Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Tag
The Only Spam I Like Comes From Monty Python.
Filed under: Analysis, Events | Tags: Blogs, Copyright, Duncan Riley, Keith Teare, Scrapers, spam, Splogs, Technology
Comments (6) Spam isn’t tasty when it arrives unbidden in your mailbox. It’s just annoying. In fact, as I have noted in the title, really the only spam I like comes from Monty Python.
Alas, these days spam doesn’t just come to you, it also tricks you into going to it. It has a slightly more sophisticated half-sibling, the splog.
Spam by Any Other Name Still Stinks
Splogging is a minor evil, right up there in terms of irritation with the sound the drill makes when you are getting your tooth filled.
The word “splog” is an amalgamation of spam and blog. The content of this beast is made up or has been excerpted from many legitimate blogs and the majority of it is ads.
Even more nefariously, there’s a variant called a “scraper.” It’s like a raccoon except instead of ransacking your garbage, this time it has gone through your safe and your fridge and it has taken your valuables and the best leftovers back to its lair.
As noted in an invaluable post by Jeffro on his Jeffro2pt0 blog, a scraper is a little thief of sorts:
Copyright’s been a hot button issue as of late when it comes to the net. I covered the main event (AP vs. bloggers everywhere) and today we’ll look at an interesting undercard match–Duncan Riley vs. perceived sploggers.
Round One Wrap-Up of Sorts
This is a week where everyone’s tolerance levels were low because of the AP mess.
That potential clash went out with a whimper and not a band and left some large questions unresolved, as the mysterious Media Bloggers Association mentioned here.
[Regarding the above link, I must disagree with the MBA about "blog rage" not work. It was more the howls of protest from the blogosphere than any dialogue that the MBA had with AP that made this go away. They realized they'd awakened a sleeping giant who was now in a bitterly foul mood.]
Round Two: Riley vs. Splogging
But I’m off track. This week on FriendFeed, there was a lot of discussion clustered around a post by Duncan Riley entitled Why Has Keith Teare Gone Into Spam Blogging? Seriously Dumb.
His beef with Teare is that the latter has blogs such as SeriouslyTech that apparently republish full content from many influential bloggers- including Riley’s own work! It must have been quite a shock when he came across it.
But in fact, it seemed Teare was really a handy representative for the many sploggers out there who basically snatch your textual child and put it in their own nursery- so to speak.
I don’t like it and I’m a Z-list blogger. I can’t imagine how irritating it must be for the A-listers to have their work snatched like that because people want to capitalize on their reputations for increased web traffic.
Riley was civil but clearly upset and gave Teare the benefit of believing he had been badly advised:
fav.or.it meets with no favour?
Riley saved the worst of his ire for fav.or.it, and rightly so. As he noted, not only does fav.or.it often reprint full contents of blogs, it makes the authors jump through hoops to prevent it from happening again.
Look at their help page which explains the process. That’s more than anyone should have to do concerning content that they created which turned up unexpectedly elsewhere.
No wonder Riley was compelled to ask “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.”
Aftermath
There was A LOT of discussion on FriendFeed about this and it also branched off into discussion about copyright. (Though that was also in large part to the “AP vs. the world” business.)
It was fascinating to watch the ripple effect in play. It was also exciting to watch all these smart, tech-savvy key influencers discuss and debate such important issues. And hat’s one of the things that makes FF so compelling.
According to FF (or, to be accurate, Twitter via FF), Teare has apparently taken Riley’s content off his site. Teare has also tried to explain his position in comments on Riley’s blog – see that and many other insightful comments here.
But this does raise some questions: Is fav.or.it actually a splog or just an aggressively grabby aggregator?
Is what they are doing wrong or is it the way they are doing it and the arrogance they are displaying in asking the copyright holders to get a license to get them to back off?
Are they actually adding any kind of value at all to the work? Or are they just coasting on a lot of other people’s coattails?
Why do you think copyright has blown up into such a hot issue again? And is this some kind of turning point?
And does anyone else agree with me that it might all be due to the humidity?
