The Death Of Arrogance
I’d like to start this post with a statement: I’m not a journalist, I’m not a professional blogger, I don’t get paid – directly or indirectly – to write, I don’t have any ads on my Posterous or my blog. I’m just a nobody with a big mouth. Finally English is not my native language.
Yesterday a debate started on Twitter after I shared an article taken from Yahoo! Finance and posted in extenso on my Posterous page.
For those – like Charles Arthur- who do not know the way Posterous works, here is a small tutorial.
You surf the web – find an interesting post and want to SHARE it.
Then once you press the Share on Posterous button you have :
Et voila – content is shared and all credits are given to the original source here:
Basically Posterous sharing ie Digg, Techmeme, Google Reader is identical as a ReTweet of valuable content.
Now back to yesterday’s incident.
I shared the following: http://florianseroussi.posterous.com/ten-big-companies-that-are-veering-toward-ban reproducing EXACTLY what was posted on Yahoo! Finance page. Exactly. Giving credit to Yahoo! and Business Insider as per the original post.
You will note that Yahoo! has a generic link to Business Insider but not to the original BI article.
Charles Arthur then asked why didn’t I link the original Business Insider post. Tried to explain how I used Posterous add-on to share content but Charles didn’t know anything about Posterous.
Mike Butcher – Techcrunch UK editor- jumped on the bandwagon without checking the facts thinking I simply reproduced a paid content without giving any credits. Once Mike understood his mistake he blamed me for not finding the original post and manually adding a link to the Yahoo! re-post. It was simply a ridiculous claim but I searched the internet, found the link and added it to my shared content credit to appease boiling journo blood. As someone mentioned to me via DM – Mike Butcher was much more eloquent to defend the right to publish stolen documents on Techcrunch aka Twittergate. Journalist bullshit duty I guess.
Charles Arthur lost the plot, comparing cars, free content, source code and who knows what all together. Within hours- Charles tone went from arrogant to sarcastic to insulting.
Ilicco Elias tried to minimize the incident but Guardian editor was not ready to give up so easily.
My buddy Paul Walsh came to the rescue with a fair statement:
Charles still on a roll threatens to sue me and foresees a class action against Posterous starting soon (ahem)…
At last in a final act of bravery Arthur decided to block me and called me stupid after I mentioned The Guardian.co.uk had lost over £24M.
Mr Arthur – as the tech editor of The Guardian who do not have a clue what Posterous is – you should have a much more humble attitude.
Journalists – your current business model is SINKING. You are dying slowly with 20th century principles. Wake up! Look around. You do not have the monopole of information and sharing. We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job – not by shutting us down.
Note: I didn’t want to go on the legal approach of copyright et al on this post. I’m not an attorney and IP laws (international laws should I say) are too complicated for a blog post. Yahoo! quickly replied to my email and stated they are not involved as no logo or Yahoo! material has been shared.
Hopefully Charles Arthur will use last pence of The Guardian to start a worldwide class action against Google and Posterous to prove his point and whatever the outcome shall be – we will burn in golden letters on The Guardian’s headstone : The Death Of Arrogance.
UPDATE Sept 24 : After an email exchange with Charles Arthur I have modified the Posterous post to an excerpt only – adding another link to Business Insider [there are now 2 links, one on header and one on footer]. It would be interesting to know the conversation rate between hits on my Posterous to links onto BI but my guess is we will never know.
Tags: charles arthur, copyright, ilicco, journalism, mike butcher, paul walsh, posterous, TechCrunch, the guardian, twittergate
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 3:00 am and is filed under Content, Economy, Legal, London, Newspapers, Social Media, TechCrunch, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
91 comments to “The Death Of Arrogance”
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Fair play to ya (english for ‘well done given the circumstances’). Thanks for sharing this detailed history. A micro-view of a much larger cultural shift.
I kinda feel bad for the *tech* editor really missing the point.
Did he not get the memo?
Charles is right, you clearly don’t understand copyright: no, it’s not the same as a “retweet” and no, you don’t get to “claim the right” to publish any content. It’s not your right to claim.
It’s good to see publishing is in the hands of such clued-up individuals. I can’t wait for the next generation to take over media content production, I’ll sit back and watch the train wreck.
@Waldo that case is not a copyright issue – it’s all about pseudo journalists losing their jobs and hurting an industry due to their lack of research and curiosity.
You cannot be a tech journo of a leading newspaper and not be up-to-date on widespread sharing tools. It’s not something forgivable.
And yes – I claim the right to whistle some Kanye West without asking permission or to distribute honest credited content for non commercial use ie a reprint of an interesting article I may have photocopied from The Guardian to share with friends.
As for the legal side of view I’d like your opinion on publishing stolen material from a corporation and making it available on an AD SUPPORTED blog.
I keep coming back to your blog.
My favorite part:
“You do not have the monopole of information and sharing. We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job”
You said it all.
Brilliant.
Somehow, I think you’re the one who doesn’t get Posterous. It’s a simple blogging tool and that’s all, originally designed to let people email a post rather than compose it in a browser. What you put in there is up to you. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you have to go select the text to copy before hitting the “share with Posterous” bookmarklet. Claiming that the tool made you ’share’ entire posts written by other people with the tiniest of attributions is like claiming the devil made you do it.
Most bloggers have adopted the reasonable position of linking and critiquing. The people who copy stuff wholesale and publish it on their blogs have earned another name: splogger.
If you want to go do a better job then, by all means, do it. But by claiming you’re the good guy who is just ’sharing’ when you act like a splogger, you deserve all the criticism you get.
@Chris I understand your point but reality s different. Posterous is a sharing tool. You may want to read the Mashable post http://mashable.com/2009/05/26/posterous-twitter/
As for my thoughts and opinion they are shared on this blog.
You may also want to check a basic Google Reader page and tell me what is different: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ouriel.ohayon
There are cross-purposes misunderstandings here, partly because of Twitter’s limits. Yahoo, I’m sure, paid Business Insider for use of the piece. But Yahoo will then want to recoup that payment by selling ads against the piece – on its own pages. It’s been assigned a copyright to the piece, which it wants to monetise.
Saying that you’re not going to deal with copyright law in this post is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. My whole point was that this is all about copyright. It’s about respecting the fact that content doesn’t create itself, that the creators of copyright content (such as journalists, or their employers) are the ones who determine how it should be used. You don’t magically acquire the rights to decide what can be done by *reading* a piece.
My two original points were that you should have linked back to the original BI post; and that it is against the law to copy content wholesale (eg putting it on Posterous) unless you’ve got explicit permission from the copyright holder to do so. So there wasn’t a link to the BI piece in the Yahoo version. Most bloggers realise that it’s important to credit original sources.
You have not mentioned here the multiple links I posted to you via Twitter explaining copyright, and how it applies to content. You still don’t understand that even if there’s a button on a web page, that doesn’t mean you can copy work that people have put effort into and stick it somewhere else on the web.
I completely understand Posterous: it’s like Tumblr and a zillion other blogging systems. Except Posterous is encouraging people to copy content from other places and put it on its site. I’d suggest that’s dangerous for Posterous from a copyright point of view. If you don’t know why, read up about copyright. Just because someone invents a button that lets you steal stuff, it doesn’t mean that stealing has been repealed. Look at YouTube and the lawsuits it’s defending itself against.
The creator of the content determines whether the content can be copied wholesale. Not you. Just because it’s easy does not mean it’s right. And as I tried to point out, you can get sued. However, you didn’t bother to read the links. You didn’t comprehend that the many hits on Google for that article linked back to the Yahoo piece. They weren’t copies of the content. Apart, perhaps, from yours.
