>>Perhaps I am naive in my thinking, but it’s worked for me (and scores of others) over thousands of years.
I am not disputing thousands of years of physical property rights. I am talking about something that is uniquely 21st century at this point in human history. “Fair” is not just in the eye of the beholder. “Fair use” is a real thing in law. the lines over property blur as I put my intellectual property up on someone else’s intellectual property and both are hosted on someone else’s physical property which operates on someone else’s intellectual property. By the property rights of the past, the owner of the server now owns it all.
But, IP rights have protected the OS owner’s rights. It protects the service owner’s rights. But it has not evolved enough to protect the individual IP rights of the poster. Using the old property rights of physical property, the rights of the individual in cyberspace are nil. Is that freedom to you? Especially now that it is finally possible to have a conversation with literally anyone anywhere and to make your own voice heard! You would nail that capability to the old concepts of rights that determines who owns the strip of ground where a fence sits??
Yes, everyone can opt out of cyberspace.
But, no they can’t. It is a part of our lives now. People in third world countries who can’t figure out how to drill a water well get cell phones and join the global hive mind. You cheapen your argument by simply saying that, “If you don’t like your IP being owned by the guy who has the keys to the server, then you should unplug your life from the world around you.”
But, again, nobody is forcing anyone to put their thoughts and pictures on FB or Twitter. Further, the market is already responding- many individuals don't post their content to FB; they just post links to the content, thereby retaining the copyright AND denying FB the aforementioned license. Indeed, there are websites that guide people how to build their own email servers. If it was good enough for Hillary, it's good enough for us commoners.
Yes, this is hard work. And it's not cheap. But the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I would love for a court to rule that FB et al can't write contracts the way they do, but the moment I let my feeling so empower the govt, I have effectively made my soul that of a Democrat.