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Let’s Talk Copyright

good post duncan

get the fucking favorit olympus camera ad screen off the video …. bastards

You really are fighting with the wrong people Duncan, you don't seem to get the idea that legally what we are doing is no different to what google reader/bloglines is doing. In fact we are doing something way ahead of everyone else in that we support creative commons licenses and so if you can put up a full feed and then add a CC license and we will abide by that. Does google reader or any other reader do that? no. Just because we are presenting the content in a more traditional format in the attempt to bring in a more broad demographic you suddenly think we are stealing content, its a ridiculus argument.

Have I had Mike Arrington on the phone because we are republishing his content? No, because we show the adverts he chooses to monetize his feed with. Plus unlike any platform in the world, the attention that we give via comments is pushed back to his blog. Do you see friendfeed etc doing this? no! they are stealing attention away and nobody has a problem, I cannot frankly believe you are calling us a walled garden, when we have one of the most open and advanced platforms out there.

You obviously have some kind of axe to grind, but frankly you are barking up the wrong tree. And you are am afraid in a minority here, go play with AP who seem to live in the past like you.

Nick
you are nothing more than a leach who is so inept you have to steal from others to create a business. There is a world of difference between personal and commercial use of data, under law, and it takes 5 seconds on Google for a retarded 2 year old to find that distinction, something you're completely incapable of. There is also a world of difference between fair use (extract) and full scale copyright infringement.

As for an axe to grind, my only axe is with scumbags like you who steal from others then put a 2.0 label on the product and call everyone who calls you out as being copyright nazis in bed with AP. You sir are scum.

AP wants to charge for the use of 5 words…that is extreme when fair use dictates that a reasonable portion of text can be reprinted. Note: not an entire story, but an extract. Sure, the exact number isn't defined under law, but AP doesn't get to say it's less than 5 words.

Ryo
typical splogger line: if you don't want it ripped, don't put it out there. And you obviously didn't watch the video either. Google reader is personal use and uses feeds in that context. by publishing a feed we are offering personal use of that feed, we are NOT offering commercial use unless specified. If you've got a CC license that allows that, great, but I'd note that YOU GAVE PERMISSION, where as these scum bags take the content without even asking. Permission for commercial use must be obtained, it's not a given that it exists already

Nick,
what you said is ridiculous.

Your usage of other people's content is not “personal use”, but commercial, because you take advantage of the content differently than GReader does. GReader shows content to me, and only to me, whereas you take away the SEO juice from the websites that created the websites originally. This is clearly commercial use, because you do more than just showing content to visitors. You take advantage of the content to get more users yourself, even moving away attention from the original blogs completely.
Your back-links are a shame, and you know that exactly.

The issue around building communities around comments is a completely different – it's a moral issue. Yes, it's a problem for bloggers that comments are spread all over the web now. That started long ago with Digg (although nobody ever complained, because they prominently link back – different than you). They still link back more prominently than you do.
The thing is though: It's a moral issue, not a legal issue.

You keep the content, you keep the SEO-juice, you keep the page views, you don't link back. (The links are a joke.) Your whole website wouldn't survive a court, even if a sane judge would rule for “common sense”.

Claiming that this is the same like AP wanting to charge $12.5 for 5 quoted words is ridiculous, and if you don't know that, you honestly shouldn't be an entrepreneur.
There is a big difference between fair use, personal use and stealing content.

But then again, your business is basically a splog – I don't expect you to agree with common sense.

PREFACE: I am not defending fav.or.it or splogging. Wrapping ads around foreign content is a bad thing. Allowing your aggregated pages to be indexed by search engines is a bad thing. The end.

Duncan: Now then… you're missing some important points that make your, um… emphatic arguments a bit over-the-top. First, is that copyright law does *not* (in the U.S.) allow for unfettered personal use. For example, in the Betamax case, it was established that time shifting of broadcast content was allowed, but not archiving. In other words, that thing that Google Reader does? A clear violation of copyright. Given that you just declared GReader okey-dokey, you might want to dial back the certainty and righteous indignation.

Also bear in mind that GReader (and every other responsible feed-related service) does a lot of content modification. They're not just displaying full content… they *modifying* that content by cleaning/stripping style attributes, scripts, and so on. In other words, creating derivative works. Something that, another technical copyright no-no.

It's also worth pointing out that your declaration that you can only get to GReader data by logging in is incorrect. GReader provides public feeds, which is how RSSmeme got the data they were working with. (Odd that no one threatened to sue the Big G, where the money actually lives.)

SUMMARY: The web is more complex than existing copyright law. I suffered my first site-scrape in '99, and I hated it as much then as your do now. We're really on the same page… I'm just not crazy about how you keep acting as if this is a simple matter, and anyone who disagrees with your conclusions is a splogger.

Second, IMO, the implied license for RSS is clear… you put it in the feed, it's cool to republish it. The core purpose of RSS *is* republishing, even if it has been adopted for other uses. Again, I'm not saying that the implied license frees you to wrap ads around republished content or engage in any other extracurricular activity. But that core notion needs to be preserved and understood.

Copyright law doesn't allow personal use – you're right. But offering RSS, and that's accepted common sense, allows to consume content differently, as long as it's for personal use. That does NOT mean that one can republish the content in any way they want.

Google Reader's Shared Item Feeds are something that's pushing the boundaries – they take publicly available feeds and “repackage” them, in a semi-public way. They act legally, because they don't put ads up, don't provide a directory of shared-items-feeds that can be scanned easily and don't allow the shared items-feeds to be indexed. (Although I was shocked to find out that Yahoo doesn't respect the robots.txt on http://www.google.com, that disallows indexing anything in the “reader/”-subfolder.)
ReadBurner and RSSmeme act legally, because they index the feeds, but only show a quote of the article (RSSmeme just changed that a few days ago). They are of course perfectly legally putting ads beside the _quotes_, because that's not a matter of personal use, but fair use of content.

The implied license for RSS is not that it can be republished in any way, and the core purpose is NOT republishing. The idea behind RSS was, to provide an easier way to track and read content – through RSS-readers – for personal use. But that core notion needs to be preserved and understood.