You’re an entrepreneur. If someone took all of the source code and IP of a company you worked for and posted it all over the web, would you tell your lawyers “Well, I guess we really need to work on our model”? No, I think you’d have the lawyers finding who had taken the IP, and seeking damages and injunctions.
As for “we [readers] have the ability to share, produce and rate content” – sure you do. Always remembering that the law applies. But you didn’t produce any content: you copied a whole stack that someone had worked hard to do (that BI piece didn’t write itself), which Yahoo has paid for, and tries to sell ads against; and then you say that everyone else needs to get a clue. What solipsistic rubbish.
You pointed to the Guardian’s financial situation, which had nothing to do with the point at hand. The reason news organisations are having a hard time is because the money available from advertising is less online than in print. Though having people copy stuff all over the place, and take it away from places where news organisations can sell ads against it probably won’t help. However the Guardian does have an API which licences people to use our content, in full. You could try seeing how that works: it includes ads.
Once again: you didn’t produce any content. You didn’t use a “fair use” extract from the piece; you didn’t comment, criticise, satirise or otherwise create anything from what was there. Your addition was a subtraction – you subtracted from Yahoo’s potential page views of the piece.
Would you have copied that piece wholesale if you’d had to pay to read it, bearing in mind that in effect you’d be throwing away your money by putting it on the web? If it had cost (say) $10, would you think “Great, I’ll let everyone else have my $10″? That’s how it is for the news organisation. Would you have copied it if a screen had come up saying “before you copy this, do you have the copyright holder’s permission?”
I’d like to see the emails to and from Yahoo, as well. The copyright issue is the key thing here. By avoiding it, you’re simply ignoring what this debate is about.
@Florian “You may also want to check a basic Google Reader page and tell me what is different: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ouriel.ohayon”
What’s different is that those are short extracts – “fair use”. That’s what they tend to be short and have a “Read..” link to the original.
Read up about copyright. It’s pointless trying to explain these things to you while you remain wilfully ignorant.
I watched this one unfold with interest on twitter. I don’t know what the exact legal position is in terms of copyright/Posterous. For what it’s worth, with my “let’s be reasonable” hat on, I’m with Paul Walsh – it seems to me that Yahoo! should not make Posterous links available when Yahoo! does not own the content.
Otherwise innocent parties may breach copyrights. Yahoo! is a big enough brand that many people will think “If Yahoo! says it’s OK for me to reproduce this, then I will”.
The root of the problem here, if there is one at all, would seem to be at the Yahoo! end of things.
Florian,
I’m not going to get sidetracked into your pet peeves with individual journalists as they are beside the point. Whether Charles “gets” Posterous or not or whether Techcrunch published stolen material isn’t the point of my comment, which is:
You clearly don’t understand copyright.
When you do – or at least demonstrate that you’ve done a bit of reading – people might take you seriously. Until then you’re just making yourself look like a fool. So I’d suggest getting a little wised up on what you’re writing about before spouting off from that “big mouth”.
Surely it all boils down to do YOU have the rights to publish (see Posterous Terms of Use – http://posterous.com/tos) to the Posterous platform?
Being able to technically copy something does not give you the automatic rights to be able to legally copy something.
The Web is essentially a great big “copying” machine but the legal responsibility relating to copying rests in the people doing the copying and not with services like Posterous.
@Waldo Always admired anonymous posters giving moral lessons…
@Charles I have no problem sharing the Yahoo! email. Not sure if I can reproduce it legally in public. Let me know what is the best possible safest way of sharing private (legal) emails between a quidam and a journalist.
This being said I promise a detailed review of copyright/plagiarism/distribution/sharing for non-commercial and commercial use in a post to come. I will be assisted by an indisputable IP attorney for this review.
@James Agreed. I don’t think I made any misuse there. My aim was to share some interesting valuable content to my friends. My views and opinion are expressed on this blog.
Its a wider problem IMO.
@Florian. Did you read the Mashable post or just ’share’ it? The Mashable post only talks about photo sharing, arguing Posterous is a good replacement for Twitpic. And, though not expressed explicitly, it assumes that the pics are the ones you’ve taken, not ripped off from other people. How you get from that post to the idea that Posterous is at its heart a ’sharing service’ is beyond me.
Posterous as a company has gone out of its way to describe what it does as an easy-blogging service, nothing more, nothing less. Yes, you can splog away with it. But only in the same way you can do that with any blog.
Good to see Charles commenting here. It’s a sign of intelligence and openness I tend to appreciate. Man to man. Ideas to ideas.
You both have a point. Florian you did nothing wrong. Charles you have a valid argument regarding sharing tools.
Now let’s debate on what can be done to ensure valuable journalistic content on one hand and web distribution/sharing on the other.
Keep talking guys. We are interested in a solution.
Peace.
@Florian. You seem to believe that the existence of a tool absolves you of any personal responsibility in using it. I think if I were doing business with you – you present yourself as a businessman – I would consider that a problem.
@Chris I don’t need to think anything. There is a share buttom and as the word says “SHARE” – I use it. Is it right? Is it wrong? No for me to tell. Is Google Reader legal or not? I know few procedures are happening as we speak but I am sincerely convinced honest distribution of content fully accredited to author for non commercial use is not a crime.
There was no intention of impersonation, stealing or self attributing someone else works.
I have a track record of 17.000 tweets with -I would say 20% of links to valuable content. Posterous aggregates my findings, my pics or others pics, my videos or others videos.
Notion of crime is clearly associated with intentions. Do you believe one second I had the intention to attribute someone’s else content?
I hope you don’t.
@chris for the record I never presented myself as a businessman. I dislike every letter of the word. I’m just a lucky guy who works hard for a living and made enough bucks to help bootstrapping startups.
First of all, you forgot to mention the best comment you received:
http://twitter.com/filos/status/4298507319
In regards of the topic discussed here, I can say that in general, I don’t like posts where others re-post my content entirely without giving credit to me (as a “normal” not-professional blogger). At the same time, you used a feature that re-posted the article together with a (sort of) credit, but it is not your fault if Yahoo didn’t put the original link.
Digg, Techmeme etc are a bit different, since you just get the headlines there, then you need to jump to the original article. In this case you posted the entire article, but you simply used the Posterous sharing feature. It’s fair, imho.
All that said, I think this doesn’t allow anyone (Charles or others) to become arrogant. The point is that if someone becomes arrogant and gets upset by this fact means that he/she feels how big the problem is. What problem? That normal, smart, not paid people can write better and more insightful content than a journalist.
Do you know how many completely ignorant (I mean about the topic they are writing) journalists I know? Once I was interviewed by the NYT about VoIP. 30 minutes call. Do you think I’ve been mentioned in the article? NO. The person I was talking to was far from being expert on the topic and I think me or other VoIP bloggers would have written a much, much better article.
Conclusion: I agree that journalists MUST change their business model. Balance sheets confirm that. Period.
From the Posterous Terms of Service (posterous.com/tos):
“Posterous is an easy way to share your personal thoughts, photos, and home videos. We want to keep it a safe, fun, friendly place, and that means a few rules. You may NOT:”
* Post unlawful, harmful, or obscene content.
* Forge headers or otherwise impersonate someone.
* Post content you do not have the right to transmit.
* Post content that infringes on trademarks or copyrights.
…”
(Note that it’s *your* *personal* thoughts, photos, and home videos – not “the whole page you found somewhere else with no comment about why”.)
If you can show us all that you have the right to post that Yahoo page, please do. It would be in the form of a statement by Yahoo or Business Insider – perhaps putting its content under a Creative Commons licence. I didn’t see one, though. And I looked very closely.
