Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: June 18, 2008
Tags : fav.or.it
First Keith Teare, now Fav.or.it. The long in beta service Fav.or.it has launched and despite word that it was suppose to be an advanced feed reader, Fav.or.it has launched with a portal that reprints content from other sites then tries to build conversations around that content, as well as offering a feed reader.
I wasn’t happy with Shyftr for trying to do something similar, but Fav.or.it makes Shyftr look like school boys on a country outing because under Fav.or.it’s model, content is republished in full in areas fully available to the casual browser.
If that’s not rich enough their we won’t publish your content rule is beyond belief. This page demands that people who don’t want their content published in full on Fav.or.it must apply a creative commons license and only then will Fav.or.it decide to only publish an excerpt instead.
Their defense of the service: comments are pushed back to the source. That and it offers a similar service to commenting systems like Sezwho with comment tracking etc…
The only word that I can think of: leaches.
This is going to be defined as a blogging 2.0 service and in use it offers an interesting and somewhat appealing package to the end user. But in doing so it steals page views away from the original content creators, creating a win/ lose situation where there should and could be a win/ win one.
To be fair they don’t republish all content in full, but the fact they are doing it on any content unless their stupid criteria is met would be a DMCA notice waiting to happen if the company was American (they aren’t unfortunately). Republishing in full of anyone’s content should ALWAYS be on an opt-in basis, not an opt-out basis for a legitimate service, and copyright laws in most countries would mandate that this is the case, particularly when the content is republished for commercial use (in Australia, some personal use copying is legal).
And exactly when did splogging become a business model again? It’s like a whole chunk of the world missed the memo that ripping peoples content off for your own commercial gain is immoral and wrong, no matter how well you flavor the end product. Or am I simply a dying breed of online creators who believes in a fair go for all and that content creators still have some rights over the republication of their content in full?
The bonus takeaway: try clicking on the names of the blogs on each post in Fav.or.it: they’re even trying to scam Google juice on the blog names through an internal linking scheme. Links to the original post are via little tiny boxes, one next to the title (to the post), one next to the blog name to the blog itself.
Update: Fav.or.it reminds me of Topix. Topix republishes excerpts from blogs and other news sources and builds a community around that, but notably they license the rights for any content they publish in full. In only publishing the excerpt they comply with copyright, and they also drive traffic back to the source. Everyone wins.
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Jun 18, 2008
perfectly said bocajuniors.
Jun 18, 2008
Thanks, Allen.
These are my first comments using Disqus (and first time commenting here on Inquisitr for that matter). I just noticed that the “em” italics show up fine on Inquisitr but not back on the Disqus site. Odd!
Jun 19, 2008
So they do slap ads around the content. My mistake. Fav.or.it are therefore evil.
But why would I want to turn off Adblock?
Jun 19, 2008
What I really dont like about sites like this is the fact that they use the content of each blog, then turn it into their own page, so the actual blog and story doesnt get any traffic from the site. So there better be some benefit in terms of link juice or it is just another complete waste of time!
Jun 19, 2008
seriously, it takes a leach to support one. Tell me: government welfare?
Jun 19, 2008
rogerben: Interesting idea, but it still runs into the fundamental problem that Duncan outlined — copyright protection is not an opt-out/opt-in mechanism. Copyright automatically protects the content creator upon creation, not upon opting in or out of a third party standard.
Jun 19, 2008
Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it
That point aside, this is precisely the reason that copyright law protects the content creator by default. Copyright doesn't protect a third party's right (fav.or.it, etc) to go scrape a site's content and reuse it freely unless the site says they can't. Copyright protects the creator's right to their content unless the site explicitly says that a third party can use it (and under what conditions).
Copyright does not place the obligation on the content creator to op-out their site of every service or group of services out there that wants to expropriate their content.
Now, re: Google Cache. The web has certainly created new mechanisms that the law is still grappling with.
In 2006 a district court here in the US sided with Google's ability to cache web pages, in Belgium a year later the court there sided against Google's interests.
In the US case one of the factors was that Google makes no money from their cache, as well as the fact (I would argue) that the judge didn't seem to understand some of the finer technical aspects of web caching. [decision here]
Jun 19, 2008
On the web, things work both ways. If you don't want Google or the Internet Archive crawling and caching your site, you have to tell them. If you don't want someone using your syndication feed to republish your content, you need to tell them.
Constantly turning this into a “my rights vs. your rights” battle achieves nothing. If everyone involved will take a bare minimum of responsibility for their part in the online publication lifecycle, the issue goes away.
Jun 19, 2008
“Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it”
Sure, in the sense that the former is actually a far more egregious abuse of the sort of formalist copyright policy you're advocating. Unlike HTML, RSS was specifically designed to enable content from one site to be displayed on another. By publishing a feed, you are explicitly opting into that ecosystem. When Google or the Archive create copies and derivatives of HTML content, they require an opt-out, even though they're using that HTML in ways not intended.
Again, this doesn't mean that I advocate a “screw y'all, I'm gonna do as I please” approach. I simply insist that responsibility must be taken on both sides. I launched a (wholly unsuccessful) fav.or.it-ish service years ago, and I followed a series of very simple rules in handling content:
(1) Used “noindex,follow” on all pages containing feed content.
(2) Always checked robots.txt, and respected it.
(3) Looked for atom:summary elements, and when available, used then instead of atom:content. (This is a huge problem with RSS 2.0, and I would urge anyone with copyright concerns to switch their feed types ASAP.)
(4) Provided a consistent user-agent string with all requests, so the app could be easily blocked at the web server.
(5) Didn't run ads on any page containing feed data.
As far as I can tell, fav.or.it, doesn't do at least four of those five things to ensure that it is behaving responsibly. So I've got no problem with people complaining about them. But I *do* object to a lot of black-and-white thinking being injected into a debate that should have moved past such stuff a long time ago.
Jun 19, 2008
I said: “Certainly we can all agree that Google or Internet Archive != fav.or.it”
You responded: “Sure, in the sense that the former is actually a far more egregious abuse of the sort of formalist copyright policy you're advocating.”
Obviously, we must be talking past each other because I couldn't disagree more with your interpretation of my position.
In any case, the sentence that followed caught my attention:
“Unlike HTML, RSS was specifically designed to enable content from one site to be displayed on another. By publishing a feed, you are explicitly opting into that ecosystem.”
Which begs the question, what ecosystem are we talking about? Splogs? Services that scrape full feeds? Except for the owners of such services, I know of very few people who want to be part of that ecosystem.
Most folks when they publish feeds believe they can (1) let users read their content in feed readers and/or (2) if they're lucky enough, get picked up by services like Google News (which display short summaries, not full text).
They're not opting into some ecosystem where they provide their full content free of charge for would-be competitors.