Disqus - Latest Comments for BocaJuniors

Re: Protests over Verizon deal with 1938media

BocaJuniors — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:23:28 -0000

Exactly.

This isn't a discussion of freedom of speech but corporate responsibility and "political correctness."

Freedom of speech protects Loren (and all of us) from the government telling us what we can and can't say. Verizon, on the other hand, has every right to censor Loren. They aren't limiting Loren's freedom of speech if they decide not to pay him for his content.

Re: Protests over Verizon deal with 1938media

BocaJuniors — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:09:30 -0000

File under: inevitable.

And if this news ever goes mainstream I think that everyone outside Web 2.0 and the racial grievance industry will be wondering: Who is Loren Feldman and what is Project Islamic Hope?!?!

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:15:54 -0000

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.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:33:47 -0000

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]

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:49:22 -0000

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.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:44:04 -0000

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).

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:57:29 -0000

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!

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:23:47 -0000

Yeah, if we follow the strictest letter of the law of Copyright no one should reprint full-text posts. But if that were the case then Google Reader wouldn't be allowed to exist...

All due respect, you couldn't be more wrong.

The problem is that with the relatively new internet distribution method of RSS, the legal rules governing third-party distribution is a bit murky (at least in the United States). In other mediums the rules are quite clear and have established legal precedent.

For example, if I want to tape an episode of ABC's hit show Lost and watch it later, then that is fine. In fact, if I invite a couple friends over to watch an episode with me, that's perfectly legal as well. However, if I setup a business to make money from rebroadcasting these shows to the public (renting time on a public access cable channel, selling ads that replace ABC's ads, hosting an after-episode round table discussion on Lost mythology, etc)...then I'm in some legal hot water unless I get ABC's permission beforehand. Just because ABC broadcast Lost in a manner that made it super-duper-easy to syndicate doesn't mean that I get to "add value" and then make money from their content. Whining about how my round table discussion "added important value and facilitated conversation" won't prevent a court from siding with ABC.

Similarly, until now the prevalent netiquette has been that using a site's full feed in my own feedreader is okey-dokey (and encouraged!). But it is rude/bad/"evil" to reuse that site's full feed and display it on my publicly available site (especially if I am attempting to make money off it).

Whether the generally accepted principal of netiquette is adopted as legal precedent is yet to be seen. But if I had to guess, the courts will follow the generally accepted guidelines that govern analogous mediums.

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:57:47 -0000

"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...

Re: When Did Splogging Become a Business Model? Fav.or.it

BocaJuniors — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:54:55 -0000

"In Fav.or.it, there are no ads slapped around your content..."

Turn off your Adblock Plus plugin.

Here is what I'm seeing right now:

This post from Mashable is displaying an Adsense banner for Flock to the right of the content and wider banner below it.

This post from Think Progress is displaying an Adsense banner for "free credit reports" to the right of the content and Adsense text ads below it.

And this post from Techcrunch is displaying Adsense text ads to the right of the content and below it.

I could go on, but you get the point. Go to any "post" on fav.or.it and you get ads "slapped around your content."