@Dean, your reasonable hat sounds like a good one. Though I think Yahoo will have licenced its own use of the content. But yes, it’s pretty easy for people to breach copyrights. Especially if they don’t understand the concept. Your analysis of why people might get it wrong sounds spot on.
Hi Florian – this is a very interesting situation. (not sure the title needed to be so inflamatory though!)
I would like to ensure that my standpoint is clear as we (I) have discovered on a number of occasions, it is very dificult to maintain a coherent conversation over a prolonged period of time via twitter. It may be simply an inherent platform limitation, or me not being able to type short.
Personally (and this may or may not be my employer’s view) I do not believe that one should copy an entire post & replicate or re-publish it on an other blog or platform without the explicit permission of the originator. Use a snippet, enlarge on the ideas contained in the post, add to the discussion around the post, but not copy it in its entirety.
I am not talking about whether it is “legal” to do so, or whether it is “easy” to do so.
The amount of content that can/should be used from a post is a grey area, and I think it would be fruitless to try to determine a percentage or amount of content that can be used as it will quite clearly vary from post to post.
Giving attribution, should be, well, a given, however it may be difficult or impossible to determine or link to the original author if you are “quoting” another blog (in this case yahoo, publishing BI content) again what “should” happen in those situations is a grey area.
My last point is, I believe where Charles Arthur and I disagree. I believe that linking to a specific image url (the actual jpeg file hosted on a website) as opposed to the post in which the jpg appears, removes the ability for the originator to create value from that image, (in whatever way they wish to) while at the same time increases the costs associated with the use of that image, eg hosting. It also does not allow the image to be correctly attributed to the originator.
Is a complete image the same as a whole, text-based post? I believe they can be, and hence should also be treated as as such.
@Florian “I am sincerely convinced honest distribution of content fully accredited to author for non commercial use is not a crime.”
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Ever heard that one? “You’re not allowed to murder people? Nobody told me! Let me off, judge.”
Journalists get schooled in copyright law because not understanding it can cost them, and their organisations, a lot of money if they get sued for copying or plagiarism. That is why I am pressing this point. You (and @luca – hello luca) seem to find it “arrogant”. Well, when you know about something, and someone’s telling you you’re wrong, it tends to get frustrating to point them to links where they could read up about it and discover you’re not wrong, and have them ignore it and keep saying you are wrong.
Try it on a police officer. “You’re just being arrogant now telling me about the traffic laws.” Mm, they love that.
@luca journalists tend not to be experts in a topic – but they know how to gather and organise the information about it. Your interview about VoIP probably informed the journalist so they could write a piece that did make sense. Their next story might be about a topic you’ve never come across, and they’d have to become instantly expert on that too.
As to *journalists* changing their business model – it’s something we’re all thinking about. Your suggestions very welcome.
@Ilico: “My last point is, I believe where Charles Arthur and I disagree. I believe that linking to a specific image url (the actual jpeg file hosted on a website) as opposed to the post in which the jpg appears, removes the ability for the originator to create value from that image, (in whatever way they wish to) while at the same time increases the costs associated with the use of that image, eg hosting. It also does not allow the image to be correctly attributed to the originator.
“Is a complete image the same as a whole, text-based post? I believe they can be, and hence should also be treated as as such.”
It’s not so much that we don’t agree; I’d agree that such a link does make it impossible to monetise an individual image. But it’s whether you can prevent such linking from outside. It is feasible, just about (only serve the image as part of a bundled HTTP call with others) to prevent such “deep linking”, but it’s a lot more effort than it’s worth, because it will slow down your website enormously.
The problem comes when people copy the image (happens a lot) or “hotlink” the image to use on their site, calling it from the original – which then gets the hosting cost but often not the benefit. It’s possible to prevent such hotlinking (I know a climbing site that does that) but most people don’t bother – they can after all see who’s linking in to their stuff.
Obviously (@Ilico), your focus is pictures; mine is words. Ironically, the text of the page tends to be harder to tear away from monetising ads than the pictures (because computers treat text and images so differently). If anything, photographers have been harder hit by the ease of online copying than writing journalists.
There are a few simple reasons why I don’t like people copying entire article – whether they give credit or not.
1) It clutters up the Internet. I’m half serious. When researching an article, it’s depressing seeing the same article again and again and again. Often there’s not so much as an “This is an interesting article from XYZ”. Just the content reproduced but with someone else’s adverts on it. It’s frustrating and pointless when a link will do.
2) It splits the community. You’ll have people commenting on the original article in 27 different locations. That can be justified where you have disparate groups of people (investors, tech pundits, consumers) who want to comment in their own space, I suppose.
3) It puts the article out of context – often in a damaging way. I’ve had my content lifted and placed on the blogs of rather nasty far-right websites. Now, anyone searching for me is going to think that I wrote an article for a bunch of fascists.
I accept that you’re not doing (3). But I’ve got to ask (because I don’t use Postereous) what value does your reproducing the article add? I don’t mean monetary value to you – I mean how / why is it better to reproduce it rather than to post a link to it?
T
florianseroussi, you really do need to learn some basic facts about copyright. It doesn’t matter if someone, or some corporation, has chosen to post something on their website, you have no legal or moral right to copy it and republish it somewhere else, and if you “claim” or imagine that you do, you’re merely deceiving yourself.
You say you work hard for a living; well then maybe you should understand that there are writers, and creators of other original content, who work hard as well. That’s why copyright law exists, to protect their rights to their efforts. The ‘arrogance’ here is all yours, in imagining that – as someone who merely copies but does nothing original – you can ‘claim’ the right to republish ‘anything’ you find on a publicly available site, The fact you can read it, copy & paste it, does not mean it isn’t copyright and someone else’s property. You need a licence to republish, that’s why Posterous states you can’t use it to republish anything which you don’t have rights to. You have no rights to republish anything Yahoo!Finance has licenced from BI, the fact you showed it word for word doesn’t make it ok, you simply should not have done it. The fact you said where you’d stolen it from didn’t make it ok, you were wrong to steal it. Please don’t confuse using tools like Posterous to share or produce original content which you have originated, with using it against their Terms & Conditions to simply reproduce stuff you’ve stolen.
Sure, you can go around whistling a Kanye West number if you want; but if you make it available on your website for people to download for free, you’re breaking the law and asking to get into trouble. If you identify yourself as a copier, rather than a creator of something original, don’t protest when someone from the ‘original’ team kicks your butt.
You can link to something, or publish an extract as “fair use” or for comment and review, but that’s all. The ‘business model’ with a hole in it is in fact the one adopted by those who imagine that, as they lack the talent to produce anything original, it must be ok for them to steal from those with the talent; when the truly creative finally take their product away from where you can steal it, what are you going to be left doing ?
As a kid I always wanted to become a journalist. Generation born in late 60’s had that dream. Dream died and I don’t see many kids who believe journalism is a even a decent job. 15 year old teenagers – with no academic skills as per say- do write excellent posts, in many way better than veteran journos. Danielbru on TechCrunch is one example. Yes, arrogance and superiority complex have killed the newspaper industry. @ilicco Title perfectly express that IMO.
@charles you can argue as much as you want on legal grounds bringing your ‘thoughts’ to the table. An attorney is working on a detailed reply and for what I just heard you are not right on usage of copyright material (IF BI article was copyrighted – which is still not sure as we speak). You have educational intent, journo intent, etc. Like I said this needs a professional answer and we will get to it.
Here is a copy of Yahoo!’s response. Yahoo! does not consider BI content as theirs and omitted my question relevant to missing original link on their source.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Inc. regarding your request for
permission to use a Yahoo! service mark or trademark, logo, slogan,
screen shot, copyrighted designs, or other brand feature. Please be
aware that your request was not submitted to the proper party and we
have no authority to grant the requested permission.
Please note that Yahoo! is unable to grant permission to use material
posted by users and third parties on Yahoo!. In order to obtain
permission to use this material, you would need to contact the user or
other third party directly.
Regards,
Copyright/IP Agent, Yahoo! Inc.
copyright@yahoo-inc.com
****************************
c/o Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
@Lithotomist are you an attorney or someone who claims to knows the law?
What is the hard part for you to understand- The fact that Posterous is a SHARING platform such as Google Reader or Techmeme or the fact that THIS blog -where you just left a comment- is my personal website?
I promise a legal review on the issue. From there we will be able to argue. For now I don’t (unlike you -ahem) have enough legal knowledge to discuss the matter.
@Waldo you may want to read this http://blog.fluther.com/blog/2009/06/01/an-open-letter-to-jason-calacanis/ regarding RT and attribution of Tweets.
@charles Since when journos are understanding ‘business pressure’ when they accumulated £24M of losses? You are accountable for this money as any other executive in any other business. You blame it on the ‘difficult advertising market’ so what? We should keep ‘financing your losses’ to preserve historical journalistic achievement?
Another example of arrogance. “It’s not my fault” is a lame answer. You are burning investors money, same way Lehman Brothers did. I don’t recall reading explanatory articles on your paper regarding business pressure for money makers.
I’m surprised you didn’t get my point : It has everything to do with content distribution. Learn how to share and re-distribute your content. Bring interest to your business and you might see new streams of revenues.
Last you never answered on the “print button” on the Guardian.co.uk. Why do you have it if people shouldn’t distribute? Oh maybe you expect them to print an excerpt only. What about saving few trees and remove this feature
Charles Arthur is the reason mainstream-media journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, because of the unprofessional approach regarding distribution of premium content.
Keeping information private weakens mainstream-media a bit more everyday. I’m surprised other journos aren’t stepping into the conversation asking editors for more ‘openness’.
Florian you got every right to speak up. There is absolutely nothing wrong in your attitude, post or comments. You earned my respect.
Florian
I think you’re deliberately missing the point here. Posterous allows the copying of entire articles, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to.
Forget copyright and legality for a minute, think about respect. Respect the original author of the article and link, don’t just reproduce. Whistling Kanye West is, you must be able to see, a partial reprodcution and no one minds. Taking the whole thing and passing it around, note for note, is taking someone else’s work and giving it away when they deserve to choose the ways people access it.
Business Insider copyright all of their material (it’s in the footer of every page) and Yahoo will have paid them for the content. Yahoo didn’t offer you the chance to post the whole thing on Posterous, you used a bookmarklet made by Posterous, not the sharing tools (all of which produce a link to share, not reproduce the whole article) on the Yahoo page.
Really, you should have a look at growing up a little and realise that publishing on the web is not the same as giving away your work for free.
@claire Respect is applicable everywhere not only in journos world. RT a quote, posting a YouTube video using the “embed this” button is also subject to permission if I read you right. Should I mention RT or embedded videos are often used on ad supported blogs. And videos cannot be ‘partially’ posted…it’s all or nothing.
If this is the case- I wish you good luck to fight this war.
No, Florian; it’s you that seems to find some things hard to understand. Posterous in its terms of service says you won’t “Post content that infringes on trademarks or copyrights”.
Sure, Posterous is a sharing platform; for sharing YOUR original content, things like photos you’ve taken, words you’ve written, i.e. things that you have the copyright for; not for sharing things you steal from other people or sites. What don’t you get about that? Can’t you simply read the Posterous terms of sevice ?
Even if you, with the academic qualifications and business career you make much of in your own biog, claim not to know how copyright works; even if none of the corporations you’ve been an executive with have ever explained to you that they had some proprietary, copyright material at the core of their business; you know how to use the internet to find out the basic principles: which include the fact that the author of an original work has exclusive rights over it, protected by law, and you know that you have never sought nor had transferred to you any rights to republish the material in question here.
The fact that the first publication was on a website accessible by members of the public does not put the content into the public domain, it remains copyright; and the fact that you republished it on a website which you regard as ‘personal’ is irrelevant since it is also open to members of the public to visit it and comment on it. If you had just copied the material to a document on your computer for your own reading, a place where no-one else could see what you’d done, you’d be fine; but you have quite explicitly said you republished the material where you could SHARE it with anyone who happened across it. Ergo, you are in breach of copyright.
Incidentally, a journalaist is not an executive responsible for the business decisions of the publication he works for; you’re confusing journalism with business management and really with your claimed business acheivements, you ought to know the difference between the two things.
I’m an Intellectual Property lawyer at WilmerHale Law Firm.
Business Insider has nothing stated in their copyright policy regarding reprint permission therefor one would assume Common Laws apply.
In absence of specific reprint permission policy you may reprint IF you provide attribution to the author and copyright holder on the reprint.
Court would assume Business Insider has sufficient knowledge on copyright laws to properly protect their content and would they have been more specific no one would have reprinted without permission.
Business Insider Copyright Policy
Pursuant to 17 USC. § 512 as amended by Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”), the Site has instituted procedures to receive written notification of claimed infringements and to process such claims in accordance with the DMCA. If you believe your copyrights are being infringed, please fill out the Notice of Infringement form below and mail it to Silicon Alley Insider, Inc.
The Notice of Infringement contains requested information that substantively complies with the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 USC. § 512(c)(3)(A), providing that to be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following:
* A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
* Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that Site.
* Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
* Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party such as an address, telephone number, and if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
* A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent or the law.
* A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
* Notification from a copyright owner or from a person authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner that fails to comply substantially with the provisions above shall not be considered as providing actual knowledge or an awareness of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent.
In conclusion you did nothing reprehensible by Law. Ethic and respect are arguable notions.
Your poor clients. You can reprint with attribution with some creative commons licences, but Business Insider is all rights reserved. You can also reprint without permission for the purposes of journalism and comment, but there was no comment, just reproduction. Naughty. Disrespectful.
@Vasiliki Mitrias. Ooh, what fun. I get to take on a lawyer.
“Business Insider has nothing stated in their copyright policy regarding reprint permission therefor one would assume Common Laws apply.”
And then you copy (oh dear me) its notification where people *whose copyrighted content appears on BI* can apply *to BI* to have it removed. Not where BI can complain about misuse of its content. I’d suggest you haven’t looked very carefully at what the page actually says.
Well, I’ve found something more definite. The bottom of the front page of Business Insider says “* Copyright © 2009 The Business Insider, Inc. All rights reserved.” And of every page. It’s in their footer code.
That means that it reserves all rights, including reprint permission. That’s the meaning of “all rights”. Yes?
I have contacted Henry Blodget, BI’s CEO, who told me by email that “We have a partnership with Yahoo TechTicker in which Yahoo syndicates some of our content. Yahoo is an excellent partner, and we’re very happy with the relationship.”
Syndication means that publication rights are temporarily transferred to the other site. It does not affect reprint or other rights.
Therefore Yahoo does not have the reprint rights. BI reserves all rights. The only question now is whether the copying of an entire article that BI had licensed to Yahoo and posting it on another site constitutes copyright infringement.
Hmm, no assignment of reprint rights to Yahoo except for publication on its site (that’s syndication). No “fair use”. Slam-dunk, I’d say.
Which law firm? I must try to hire someone else.
@Vasiliki Odd, because the version of the site I’m looking at clearly says “All rights reserved”, which isn’t strictly necessary under the Berne Convention but it’s there all the same. You’ve heard of the Berne Convention, right? All rights tends to subsume reprint rights in all the discussions I’ve had over these things. And the Berne Convention was brought mainly because of unauthorised reprinting.
You being a big-shot lawyer and all that I’m sure you’d know that. But then, I’m a little confused as to why you’ve posted their DMCA takedown policy, which is nice but not exactly relevant.
Oh, I’ve had some more from Henry Blodget. I asked: “What’s at issue is: if someone simply copies the content of a BI post that’s been reposted on Yahoo and sticks it onto Posterous.com (which happened here) – is that a copyright infringement?”
He replied: “Yes, that’s obviously a copyright violation. Yahoo has the right to reprint our content. Posterous does not.”
Any time you want to accept that you’re wrong, Florian, it’s fine. Hell, I’ll unblock you too if you can manage to say it publicly.
We are turning in circles.
It would be nice to know Posterous position.
No one will change opinion over a blog post. For the fun of it I browsed Posterous suggested sites and found over 60% of reposted content. Mostly videos and images but a great number of articles too.
Never heard of any law suits against Posterous or Posterous users.
Information often goes from Blogs to newspaper and credits are almost never given to author (TV news is a good example). Plagiarism is a journalistic word that occurred way before internet was born. Copyright infringement is an every battle among news agency. Don’t bring your crap to the web.
Continue on with your sectarians principles, stay in your bubble, deal with your kids iPod content, and ignore 1.7b internet users. And if all fails – you are not responsible for the loss of your industry. It’s “bizness prachure”.
Now I’m going back to the real world.
The line “I didn’t want to go on the legal approach of copyright et al on this post” is all I needed to read to know that you are wrong.
@Florian, I am afraid that you are wrong and simply digging yourself in deeper by trying to defend the indefensible.
Charles Arthur may have gone off at you and maybe you don’t appreciate his tone, but you know what? He’s right.
You may not have realised that you were doing something wrong when you reproduced the entire post and that’s forgivable. Now that some smart people have explained the situation for you, you should take that on board, apologise, remove the original post, and not repeat the error.
This has nothing to do with “arrogance” on the part of the media. It’s just the law, plain and simple. Sharing technologies are great but “sharing” means excerpting and commenting, not copying the original text in its entirety.
This guy claiming to be an intellectual property lawyer clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t got even some of the most basic information right.
Copyright is inherent. You don’t have to register copyright (though in the US this option is available and it can give you some additional protection). You also don’t have to put a copyright notice or ‘all rights reserved’ on the bottom of your material. It’s copyright from the moment of creation. The only reason you might choose to plaster copyright notices over your material is to try to ram home the point to idiots who don’t understand this basic fact.
Most countries have a provision for fair use, which allows you to quote from copyright material. This would cover an excerpt from another blog or news story and add your own opinions and commentary. Whether you are using social media tools such as Posterous or not, it’s okay to do this to a point.
Here’s the thing. Fair use means you can quote a copyright piece. It also means you can excerpt a paragraph or two. It does NOT mean that you can copy the entire work. Generally the law permits you to copy no more than 10% of the original text.
For the purpose of copyright law, it actually doesn’t matter if you provide a link or credit. The reason for providing a link or credit is to avoid allegations of plagiarism – which is an ethical rather than a legal issue. You best serve your readers by telling them the original source of the material. And it’s considered good blogging courtesy to link to the original. However, the link does not get you past the copyright issue – you still can’t quote more than about 10% of the material, without prior permission from the author.
Posterous gives you some technical capability – it’s still up to you to make sure that your use of it falls within the law.
Yahoo didn’t copy the original material in violation of copyright – I think you’ll find that they paid to reproduce the material. Did you pay?
@Caitlin I hope the argument is not about me being right or wrong. But about reality vs. dying principles.
How do you apply fair use in Video posting? Just wondering…
@ndrew if you read sentence until the end you saw I’m going to post a legal review in coming days. I asked a law firm to participate in the debate. I’m not an attorney and do not pretend to be one.
The guest post will be published as soon as I will get it. No matter what the outcome is. I’m interested in knowing the legal truth.
PS By the way, the Guardian newspaper is not owned by shareholders – it’s owned by a private trust. So the newspaper’s losses or profits don’t cause investors of any kind to lose money. Not that this has any relevance to the question of copyright.
@Florian, the issue of whether you are right or wrong about copyright is easy to answer. You’re wrong.
The issue of whether you are right or wrong about the wider trend is an entirely different matter. Yes, copyright law is finding it difficult to keep up with advances in technology and the fact that anybody with a modem is now a publisher. Yes, copyright violation is widespread and it’s becoming difficult to police that. Yes, media companies are finding their business models disrupted – old revenue streams like classified ads are disappearing and new business opportunities are emerging every day. Everyone in the media is aware of these facts.
But really, you are not meant to reproduce articles in their entirety, with or without a credit. I have had extensive training in these matters.
By all means get a legal opinion but I think you’ll find that you have to pay a lot of money for one. Unless your site traffic numbers are huge, no law firm is going to want to write you a guest post for free when they could, you know, be billing clients. Far better to use some of the extensive existing resources on the internet. I believe Charles Arthur pointed you to a few. There is a useful primer here as well: http://www.lib.byu.edu/departs/copyright/tutorial/intro/page1.htm
The real villain here is Posterous. I believe you acted in ignorance – you’ve said yourself that you are not an attorney and you want to find out the full legal facts. This is probably the case for most of Posterous’ users. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon only reproduce the headline and opening paragraphs, which is a sensible, moderate approach – allowing sharing without enabling copyright violation. Posterous should make quoting an excerpt the default setting and play a more proactive role in educating its users about copyright.
@Florian: “We are turning in circles.”
Translation: for some reason nobody seems to be agreeing with me except that legal guy, though he couldn’t tell a DMCA takedown page from an “All Rights Reserved” notice.
“It would be nice to know Posterous position.”
You mean the thing I posted earlier in these comments? Where it said “You may NOT… * Post content you do not have the right to transmit.
* Post content that infringes on trademarks or copyrights.” ? That one?
I think that’s not too hard to parse, is it?
If you want to have a post about how news organisations can make money in a world where widespread copying is feasible – well, that’s quite another matter. That could be interesting.
But on the narrow topic here of whether it was legal to do wht you did – and let’s remind ourselves: as you said in the post, “I shared the following: http://florianseroussi.posterous.com/ten-big-companies-that-are-veering-toward-ban reproducing EXACTLY what was posted on Yahoo! Finance page.”
On the question of whether you’re allowed to do that, you’ve now had the ***chief executive of the company that wrote the post***, numerous journalists, and several passers-by explain that you’re not.
Henry Blodget! I asked him! Have you asked him? Ask him! Send him a link to your Posterous thing, ask him if it’s legal. His address is easy to find: see http://www.businessinsider.com/contact .
If you need a larger hint that you are wrong on the copyright question, I think it would have to be attached to a meteor, because it’s hard to see what else would get the idea into your head.
You asked about video postings. Exactly the same principles apply so you should either ask permission from the copyright owner to run the video or not run it at all. Unless you want to spend time and effort, editing the video so you’ve just taken an excerpt.
If it’s on YouTube or another video sharing site, then refer to the terms and conditions of that site. The copyright owner may be agreeing to let their video be embedded on 3rd party sites by uploading it to the video sharing site in the first place.
You bring up video and embedding, which is a different matter. Where it’s not a simple attempt to spread a brand around the internet, you’ll often find that the advertising is contained within the video, either before or after the content, so the creators are still rewarded for their work even if it’s not watched on their own site.
I really do urge you and the people who have agreed with you on here to reconsider. Be adults and don’t just assume that everything’s yours to take away just because no one is stopping you.
@caitlin It’s true for Google Reader. Check this link and tell me what is different? http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ouriel.ohayon
@charles As for the attorney who commented on earlier – I don’t know the guy, and ask him to come forward to defend his opinion if any.
The attorney who will do the review is Bradley Gross from Becker Poliakoff oLaw Firm also on twitter @bradleygross or thru his blog: http://www.bradleygross.com/
Caitlin
Posterous does seem to be a bit irresponsible here. Especially if they’re recommending streams that consist of reproduced material. It’s just rude.
Florian
A lot of commercial sites don’t put their full content in their feeds. The Guardian puts ads in theirs so they do. It’s still on their terms.
@Claire Youtube and Vimeo are not using advertising on their video. You can embed any of video and have no way but to post in full the content with no link to author. FYI Youtube is 73% market share.
Yes. It’s also part of the YouTube and Vimeo terms and conditions that you don’t upload stuff you don’t have the rights to, and they’re losing huge amounts of money despite their big market share. YouTube have done huge deals with the music companies, costing them even more money, to avoid big court cases. They’ve experimented with advertising but don’t have any sustainable way to keep on doing business so far, they’re funded by the rest of Google. You can do it, but you don’t have the legal or moral right. Do you still feel you’re right to do so?
@Florian,
This is ground-breaking stuff. A website that changes copyright law. Why isn’t this front-page news?
But there’s one thing you could clear up, perhaps. Could I write another website that changes copyright law back? Pre-posterous.com would be a good name for it.
@Claire the day you will show me a case of jurisprudence proving conviction of a poster of a Video on a non commercial ad-free site I might think about it.
@Adrian Good idea. You should join @CharlesArthur in a worldwide Class Action against Posterous and Google Reader. Note: I’m not in any form or shape related to Posterous (i wish i was).
Florian
It’s widespread. You’re unlikely to be prosecuted. So what? Does that make it right?
Does it feel good to be a parasite on other people’s work?
@Claire this is where we fundamentally disagree. Shared content – given the right credit- is journalism’s salvation. Sharing increase awareness and virality.
Let’s be logical – you won’t get rid of Google, Youtube, Posterous. Deal with it. Adapt, change your approach and journos might survive.
@Florian
In response to your comment about Google Reader, Google has programmed it to display the RSS feeds. The RSS feed is set by each individual publication — some choose to have their entire post displayed, others choose to have a summary only.
How is your situation different from Google Reader? Well, Google’s software automatically generates feeds based on settings prescribed by each individual publication. In your case, you knowingly highlighted the entire text and pushed “Share on Posterous.”
This is no different than if I had copied and pasted the entire text onto my own blog, regardless if I link back to the original article or not.
The idea is that you are taking away valuable traffic from the original post. The Business Insider needs that traffic to get the advertisers that pay for their writers. By reposting an entire article to your Posterous, one needs not visit the site itself. It would have been better to summarize or excerpt the article and add a link back to Yahoo! or Business Insider. (Keep in mind that Yahoo pays a licensing fee for reprinting that content, so it is irrelevant who you link back to.)
I am curious to see what your legal expert has to say, but I would guess that legally you’re in the wrong. But I also know that legislation has not been able to keep up with the rapid evolution of the internet, so who knows.
@charles Brad got your email. I think he understood the topic before but it’s good to see you top of things.
@Florian,
I’m sure you’d be the first person to agree that suing your customers isn’t the best way to build a business. But just because many rights owners sensibly decline to do this doesn’t mean that widespread copyright infringement doesn’t hurt them. Nor does it change their legal right to do so.
As for this:
“We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job – not by shutting us down.”
Could you explain how “doing a better job” will make any difference to the profitability of pro content producers if their content is distributed in ways that makes it impossible for them to gain revenue from it? If *all* you like to watch is amateur vlogs on YouTube, that’s fine. If you *also* want to watch the latest James Bond film and you want to ensure that they’re going to continue to make James Bond films then you’d better make sure you watch it in the cinema or pay for a DVD rather than download the whole thing from Bittorrent.
As Charles Arthur alluded above, if you can think of a way in which people can share all their favourite pro content through whichever channels they like and still provide sustainable revenue streams for pro producers then you’ll probably be the world’s richest man by the end of the next decade.
Good luck with that, and I hope you don’t think me suggesting that a place to start would be learning copyright law shows that arrogance is still alive and kicking.
Florian
The journos are adapting. You’ll find most of the big organisations’ videos on YouTube, freely available. They cover their costs with advertising and make a business. They’re happy for you to share and comment, take bits and put them on posterous to bring them to the attention of your friends and links back to them.
What you did, though, is steal. No one will follow your link as you’ve already taken it all. Shared content will no doubt play a part in the journalism business’s salvation but that’s not sharing. Try to be a better, more responsible citizen in future. At the moment you’re just a petty thief.
@Adrian I like any positive views. I’m a bit old to start learning but I’m ready to give it a try. Moreover I’m as anxious as everyone to find the legal truth on content sharing.
It’s not black and white.
Doing a better job starts by producing better content and not be endangered by bloggers -who apparently did not follow the same scholar cursus to become journalists. We need to see the value added proposition between a 16 year old blogger and a Guardian Editor. This gap has now disappeared. You can claim teenagers became more aware but I blame it on journos lack of analysis on topics.
Most articles are recitation of facts with no thinking outside the box. Arrington, Dave Winer, Arianna Huffington, Andrew Sullivan and few more are thinkers bringing something new to our life [note: I don't need to agree with them to find them interesting]. And funnily none of those are losing £24M like the Guardian online.
Serve us better content – that is what i meant.
Better content that you’ll then steal so they can’t make money off the adverts? three of the four you mention depend on advertising revenue for their incomes.
@claire you must be an irreproachable citizen. Disrespectful but honest.
Let he without sin throw the first stone.
Wow for a business professional and so-called investor this is quite a rude post. Full of shit am I? First of all my main gig is as a blogger, not a “journalist” as such. Second, my problem with your Posterous was not its existance – I couldn’t care less – but that it was SO BAD. You’re just copying and republishing entire blog posts. And not even from the original. This is the same as astro-turfing spammers. I though professionals like you had more brains than that. See below for my Twitter replies to you: “Good bloggers/sharers, excerpt, comment, analyze, quote, link. Not cut and paste (or whatever) entire posts.”
Thirdly, you copy and paste an entire post from a blogger. Allow me to inform you: bloggers are not, generally, hugely well paid people. We do not get the salaries or pensions of big newspaper people. But we are passionate about what we do. Business Insider is a startup. You, being a (it says here) smart guy ought to know that. Apparently you know all about how the Internet works. Well here’s a lesson for you: the link economy is important. You provided no link to Business Insider. Just one to Yahoo Finance which, because it is syndication material, will just die. BI will get nothing from you because you were just too plain lazy to link to the real source. That’s pathetic. It’s bad blogging, AND it’s bad SHARING.
Lastly Posterous has provided you with a tool to share, yes. But HOW you share is as important as what you share. In my book, excerpting and commenting is the best sharing. You’re just astro-turfing. That’s why I said your attitude sucked. I don’t really know what you are like as a person. Maybe you’re a really nice guy. My apologies if I offend, however, I feel I must say that your attitude about this issue is, well, arrogant.