UPDATED: Wow. Riley really does feel very strongly about all this and I suspect his latest move may generate some interesting discussion. To hear the man speak the situation in his own words, please go here.
(But please come back – or stay on FriendFeed- and answer this question: Is he right? How do you see the copyright issue?)
AM
UPDATED:The AP vs….well, Everybody: Can’t Media New and Old Make Nice?
Filed under: Events | Tags: AP, Blogs, Copyright, Drudge Retort, Fair Use, Jeff Jarvis, Media Bloggers Association, Michael Arrington, Rogers Cadenhead, Technology
Comments (7) Maybe it’s the humidity?
The blogosphere seems to be full of crankiness lately- more big name bad-feeling match-ups than any given roman-numeraled Wrestlemania.
But the headliner would have to be Old Media vs. New Media.
How the Mess Began
Last week The Associated Press contacted a news aggregation site – parodically-named the Drudge Retort – and told its founder Rogers Cadenhead to remove several posts featuring short quotes from AP stories. And we’re talking short- as noted by Jeff Jarvis in his passionate and rather incendiary post FU AP:
As journalists have long been espousing freedom of the press and such, the AP’s actions seem counterintuitive, if not a tad hypocritical. That is, until you remember that the AP is a wire service and it makes money by charging various news outlets in various cities a somewhat hefty fee for access to its services.
AP’s P-O-V
From the Old Media point-of-view, New Media gets in AP’s way and makes its services less alluring because, many people will not go on to AP but instead settle for the news from a blog or two or twenty. And once a news story has been picked up and blogged about it tends to spread like wildfire across the Internet. The result?
As noted in a nifty piece for MSNBC and Newsweek by Helen A. S. Popkin, the result is “diminishing the AP product’s value to the media outlet paying the AP bill.”
That’s why the AP has its knickers in a twist.
New Media’s Response
As you can guess, AP’s actions were not warmly received. The guardian.co.uk’s Jemima Kiss detailed some of the more interesting responses including Cadenhead’s assertion that “sharing links to news stories of interest has ‘become an essential part of how millions of people read an evaluate the news today.’”
Even more riveting has been TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s reaction to this. First he announced that his influential blog would boycott the AP in return.
Then yesterday he posted a piece entitled The A. P. has Violated My Copyright, And I Demand Justice. The gist of the post was that the AP had quoted 22 words from one of the TechCrunch posts and as such had violated the standards for copyright infringement to which they are holding bloggers:
He’s also going to bill them what they allegedly would have billed him for publishing a 22 word quote from one of their pieces on his blog, among other measures. And as of this writing, he’d received 163 comments, overwhelmingly supporting him.
Can Anything Good Come from Something Called MBA?
The answer in this case is possibly.
According to today’s PR Week (US), AP was set to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association. (I must admit I’ve never heard of them- but I am fairly new to blogging. However, I would like to know who voted and decided that these folks speak for bloggers? Anyone? I’d love to know more about how they were picked to represent the blogosphere.)
But, returning to the place where this all started, Rogers Cadenhead found what some might consider a silver lining in all this stormy debating: potential guidelines for bloggers.
New + Old Media=Much Stronger than New vs. Old Media.
What Cadenhead touched on there is absolutely key. There is a mutually-beneficial relationship between Old and New Media that’s been much more eloquently summed up by InfoWorld’s Robert X. Cringely:
But as necessary as this is, is it still possible? Can we all get along?
What are your ideas as to how the representatives of Old Media and New Media could work things out? And don’t we have to redefine the whole idea of copyright in our wired world? Is the AP making a last stand against inevitable change or will their actions have lasting impact? Or has the New Media’s response become sort of blogger’s version “Shot Heard ‘Round the World?”
And, ultimately, does all this crankiness come down to the humidity?
UPDATE: Rogers Cadenhead has stated that AP has settled with Drudge Retort. And apparently AP will be releasing some sort of guidelines for bloggers based on discussions with the MBA. But, as Cadenhead has noted, the fair use issues that brought this about are still in play even if the dispute itself is over. And the news about the guidelines isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence either:
