in making this move now, Instructables has destroyed value contributed by its users under a different set of starting assumptions about what the site was going to do with the content they put up. In so doing, they changed the rules mid-game to the detriment of everyone involved.

While it is true that most regular consumers of content wouldn't care about the GPL equivalent for content much in the same way that most folks who use a Linksys router don't care about the GPLed code provided on the Cisco site, content authors would— especially the ones who spend painstaking hours documenting how to make a continuously rotating servo for the betterment of mankind only to discover that their work has become the pawn of some business model chess game most startups have already lost.

Now, back to making money. I think it is a great thing to do especially for a site as rich in possibilities for monetization as Instructables. How about the site sell a premium print magazine of the best projects every month? How about t-shirts? How about seminars with the "experts"? A conference like Maker Faire but on a smaller scale with Meetup-like distributed dynamics?

Now I'm sure that the guys there have thought of all of these possibilities and many more so my point here isn't really to come up with a new business model for them, but to suggest that there may be some out there that are not quite as corrosive to the mission of becoming the public documentation tool for the DIY generation— a very worthwhile one— that they initially set out upon.

And in the meanwhile, who's going to get this GPL for user-generated content thing going? Because we're going to need it— especially mobile devices empower all sorts of very valuable location-aware content authoring over the next decade.