For the record: My Twitter stream in reverse:
# @florianseroussi actually, you never answered my point: No *direct* link to Business Insider. Please consider putting it.7:25 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie
# @florianseroussi I’m off to post twitterfon’s source code to posturous!
. Good day sir.7:15 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie in reply to florianseroussi
# @florianseroussi it’s not sharing it’s outright copying. No link to original source even. No better than an astroturfer. Hashtag that.7:14 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie in reply to florianseroussi
# @florianseroussi I’m siding with the bloggers not the journos here. *FYI*.7:08 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie in reply to florianseroussi
# @florianseroussi so u blame Yahoo for not linking, even tho u *know* the original post is *free* at BI!? #Fail7:07 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie in reply to florianseroussi
# @florianseroussi it’s not full credit because u don’t even give a direct link to BI, which is not even Big Media. Your attitude sucks 6:49 PM Sep 22nd from Tweetie in reply to florianseroussi
# @florianseroussi Good bloggers/sharers, excerpt, comment, analyze, quote, link. Not cut and paste (or whatever) entire posts. Case rests
5:21 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to florianseroussi
# .@florianseroussi is now a journo! “Ten Big Companies That Are Veering Toward Bankruptcy” http://bit.ly/SCSLJ [Er, hold on...]
Oh, and I forgot to add. Business Insider’s content is *FREE*. Give them a damn *LINK*, buddy. Geez… Why do we bother…
I’m not a big fan of TechCrunch but you, Mike Butcher, just got it absolutely right.
Florian,
Go and mirror the whole of TechCrunch or HuffPost and see how long it takes them to sue you in a very old media, 20th Century kind of way.
Andrew Sullivan has got a Harvard PhD in politics. Dave Winer invented RSS. I don’t think either of them are “16 year old bloggers”. One is a professional journalist at a major publication (The Atlantic), the other is a top-flight technologist who bolsters their reputation through blogging.
Doubtless there are some brilliant 16 year old bloggers in every field that are building great audiences around fantastic content. I expect those very same people will want to continue developing their talent in professional life once they leave education and if that means producing content for a living then one way or another that content needs to be paid for.
If you’re happy to drop all pro content in your life in favour of teenage bloggers then that’s your choice. Do blog about it — it’ll be fascinating, but forgive me if I continue to read people like Sullivan and the Guardian too.
@mike no offense taken. It’s a conversation – some may have forgotten.
Your misconception comes from the fact Posterous is NOT my blog. It’s purely a sharing site of interesting pieces I find on the internet.
Your problem is mostly with Posterous and Google reader. I invite you to check of your TechCrunch colleague Reader and tell me where is the difference. http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ouriel.ohayon Ouriel was editor of TC France. I was going to post Danielbru’s Posterous but he quickly truncated his posts to show excerpt only.
Finally you omitted to respond on the Twittergate issue. Stolen private documents are legit to publish? Is that covered by a special copyright act?
That Danielbru’s a smart lad.
@claire AGREED
It looks like Nancy already answered your question about Google Reader but I’d like to add some details.
As she said, the site owner controls the RSS feed. They get to decide whether RSS readers such as Google Reader will display the full feed, a partial feed or headlines only.
Furthermore, through tools like Feedburner you can track the number of people who subscribe to your feed. You can also insert ads into your feed.
In the case of my travel and food blog, RoamingTales.com, for example. I have several hundred subscribers signed up to receive my posts via RSS through tools such as Google Reader. I have full feed turned on so my entire post appears in Google Reader. When someone reads one of my posts in Google Reader or another RSS reader, the traffic is tracked via Feedburner in exactly the same way as traffic to my website. I also have ads inserted at the bottom of my RSS feed so my readers will see ads without actually going to my site. I get the revenue for these ads, not the RSS reader.
Whereas if someone were to steal my content and put it on their own site, I wouldn’t get the traffic or the advertising revenue. The content thief would be the one who benefited. It’s fundamentally different.
@Florian “Doing a better job starts by producing better content and not be endangered by bloggers -who apparently did not follow the same scholar cursus to become journalists. We need to see the value added proposition between a 16 year old blogger and a Guardian Editor. This gap has now disappeared.”
1) The Guardian has an enormous network of blogs within guardian.co.uk. We link, we comment, we aggregate. And we also generate original content, besides all the other stuff such as podcasts, short films, articles and of course that “print” thing. And that’s not including all the other projects that go on, such as Katine – guardian.co.uk/katine.
2) in terms of value added, was it me or was it someone else who actually contacted Business Insider’s CEO to ask about the copyright situation re Yahoo and Posterous? Oh, yeah, it was me. Your contribution: sending a random email to the wrong department of Yahoo.
Clearly the trend here is against you. The fact that you’re completely unwilling to hear that and accept your error (another thing where the Guardian leads among UK papers, by the way, in having a readers’ ombudsman, where we aim to correct errors of fact as quickly as possible) indicates a pigheadednesss that, if you were an inventor creating something new, would be laudable.
Unfortunately you’re just someone who copies stuff wholesale. Morally, that puts you on a level with the people who offer pirate DVDs and CDs at car boot sales – leeching on the hard work of others.
You won’t be able to accept this criticism either. Answer us this, though: when was the last time you said “Oh, I’ve been so wrong about X! I now realise that Y is the case, and I was mistaken.”
(If you want to see when my last one was, I blogged about it on my own blog: http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/?p=1114 . It’s also relevant to this discussion.)
And by the way you’ve left my comment where I use Henry Blodget’s quote (with his permission) in moderation, so other people can’t see it. Was it too inconvenient to have him point out that “Posterous doesn’t have permission to post our content”?
@charles – it’s 8am and external links are subject to approval on WordPress. Your comment is right there where you posted it.
Maybe you should calm down a little bit.
I know how to admit being wrong. You need to trust me on this.
“Clearly the trend here is against you” made me smile. You are looking at few comments on my personal blog and you call that TREND. Charles in all fairness – TREND (i mean WORLD trend) is against you.
I might have done wrong unintentionally, which in this case -as Henry Blodget mentioned in his reply- is a Posterous problem.
Got to run – I don’t make money here
What, is moderating a few comments and fostering a community too much for you if you don’t get paid? Maybe you should take some advertising in, try to make a little income for making content. Then we (the readers) would get a better service and might return. All you’d have to hope for is that no one nicks your work and posts it somewhere else without contributing anything. Oh, hang on …
@claire even if you pay me I won’t wake up at 3am to moderate comments.
I invite anyone to use my content with no limitation as long as they give me credit for it. Period.
Good for you. As long as you have a living elsewhere, I guess that’s how it will stay. Other people, people who have to pay people to moderate at 3am and investigate stories and write reliably interesting content for people to read, might want to employ a different model. Maybe you should think about respecting that.
@charles your comments are childish. Can’t believe someone is actually paying you to write.
Ok in order to understand, what is your solution: shutting down Posterous,YouTube and your sales will go up. Bottom line revenue is the issue right?
I’ll be honest with you, if Florian hadn’t posted this article I would have never read it. And among the 600+ views I bet 599 didn’t hear about it.
Robin Wauters TechCrunch writer was the first one to RT Florian and this is how I got there. http://twitter.com/robinwauters/status/4170638174
So does it make Robin guilty of not checking Florian’s permission? Same way Florian didn’t check Yahoo! reprint permission? Or did it help to bring some awareness on BI content?
I vote for #3.
This conversation is so 1990. Boring.
Eric you’re a fool. Try to understand that retweeting and reproducing an article, written over time by someone with expertise who is trying to build a business out of distributing their knowledge, are two different things. That’s not an attack on social media or old media protecting its bottom line at all costs, it’s just that Florian is a parasite on someone else’s work and should be judged harshly by people who care about other people. Link, don’t copy. Don’t be an arsehole.
@claire fool, arsehole, parasite – your vocabulary gets better…just googled you and got the impression you are a professional commentator mostly on the Telegraph. Is this what you do for a living? Are you related to Charles? lovers?
Passion won’t triumph over reason. Get over it.
