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Deja Linking Ads Within Usenet Posts?
---begin deja's reponse-----
Greetings,
Thank you for contacting Deja.Com Customer Support. Thank you for your recent e-mail concerning the new feature in Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service that detects product names in Usenet messages and hyperlinks these names to related content in Deja.com's Precision Buying Service. These hyperlinks are not sponsored advertisements, but are simply pointers to other areas of Deja.com which we hope you will find relevant and helpful as you are reading Usenet discussions.
We are sorry that you are offended by this feature. We do not believe that users of Deja.com will view the hyperlinks as being part of your message. Rather, we believe users will understand that the content of the original Usenet posting has not changed, and will appreciate that these hyperlinks are simply part of our continued efforts to make Deja.com a compelling way for users to discuss and learn about products
We know that users love to discuss and debate their favorite products and services on Usenet, and our new links provide seamless, one-click access to additional information about the exact product being discussed - from specifications and features to user ratings and reviews.
*Please bear with us during our roll-out of this feature. We are working to refine the process by which we generate these context-sensitive links in order to maximize their relevance to the products and services being discussed.
We are providing these links to help users make the most of Deja.com's content offerings, and we hope that you will come to find them helpful. However, because we realize that some users would rather not have Deja display links to our Precision Buying Service content from product names mentioned in Usenet postings, we are currently in the process of implementing an "x-no-productlinks: yes" header which will suppress the generation of these hyperlinks on those messages. Deja.com also currently observes the "x-no-archive: yes" header, which prevents postings from being available on Deja.com. More information about using headers when posting through Deja.com is available at http://www.deja.com/help/help_pn.epl For help on including headers when posting through other software or services, please refer to the help documentation for the software or service you are using to post Usenet messages. In addition, you may refer to the "self nuke" feature of Deja.com described at http://www.deja.com/help/faq_abuse.epl #nuke, which allows users to delete their messages which appear on Deja.com.
If you wish to remove older posts:
Deja.com has a form for users that allows you to remove (nuke) articles that you authored from a verifiable account.
This form can be found at
http://www.deja.com/forms/nuke.shtml
Please visit this page. Be careful to follow the instructions given both on that page and on the email that follows, or your messages will not be nuked.
Note that if the message was posted to a Usenet newsgroup, this will not eliminate your posts from the Usenet at large, only from our archives.
If the post is on an old or defunct email address please contact me for further instructions.
*Should you wish to prevent your articles from being archived in the future, when posting you will need to place the x-header:
x-no-archive: yes
in the x-header field of your posting form, or if your browser or newsgroup reader does not support x-headers, then you will need to type
x-no-archive: yes
as the FIRST line of the body. Note, it must be the ONLY text on that first line. Also, for your information, the x-no-archive will prevent your post from making their way to our archives, but in no way does this prevent an replied article from being archived.
In other words, if you post an article with the x-no-archive: yes header, and then someone reads your article and decides to reply by clicking the REPLY button, it will quote the body text of your article. The x-no-archive: yes within your original article WILL NOT prevent the replying author's article from being archived. In order for that to occur, the replying author would have to place the x-no-archive header within their x-header field or first line of the body text.
Please don't hesitate to contact us should you have any further questions, and thanks for using Deja.com!
************************************************************** Please include all previous threads in replies.
Thank you,
Dot
Customer Support
Deja.com, Inc. -- Share what know- Learn what you don't
For updates and FAQ, check out our Deja.com Customer Support Community at:
http://www.deja.com/~customersupport
***************************************************************
-------end deja's response--------
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1984? To be so lucky. The image of the future isn't a picture of a face being stomped on by a boot, forever. Instead, it'll be something...like...this;
The ceiling brightens, and an image of a sun dances across it...with the GM logo embossed on it...the shadow of a car eclipses it for a moment.
You: Damn, I thought I opted out of that.
Rub your eyes. Push 3M-Lumisheets aside, get out of bed. The sheets have little company logos that shimmer and ripple across the surface
You: Got to make the breakfast...got to make the breakfast...
As you walk to the light switch, the sounds of waves lapping ... lapping and sand shifting are projected from the carpet. Then a soothing voice "Get away, take a Royal Caribbean vacation.
You [mumble]: fuch you...not going on another one of those damn trips...floating hotels.
There are two light switches both in illuminated green; One says YES the other says, slightly brighter, YESS. The fine print under YESS says 'yess...send me back to the Bahamas on the cruse of a lifetime'.
You pound the YES button...now mildly angered. The YESS button was on the left last time.
