Tags : Fluther, mahalo, Q&A, stealing
Calacanis told to quit stealing content
In what looks to be a nice blow-up to start the week with the fine folks over at Fluther.com, a web question and answer site, have posted a public letter to Jason Calacanis the high flying owner of Mahalo, another Q&A site, on their blog telling him to stop stealing their questions. In this story of battling Q&A sites it seems that questions that have been posted to the Fluther site and posted to Twitter with attribution and a link back to the Fluther site are also showing up on the Mahalo site – but without any attribution or links.
As far as the guys at Fluther are concerned this is stealing and they want Calacanis to stop it
Stop stealing our users’ content. Your Q&A website, Mahalo Answers, is hijacking content from our Q&A site, Fluther, and breaking our terms of service.
We get it. You need to create doppelganger Twitter accounts to bolster your user base and create content. Perhaps some Twitter users are fine with the fact that their tweets are being co-opted by you to drive traffic. But we won’t allow you to strip out the attribution to our users simply to pad your own corpus of questions.
Here is the email exchange between Fluther and Calacanis as posted to the blog
[1] Letter from Jason Calacanis
From: Jason McCabe Calacanis
Date: Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: Stop hijacking our content
To: Ben FinkelThanks for the email.
We don’t autoscrape questions, but our users can answer questions from the public timeline on Twitter… those publicly asked questions can be answered by anyone, anywhere at any time based on fair use (ie including on twitter or a person’s blog).
In other words, we don’t feel you can copyright a publicly asked questions.
However, I respect your right to disagree with my position.
All the Best, jason
—————
| Mobile: XXX-XXX-XXXX
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant:From: Ben Finkel
Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 14:34:31 -0700
To:
Subject: Stop hijacking our content
Dear Mr. Calacanis,I’m writing this letter to inform you that your Q&A website, Maholo Answers, is hijacking content from our Q&A website, Fluther.com. Apparently you’re scraping content from Twitter, including our questions, and reposting them as yours without attribution or links back to our website (a clear breech of our terms of service).
Please delete all content associated with the user “fluther” and cease and desist this practice immediately.
Ben Finkel
Fluther.com Co-Founder & CEO–
Tap the collective.
http://www.fluther.com
There you have it folks, the newest battleground of the web – the Q&A Battle for Questions. This hasn’t really spread to far at this point so there’s plenty of time to grab a bowl of popcorn and a comfie seat to watch the show.
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