@claire and @eric Keep the debate PG. If you cannot handle a conversation without discourteous remarks than don’t comment here.
We are responsible adults with different opinions. Happens everyday everywhere and thank god people don’t slam each other every time they disagree.
Thank you.
@EricCohen “@charles your comments are childish. Can’t believe someone is actually paying you to write.”
The comments here are childish? Or the carefully decontextualised ones from Twitter? Either way, nobody pays me to write those. But you’d also have to explain which parts are childish. I’d be interested to hear your analysis there.
My “solution” isn’t any of those things you suggested. I’m not actually proposing a solution; this has all been about whether one has – as @Florian suggested, which I quoted in a tweet – “the right to publish ANY public available content giving credit to author”.
When it’s content that’s actually copyrighted, my point is that no, you don’t. That’s all it was. Yes, it’s symptomatic of a problem that publishing organisations have: that it’s difficult to tie content to the place where they monetise it.
To divert briefly, you wonder about copyright in retweeting. Well, Twitter has – if you bother to read its terms and conditions, which of course most people don’t – a clause which allows republication of content that you or I provide within Twitter. That’s what a retweet is: republication. Without it, Twitter couldn’t show your tweets to your followers, which would negate the point.
It becomes different if – as I pointed out, but again Florian couldn’t be bothered actually to engage with the concept; he makes idee fixe seem like a way of life – you were to suck up Twitter’s timeline and try to republish it on your own site. You’d get a call from a lawyer very quick if you did that. Try to work out why.
@Florian: “We are responsible adults with different opinions.” However, adults who are having a debate usually adduce evidence to bolster their point. You’ve yet to demonstrate that it’s *legal* to copy content as you did; the ethics has been dealt with by Mike Butcher. Just saying “But I can!” is like saying “Hey, look, I can stab this guy! Look, the knife goes all the way in!” It. Does. Not. Make. It. Legal.
@Eric “I’ll be honest with you, if Florian hadn’t posted this article I would have never read it.” Me neither – except when I came across it I wanted to find the original, because I knew there would be higher-quality stuff there. And I couldn’t, which annoyed me twice over.
Questions unanswered:
-would Florian have copied+pasted the whole article if he had to pay to view it in the first place? $0.10, $1, $10? Would he have been happy to in effect give his money away? Because that’s what he’s doing to the copyright owners when he copies the whole thing.
-does Florian understand the concept of copyright? (I think we know, actually.)
-has Florian embraced openness and sharing – we know he’s good at it, right? – enough to tell us the terms of reference on which he’s asked Bradley Gross to review this? Has he embraced openness and sharing enough to tell us if he’s paying Brad, and on what basis? Or will he suddenly find reasons why such things must remain his, and locked down?
@charles See embedded replies
Questions:
-would Florian have copied+pasted the whole article if he had to pay to view it in the first place? $0.10, $1, $10? Would he have been happy to in effect give his money away? Because that’s what he’s doing to the copyright owners when he copies the whole thing.
I do pay for content. I’m subscribed to over 10 paid subscription for premium content. Would I have paid to post this article? NO clearly.
-does Florian understand the concept of copyright? (I think we know, actually.)
The concept yes, the Law no.
-has Florian embraced openness and sharing – we know he’s good at it, right? – enough to tell us the terms of reference on which he’s asked Bradley Gross to review this? Has he embraced openness and sharing enough to tell us if he’s paying Brad, and on what basis? Or will he suddenly find reasons why such things must remain his, and locked down?
I asked Bradley to give his review on sharing posts via Posterous, Google Reader, RT. Brad is indeed my attorney but he is not actually getting paid for this review, therefor it will be up to him to make the content public. I invited him to publish his review both on my Blog and his simultaneously. You also have emailed Brad to give him your opinion as well as BI’s opinion. My intention is to find out what can or cannot be done in a legal pattern.
I hope it answers your questions. BTW I emailed you and you never replied.
Ok case rests. We did sweat a lot on this one.
Post updated.
Have a good day.
Florian,
Interested to know if this means you finally understand both the concept and law of copyright (although I fail to see how you can understand the former and not the latter).
I’m not asking for your opinion on the future of media, the joy of sharing or any other points you’ve raised to dodge the simple question:
Do you understand copyright?
PS: Yes, I’m an anon poster, welcome to the big ugly web, baby.
It’s interesting that nobody with the name ‘Vasiliki Mitrias’ appears in the Biographies section of the Wilmer Hale law firm where he claims to be an IP lawyer: http://www.wilmerhale.com/biographies/biographies/whAttorneyList.aspx?LastName=M – and they cover Partners, Counsel, Associates and Staff Attorneys, even former and retired Partners.
But then, he fails to display even a basic grasp of IP and copyright law. I do not believe an ‘IP lawyer’, in trying to justify your claim that you’ve not broken the law by illegally republishing a Business Insider property would quote BI’s policy on what you should do if you think anything they’ve published on their site breaches your copyright. This just looks like an attempt in bad faith to mislead.
Florian, you’d do better to listen to the advice offered to you by people like Caitlin, who are right where you are wrong, and it’d be a good idea if you learned just enough humility to climb down and admit you’re wrong. That’s what this has been about all along, and any attempt by you to now say it shouldn’t be about that is just trying to move the goalposts.
If you want something factual, which nobody made up, try looking at the US Copyright Office – http://www.copyright.gov – on copyright basics, or th World Intellectual Property Organisation, on understanding copyright and related rights. You’ve republished someone else’s work, which they have copyright in, without their licence or consent; you may not be sued, and this sort of theft may be common, but it doesn’t mean it’s legal or moral, just like a hit and run driver may not get arrested but that doesn’t make it ok. If you honestly think a blogger, taking someone else’s work and republishing it, is somehow better than the creator of something original, you have a lot of thinking to do.
@Waldo euh no. It would be legend if one could learn IP Laws overnight. But I’m much better with IP addresses. Maybe something you can understand in Singapore.
@lithotomist I tried a Google search and found this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=gKC&ei=E9W8Stm7DduDtgeitJWLAw&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Vasiliki+Mitrias+Wilmerhale&spell=1
I can talk about my personal experience and press. Journalists invented crookery. Content stealing, plagiarism, bribes, envelopes, conflict of interests were invented by journalists.
I had ads running on TV and national newspapers (USA Today for example) and always got a little edito on the side.
Not speaking of thousands of pics stolen from public domain everyday, photo taken without permission (paparazzi style), Youtube videos reposted on most news blogs and list goes on.
People are arguing on a technical footing about copyright, but
Copyright (at prersent) is technically outdated for this modern age,
So..Copyright and IP arguments on this subject are virtually
pointless!
You should read:
http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/04/posterous-dead-simple-blogging-gets-dead-simple-bookmarklet/
and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/technology/01link.html?_r=1
Also read my post yesterday http://www.florianseroussi.com/travel/photo-published-in-travelleisure-but-wait-til-you-read-this/ you will see
So, that would be a resounding “no” then, would it, Florian? Really, copyright law isn’t difficult to grasp, even journalists are able to understand it, so I’m sure you can. Just follow some of the links people here have provided, that’s assuming you want to learn and aren’t one of the arrogant types you rail against.
BTW: Never heard of proxy servers? This post’s IP will tell you what I mean. Namaste.
WOW.
This was some reading.
No need to say I completely agree with you Florian.
They are way out of line and missing the point of posting/sharing. Copyright laws are obsolete and need a complete revamp for modern times.
I gave up buying papers long time ago.
Once you go blog you never go back.
Mike Butcher avoids legitimate question regarding stolen Twitter docs. Why? We all know the answer.
Great post Flo. Keep them coming.
Thread locked.