The User Generated Sheep Controversy

I've always thought The Sheep Market is way cool. UCLA art student Aaron Koblin collected 10,000 hand drawn sheep via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. He paid $0.02 per sheep; now he's selling sheep stamps for $1 each. How clever is that?!

When I told my mother about the project, she said it's such a racket. She'd be mad if her sheep were on the market. Koblin should have disclosed what he planned to do with the sheep. And sheep artists should be entitled to royalties. I emailed her Jeff Howe's Wired article with a note that she's so unhip. Crowdsourcing is where it's at. Smart business is all about convincing large numbers of people to perform trivial tasks, then finding ways to monetize the results of their collective labor.

As it turns out, many of the sheep artists shared her point of view.  Both the AWS blog and O'Reilly Radar posted copies of Koblin's thesis, in which he wrote:

The response was relatively hostile...  The first responses in a ‘Turker’ discussion thread titled “They’re selling our sheep!!!” included, “Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?” and “Someone should contact them and see how much they'd charge you to buy back the rights to one of your own sheep.”

Also interestingly:

 * Approximate collection rate - 11 sheep/hour
* Time spent drawing (average/sheep) - 105 seconds
* Average Wage - $.69/hour

I assumed nobody would take proprietary interest after 1.75 minutes of doodling, which apparently isn't true. (I'm debating whether to tell my mom. She's the queen of I-told-you-so's.) In which case, are MySpace and YouTube users upset about the ad revenue that their content helps generate? Did the iStockphoto contributors in Wired's example feel cheated, because the National Health Museum paid only $1/photo for their work after seriously negotiating with professional photographers who charged 100x more? And what about Mechanical Turk workers who took part in other projects? As a point of reference, I've just made $0.03 looking up an URL on my phone browser and typing in a code. I have no idea what this is for, nor do I care.

Here's my hypothesis (which could well be wrong again): producers of user-generated content are less concerned about monetary compensation than being acknowledged for their creative work. Any YouTube videos you upload are associated with your account. You receive recognition each time they're played. Likewise, every iStockphoto you sell shows that someone really liked your work. In contrast, my $0.03 HIT ("human intelligence task") involved no self-expression.

If the sheep artists had been offered the ability to sign their work, and given access to stats on how many times their sheep have been viewed/purchased, would they have reacted with less hostility? If so, maybe there's hope yet for a crowdsourced tech support platform.

I've been wondering whether it'd make sense for a web hosting company to connect certain support ticket categories (Linux questions, for instance, or cPanel error messages) to something  similar to the Mechanical Turk? Anyone could sign up to provide responses. Participants would receive points for satisfactory answers. Just as high post count is a status symbol on forums such as Web Hosting Talk, might a high score on WebHostingAnswers.com become a worthwhile goal among sysadmins?

The WebHostingAnwers.com domain name is taken, by the way. As is HostingAnswers.com. And Amazon already has a general purpose service called NowNow, which gets its answers from the Mechanical Turk. As the user base for S3/EC2 grows, I wouldn't be surprised if an Internet-infrastructure-specific version of NowNow gets integrated with AWS.

Comments

[Ed]

"She'd be mad if her sheep were on the market. Koblin should have disclosed what he planned to do with the sheep."

Then she should read the Mechanical Turk user agreement, which explicitly says that work you do on the site doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the person paying for it: Koblin in this case.

But you raise a really interesting point, and you're absolutely right that the same people complaining about their sheep being sold don't seem to complain when their other "work" done on Mechanical Turk is also used to make money for someone else. for instance, there is work there right now to take photos of properties in various zipcodes. That's obviously to build up a (valuable) database of property images. Would people get upset to know that the owner of that database is charging others to use it, probably (hopefully!) at a profit? Probably not, and I think you've hit the nail on the head: "creative" efforts seem to have something special about them that "mechanical" ones don't.

It's also worth mentioning that if you actually go look at the forum where people complained, it was probably three or four people at most.

[Isabel Wang]

Hi Ed,

The user agreement was definitely on Koblin side, I don't think my mom was arguing against the *legality* of The Sheep Market. She just felt that it took something away from the sheep artists. I said their individual contribution was too trivial to make a big deal of; she said it depends. If one of the participants rose to Picasso-like prominence, his 105-second sheep could be hugely valuable, but that value would be lost.

I should have looked into the actual forum postings. Thanks for putting the number of complainers in perspective! 3 or 4 people out of several thousands is a tiny percentage, but I'm still surprised. If you're concerned about rights to your sheep, why sell it for $0.02?

[Ed]

"If you're concerned about rights to your sheep, why sell it for $0.02?"

Well, exactly. I assume it's because people did the drawings without thinking of what the consequences would be. Actually, I think people started complaining about it just to make some noise on the forums; I'm pretty sure that no one *really* cared that much.