When you dump 160,000 friends, how long does it take to get them back?

Much has been made already of the incredible blunder by Barack Obama's campaign in how it wrested control of the candidate's MySpace page from Obama supporter Joe Anthony.

Anthony had agreed to turn over control of the page he started on popular social networking site. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive volunteer work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and by some estimates captures one-eighth of the time people spend on the internet, jumped into the dispute, and turned the site over to the Obama campaign.

Personally, I think Anthony should have negotiated payment before he did the work if he wanted to be paid (although we don't yet know the full story of Anthony's communication with the Obama campaign as this conflict developed). Ethically, I don't think you can volunteer your time, and then demand to be paid later. But at the same time, it baffles me that Obama's campaign doesn't recognize the value of Anthony's work. Offer the man a job, for goodness sake.

As of today, Obama's number of MySpace "friends" had dropped 85%, to just over 21,000.

My friend Dana suggests Hilary Clinton should offer the following response: "If Barack Obama is unwilling to pay Joe Anthony $50,000 for two years of advocacy, tech support and writing (a steal for the number of hours clocked in and the number of connections made), while at the same time seizing control of what is effectively Anthony's intellectual property, then what exactly does this say about his stance on the arts, copyright and his efforts within the creative community?"

Good quote. But I'd push back on this point: how much of anyone's MySpace page, whether controlled by Joe Anthony or the Barack Obama campaign, is their "intellectual property?" Isn't that what  exactly what I.B.M., Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Disney and Time Warner argue in the A.A.C.S. case, yet another example of what happens when you try to control a message you think you own, but in a world where the concept of ownership changed when you weren't looking.

Comments

[Michael Stein]

I've been following this debacle on techPresident.com. It's fun to watch the Internet become part of the campaign itself. I agree that Anthony should have negotiated something before hand. But then again, what part of "campaign volunteer" didn't he understand? MySpace and YouTube offer the promise of a Web 2.0-inspired campaign season, but the Obama-bubble has burst as he reveals the classic command-and-control mentality that eventually overtakes most American political campaigns.