The rest of the morning is uneventful. You get dressed in your clothes, shower, all sponsored by the conglomerate TPGE (aka Toyota-Pepsi-GE). Little ditties and logos are everywhere, shimmering, whispering; 'did you know you can get a tune-up for your Nissan at any Toyota-Ultra-Care Autoparks?' Now, you know.
Presentable, you get in your Nissan Phantom (watch some hdtv on the view screen while in traffic), and get to work.
Your day is boring. Any epaper you touch flashes a logo across it for a moment before it's readable ... but it does have a search engine built in.
Your lunch comes..but you change your mind before it arrives and the delivery guy gets angry;
You eat the tuna sandwich.
Throughout the day, your coworkers occasionally drop by for chit-chat. Talking about what they just bought, places they're going. Oddly enough, you rember most of those things from adds in the company bathroom.
Feeling proud, you are glad that you -- at a minimum -- are doing something useful. The new Microsoft On-Target targeted marketing engine is almost complete...it should make things much better. You smile, showing sharp teeth.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT* Smacking your clock radio...you pant, thinking 'It's not true, OH!' You relax in bed to some music, and in a moment a soothing voice comes on and asks if you 'want a break today?'
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Basically, they are saying that they think that people will be able to browse through these posts on Deja.com and discern what URLs have been automagically embedded in the text.
These URLs (as far as I can see) have no disclaimer saying that they are added by Deja and not the poster.
What happens when I post a post (HA!) that says that I know a friend that uses Packard Bell machines and the shredder/reader inserts a link to a deal from Packard Bell.
The meaning of my post is tainted by having the advertisment in it. It is almost saying that I recommend PacBells (which I certainly do not) just because I have linked to this special deal.
A not-so-informed user may take this as a recommendation and buy the machine.
Good advertising, bad ethics.
Rami
Guy with no time for stupid ads
--
rJames.org - illustration
Deja's merely copying what Remarq tried (and removed, due to the ensuing outcry). There's nothing "innovative" about this, any more than there is about Deja's tactic of spamming people who register at its site. Deja *could* have been a premier source for Usenet archives and provided a valuable service to the Internet community. But instead, they are clearly attempting to co-opt a long-standing community resource and profit from it -- without returning value to the community, and, as in this case, by corrupting the article and falsely attributing statements to their authors that they did not make. This is unethical behavior and deserves the contempt of the entire Usenet community.
Fortunately, the open-source community will likely have a fast implementation of these x-headers in most newsreaders that are out there. Netscape Messenger will probably never support it, and Outlook Express...who knows?
I'm hoping there's a copyright issue at play here. Does the author get to keep the copyright on Usenet posts? If so, does this linking violate that copyright?
Two Words: Copyright infringement.
/.ers complain about overly restrictive copyright laws, and how evil IP laws are, and then Deja does something like this, which is almost definitely (although IANAL) and then they piss vinegar about something like this?
Don't they have lawyers over there? Something about 17 USC 106(2)?
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of a copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
Of coures, hypocritical
We don't want strong IP laws for Napster or DeCSS, but damn, don't touch my usenet post.
Go ahead and moderate me down for pointing out the hypocrisy, and don't bother defending it with "but they're corporations and we're people" that's as valid as a racial, ethnic or gender based discrimination.
Flame away and moderate away.
Violating an unwritten code, my ass!
An article is a copyrighted work attributed to the writer. Inserting endorsements for products, without the author's permission, constitutes making a derived work which distorts the original work. It is not ``fair use'' by any stretch of the imagination. Note that there aren't even any clearly visible mitigating disclaimers that state that the article was modified by the insertion of hyperlinks.
Note that I do not browse Usenet through Deja News, so seeing the links is not what offends me.
I do post to Usenet, and I'm appaled by the idea of my text being linked to products and services without my explicit endorsement and permission.
If they are going to do that, I expect to have control over what products I'm connected with, and I expect to get a chunk of the advertizing revenue.
I am no lawyer, too, but I know a bit of copyright law because I am teaching web design, and I know pretty well that you need a license for other peoples intellectual property to use it. By posting material to USENET, you give an implicit license to use this material in the context of USENET, and use of my message in answers is even covered by fair use provisions.
What deja does, even in their normal use, probably exceeds that implicit license, and fair use. Anyway, I have just sent them a digitally signed formal takedown notice under DMCA
asking them to take down all my posts from their site, and preventing their site to include my further postings. I also notified them that an opt-out solution by providing additional headers to my posts is not sufficient, as they are the ones needing a license to use my works, and I won't give them. It is their task to get the licenses required for the works of other authors presented on their site.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp