The user obviously retains copyright on whatever he posts/uploads to fb/twitter/etc. If the user grants you permission, IP laws cannot be used to stop you.
The CFAA did indeed come into play with the guy who wanted to automate Facebook profile transfers. But apart from the questions of that specific case, it's just not true that there are millions of people waiting to migrate away from Facebook if only they could transfer their photo library.
Most of the value in these networks is in "network effect", i. e. it's usefulness is a function of the number of other people using it.
And then there's good old "this service is actually pretty good". Case in point: Gmail. It's quite easy to move away from it: you can download all your data via SMTP and set up forwarding or an autoresponder. That people do not do so has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories. They actually like the service.
No, the only reason "network effects" matter on something that is useful specifically because it makes the transfer of information instantaneous and fluid is because we have artificial barriers (CFAA/IP) in place to keep that data stuck with one vendor.
Without this, the number of people using Facebook to access Person Data would be transparent to the average user, much like the number of people using Chrome or Firefox to access hypertext. And much like Chrome and Firefox, the switching penalty would be reasonably surmountable for most users. It's the difference between learning a new interface to the data (as in switching from Chrome) and being cut off from the data completely (as in switching from Facebook).
SaaS sites have network effects specifically because we (accidentally) legislated those effects into existence. There are no physical barriers locking people in -- the "wall" of this garden is entirely artificial.
>"Walled Gardens" have nothing to do with IP laws.
>If the user grants you permission, IP laws cannot be used to stop you.
This is 1000% false. IP laws absolutely CAN and HAVE been used to stop people from accessing online resources, even to get information that the user has authorized the data gatherer to collect. That's because when you download a page from one of the major tech services, you're not just downloading the user's copyrighted content to which the host has a license, you're also downloading the host's copyrighted code and parsing through it to extract the user's requested data.
That's been interpreted to be an infringement under the Copyright Act on multiple occasions: Ticketmaster v. RMG, Facebook v. Power Ventures, Perfect 10 v. Amazon (in which the judges ruled Google's use fair on appeal, because it was Google), and others. While you may be able to argue there's an implied license if the robots.txt is blank, that is only going to last you through the first notification that the host doesn't like your activity, which is not necessarily formal (cf. Craigslist v. 3Taps), which would matter both for CFAA and copyright purposes. It's not an issue limited exclusively to something sneaky done by Power.
Even if IP law itself was irrelevant (and it's not), there would be a lot of work to do here just in fixing up the laws around network access and blocking onerous Terms of Use.
>it's just not true that there are millions of people waiting to migrate away from Facebook if only they could transfer their photo library.
Whether you believe someone could do a better job than Facebook or not, surely you don't believe it should be, for all practical intents and purposes, illegal for them to attempt to do so.
>That people do not do so has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories.
Please try to start this type of service and get back to me about "conspiracy theories" after a C&D destroys your business, as it has hundreds of others, including mine.
Not to be rude, but you clearly have never dealt with this in a serious manner. Please be more careful before you go around making assumptions and dismissing the perspective of those with direct experience.
"Walled gardens" exist because anyone who effectively frees a user's data on the user's terms is at least sued, if not jailed, under statutes like the Soviet-era, pre-Internet Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and luddite interpretations of the Copyright Act that consider a RAM copy that exists for milliseconds an infringement.
Allow coders to make it easy to cart your data around and suddenly the major tech incumbents will have to compete on merit instead of merely holding your data hostage, which is exactly what they don't want. The powerful make laws to prevent others from challenging their power.
If we update copyright and the CFAA to address conventional internet use (from the user's perspective, not the corporate giants who were quick to legislate themselves a safe harbor with the DMCA) and constrain the scope of browsewrap and clickwrap agreements to reasonable liability disclaimers, we'll have no problem maintaining a vibrant and accessible marketplace for user-facing services.