Obama gets MySpace to give him control of a fan's webpage.

AP reports:

For the past two and a half years, the page has been run by an Obama supporter from Los Angeles named Joe Anthony. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.

But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony they wanted him to turn it over.

In this new frontier of online campaigning, it's hard to determine the value of 160,000 MySpace friends—about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed. But the Obama campaign decided they wouldn't pay $39,000, which is what Anthony said he proposed for his extensive work on the site, plus some additional fees up to $10,000.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Obama should have the rights to control http://www.myspace.com/barackobama as of Monday night, while Anthony had the right to take the contact information for all the friends who signed up while he was in control. That includes the right to tell them exactly how he feels about the Obama campaign.

There is a bundle of questions here. Is it acceptable for a someone to use someone else's name for their URL? Should MySpace have done Obama's bidding or protected the individual user? Should someone who claims to be a candidate's supporter try to extract money from the campaign? If the effort to extract the money fails, should the erstwhile supporter denounce the candidate on line? What will happen in the next instance, as candidates and individual users see how this little drama plays out?

Here's Anthony's blog, where he tells the world how he feels:

I did want to be paid, if we were to continue working together . This was not an attempt to use this profile for commercial purposes. This was an attempt to keep working my ass off on this profile, for Barack Obama, and for the enormous community of supporters on Myspace....

The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest....

Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you're just a liability.

This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters....

... I'm passionate about this right now. All this work, all this progress is down the drain, and I'm absolutely heart-broken.

Read the whole thing for Anthony's details of how the campaign treated him. It's notable that Anthony had worked on the profile since 2004. There are tons of comments to his blog post, presumably many of them from the people Anthony had previously inspired to support Obama. Sample comments:

HAHA this is funny stuff. This is the first thing I know of that obama has accomplished....

This is so not cool... I've disassociated myself with the Obama campaign and will seriously question if I'll do anything to help him get elected. He seemed better than this, but it is all about his 'managers' and from what I can see, they bite. Honestly, is Bush the problem, or is it his managers? This smacks of the kind of thing Karl Rove would embrace... not good Mr Obama, not good at all....

I was considering to vote for obama, but not anymore. If this is how his lackeys act in the shadows it may be the way that he would run the government.

But the comments over here take a different tack. Sample:

the fact that there was an unofficial fan page out there with an official-sounding URL and 160,000 friends that could potentially misrepresent Obama....

Cry me a river you leach. You don't volunteer to help a candidate then turn around and demand $39,000 for something thats not even yours to begin with(according to Myspace EULA)....

Guys ... if this guy was doing all this web-work out of the goodness of his heart, and truly unconditionally supported Barak, why didnt he just offer up the page for free?...

This guy was asking for way to much for a page that wasn't rightfully his to begin with, and I sure wouldn't want my donation to Obama's campaign to go to paying off some guy on Myspace....

And now the bloggers will talk about this. And the blogger's commenters. What do you think? What do I think? It's really bad to destroy someone else's work, and really stupid when that person was your supporter -- your influential supporter. What could they have thought made it worth making this ugly, conspicuous power play? The fear of losing control of your message? But expressing that fear also makes you look bad! You don't like people independently expressing political messages, and you want to control things? That's bad enough, but you didn't succeed in controlling him -- he seems to have a bigger audience right now -- and you've converted his message from a positive one to a negative one.

UPDATE: Here's the response from the Obama campaign. It contains too many excuses about how hard it is to run a political campaign and relies too heavily on their sense of entitlement to Anthony's website. There are vague references to their "arrangement" with Anthony, but it looks as though they never came to terms about it. Why did they wait so long to put something in writing? Were they naive and incompetent or did they mean to get their foot in the door by being low key and, over time, to make Anthony feel that he owed them the site?

At the end of the day, this is all new for everyone -- this Joe, that Joe, and everyone participating or commenting on it. We're flying by the seat of our pants, and establishing new ways of doing things every day. We're going to try new things, and sometimes it's going to work, and sometimes it's not going to work. That's the cost and that's the risk of experimenting.

You might want to try to project an image of competence if you want to be President.