When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it
Tech : Duncan Riley
Posted: June 18, 2008

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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Viewing 32 Comments

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    Duncan, nice title but totally wrong.

    We are trying to engage a new audience in the blogosphere, the only way that is going to happen is if we make it simpler, having them click to open new windows to each blog post does not work for the mass market.

    So we were left with some hard decisions on how dealt with copyright issues, I did a massive amount of reading and also spent a lot of time with our lawyers. The bottom line is when you read your 'full content' in google reader that is no different to viewing it in the format we show it on fav.or.it - in fact in fav.or.it you can switch view between porta/reader and the content is the same, but what you are saying is that we are somehow stealing content because of this?

    By employing creative commons we are giving an automatic system to content owners (feedburner now supports CC as well) to decide on how we use that content. We also by default turn the content into an excerpt if a comment is left and we do not support sending back to that blog.

    Am sure this will open up the whole conversation regarding blog copyright and I am very happy to continue that discussion.

    But frankly you have concentrated on the negative and not shown all the positive things we are trying to do within the blogosphere.
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    Nick
    utter bollocks. Google Reader presents content for private use and to date they've never once tried to sell ads off it for the same reason they dont sell ads around Google News: copyright. You a taking other people's content and building a business around that without giving anything in return, you a reprinting other peoples content for commercial gain and without permission: that's copyright theft.

    If you want to compare your model to anyone, the best comparison is Topix, who DON'T reprint articles in full unless they obtain a license to do so. Fair use only extends to a point, you dont have fair use when you are reprinting these posts in full and without permission

    There's nothing positive about stealing peoples content Nick and leaching off the hard work of others. If you had any morals what so ever you'd take down all full content and switch to an extract model only and then ask content owners for permission to republish their works. That's not just the moral thing to do: THATS THE LEGAL REQUIREMENT AS WELL!!!!
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    "The bottom line is when you read your 'full content' in google reader that is no different to viewing it in the format we show it on fav.or.it..."

    Really? Really?

    'Cause I can't do that with my personal feeds inside Google Reader...
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    Nick,

    I agree with you that Duncan focused on the negative of fav.or.it, and to be honest the aspect of reusing content without permission was what caught my attention as well when I visited the site earlier today.

    Nevertheless, the site is attractive and could be useful. There is certainly space for such a service on the web, but with a couple caveats. Content creators must be able to opt-in to:

    - provide full content
    - own the comments to their content (otherwise comments aren't allowed)
    - participate in monetization of their content (otherwise ads aren't displayed)

    I know that getting buy-in from content creators would be a struggle for such a service as fav.or.it, but that is the cost of running such a service: you can't bite the hand that feeds you (the content creators).
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    Nick: Fixing this problem is very simple, using a method I've been advocating in the syndication community for years.

    (1) Tell Duncan (and all other publishers) the user-agent string your service uses when fetching feeds.

    (2) Check robots.txt before fetching each feed.

    (3) If your user-agent is disallowed, either refuse to fetch the feed, or fetch it and truncate the content.

    Many folks don't want anything to do with Creative Commons licenses, but pretty much anyone concerned about republication rights can upload a text file to their webroot.

    Ideally, you and the folks behind other, similar services would all get together and agree to look for a "universal" user-agent in robots.txt... say, for example, "rssatomfetch". That would give site owners an easy, one-time mod to control how their posts are treated across all services. And it would bring an end to the endless "is this a splog or isn't it?" debates, since anyone ignoring robots.txt would be automatically considered a bad actor.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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]
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    "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.
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    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.
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    Duncan, it's unfortunate that Nick Halstead and fav.or.it's lawyers don't see the importance of copyright. You do have a legal avenue, however: while he is not in the United States, the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, signed into law in 2004, requires Australia to honor all American IP claims, including most of the provisions in the DMCA. A google search for Australia DMCA provides a bunch of resources on the topic.
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    Ah, I misread: I thought he was in Australia. If he's in the United Kingdom, there are several provisions that make it a criminal act to knowingly violate someone's copyright.
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    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!
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    Steven, correct, and in most civilized circles that's called stealing. If we all adopted this stand the product of quality content online would quickly dry up.
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    Duncan, you're taking unfair abuse for your position. Whether or not Fav.or.it is a "splog" really doesn't matter, but taking full content without the expressed consent of the copyright holder is crap. It's further compounded by Fav.or.it's arrogant and coercive insistence that copyright holders submit to a Creative Commons license to avoid further infringement upon their work.

    Fav.or.it's pleading that they are "adding value" to the original work or "engaging a new audience" on behalf of the blogosphere is laughably irrelevant. They don't own the copyrighted content, so they don't get to make that judgment.

    That Google Reader makes full feeds available is a defense (and a poor one, at that), not a license. That the Associated Press has seemingly gone mad and decided to unilaterally redefine the polite conventions sometimes described as Fair Use is another issue altogether.

    I have tremendous respect for Robert Scoble, but just because he finds benefit to having his full content reproduced without permission -- or simply doesn't care to enforce his rights -- doesn't mean the same situation works for another publisher.

    Fav.or.it is quite attractive, and I like the idea of making it easy for people outside the blogging loop to read and enjoy blogs. I'm not sure references to the original work are explicit enough -- the inconspicuous link icon isn't likely to be understood by the non-technical audience Fav.or.it claims to be targeting -- but I'd feel a lot better about things if they'd secure permission for full feeds as the law and common courtesy require. They should otherwise stick to excerpts.
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    Nah. Sorry, disagree here with you Duncan.

    You sound like a print media owner, or AP's lawyer before they got slapped down by the weight of blogosphere opinion last week. (Which will continue on Sky news tonight at 7:40pm when Mike Butcher of TechCrunch talks about AP's handling of Bloggers)

    In Fav.or.it, there are no ads slapped around your content, my 8-year-old understands how to find what she wants, she can subscribe to your feed, and she can add comments that you see. She didn't know you existed until your content appeared there, now she's a regular reader. What's your beef with that?

    Ah - no page views the issue? If you want her to visit your web site to give your page views, then you need to truncate your RSS feed to a summary, or switch it off for non-subscribers, and make your first paragraph entice people to get the full beef. If it's interesting enough, people will click through - maybe. Or maybe not.

    I think much of the blogging and online news world has moved on from the walled garden idea, and is happy for their content to be syndicated and spread beyond their own web servers. Or did you miss that memo But if that is not your view, your business model is based on page views, and you view the reproduction of your content elsewhere as 'stealing' then you should NOT allow people to grab your full content using RSS, twitter, iGoogle, Netvibes, etc. HOWEVER, here on this page, you promote and and link to these channels as the way to get your content. Sorry, but, D'uh?

    If you want to hold on to your content and get those page views, then only show it to people who register for your content on your web site. Make sure it's a double opt-in, and don't for god's sake let them get it by email or RSS - that will steal pageviews from you!

    Hmm, perhaps you could start a newspaper? ;-)
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    Digital Biographer
    read what I've said about AP. Read what I've said here. Do you even remotely understand the difference between personal and commercial use? I do not grant the right for other publishers to reprint my content in full for commerical benefit on their sites without obtaining my permission first. Full stop. Basic copyright law and the default position I might add unless you opt out. I do however, in publishing a full feed grant permission for the readers of this site to read this content for their personal use in widgets or in a feed reader. Indeed anyone who offers a RSS feed basically does. FOR PERSONAL USE.

    Walled garden? WTF are you taking? The conversation has moved on to many places, but the last time I looked that doesn't mean content creat
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    I've read what you said about AP, and I think I remotely understand the difference between personal and commercial use. I may even closely understand it.

    I'm only now aware that Fav.or.it run ads surrounding OPC (other peoples content). My browser plugin kindly disappeared those ads, so I do now see your point now in the context of fav.or.it monetising full feeds - that's very different.

    However, I think your comment got truncated up there somehow Duncan, so I'll stop here.
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    "Ah - no page views the issue? If you want her to visit your web site to give your page views, then you need to truncate your RSS feed to a summary, or switch it off for non-subscribers, and make your first paragraph entice people to get the full beef."

    I don't like how this is a must to protect your content. Folks realized that only providing a truncated feed was a no-no several years ago, this feels like a blast from the past.

    And psst-- people tend to take more kindly to your point of view when you're not antagonistic about it!