Slashdot Mirror
Ziff Davis To Website: License To Link, Updated
Rothenberg writes: "Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:
While I haven't gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!
We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.
My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We're investigating the situation now and will act accordingly."
Did Slashdot get permission to link to this story?
I'm going to make a very obvious statement and ask what this means for blogs. If you can strongarm anyone into un-linking something, then where will blogs be able to go?
Also, what the hell was ZDNet thinking, the folks at pocketpctools.com were sending them traffic!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
... let's boycott ZD websites for the next month or so.
/. crowd stopped visiting ZD et al. for a month or so, they would realize the err of their ways.
I'm fairly certain that if the
A tech mag/publisher should know better.
Anyone have a list of Ziff/Davie sites we shouldn't visit for the next few weeks?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
For the record: In 2001, CNET bought ZDNet. Ziff-Davis magazines were spun off to another company, Ziff-Davis Media. eWeek is Ziff-Davis, not ZDNet.
Slashdot just posted a snippet from pocketpctools.com, and a link to their site. Let's hope pocketpctools.com doesn't threaten legal action.
There is no way this will stand up. No laws are being broken (IANAL), and it would kill pretty much every postnukey news site
www.gaian-mind.org - eco-punk/crust coop and collective | www.anarchistfederation.org - so cal anarchist federation
I find this hard to believe, let's see the emails that they 'might not be allowed to post'. Otherwise, it's just them trying to get attention and traffic, in my opinion.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
There are easy technical means to stop people from linking to you. You check the referer header, and if it's from a site you don't like... you block it! Yes, a few people will have blank/fake referers, but they are in the minority.
Example... Mozilla's Bugzilla doesn't want Mozilla to link to their bugs, so they block them! Easy.
I say boycott ZD until they stop smoking crack.
with a password, then yes, you should need permission/a license to link to the article. However, I believe posting snippets for editorial/review purposes is _always_ legal. It's fair use and newspapers rely on it daily.
If there's no password protection then it's publically available information. As long as you're not cut and pasting, you're not copying, so copywrite doesn't come into play. Heck, as long as the data comes off ziff's servers, the only copying taking place is onto the users computers (which you have an implicit right to do so). This is kinda like me giving a speech in the park and sueing passers-by for infringment.
Now, in the fscked-up world of US copyright law, all the common sense outlined above probably doesn't mean much. All I can say is, good luck to these guys.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
After reading Slashdot for a while, I get the impression that these things happen all the time, and most of them are due to an overeager employee/lawyer who can be easily shut up with a polite letter pointing out why you aren't breaking the law, or, if that doesn't work, then a letter from a law firm which says the same. This isn't DeCSS-like infringement
It's unfortunate you have to do this, but this kind of stupidity seems like something web-authors will have to live with no matter what kind of copyright laws your country has.
I think the most important thing is just to know that this happens, and not to panic.
Your days are so totally numbered.
This is absurd. If it's just a snippet of information from the website, given proper credit to the source, what could be the problem?
What happens when Google News takes the first sentence of one of their news stories and uses it on their front page?
The point of making news is for people to actually read it (along with the ads displayed along side it). Barring access to this news doesn't make much business sense. Sounds to me like Ziff-Davis has an overzealous legal team, which acts in self-interest rather in the interest of the company as a whole.
They followed MLA spec for literary works! ZDMedia has no right to demand removal when it's been properly quoted.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
That and otherwise stop linking to them altogether.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I'm sure ZDNet itself has links to other news sources in many places... maybe they should set a standard and pay some royalties to those sites also .. ;)
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
I thnk pocketpctools has a pretty solid stance. If they cannot give a short quote with a reference then why is it legal for me to do the same in a research paper? How will anyone ever be able to do a book review? This type of useage is what makes research and debate possible. I mean Bush can quote Kerry (and often does) in order to make a logical debate, and he does not need a license from Kerry. This is an example of our failed system, where corporate thugs can make any demand and win because the system is too difficult and costly to use to defend one own legitimate rights.
:)
PS Any one who laughs at Bush being logical should get -1 offtopic. Of course, I should get +5 funny for saying it
I used to read zdnet a while ago when David Coursey was there, but ever since he got squeezed out it totally sucked. They have this self-promoting Esther Dyson working there whom they interview every now and then and headline her on the front page for a whole week or so; she's such a bore to listen to and her "release 1.0" monthly newsletter is priced at ~$800 yearly subscription. She made me hate the word "visionary".
This is not about linking. This is about Ziff-Davis (or probably a bot) catching pocketpctools.com (over-)quoting their article. They claim it was plagiarism, ppctools claims it was fair use.
Note that pocketpctools.com still links to the article in dispute at the end of their statement. So linking is obviously not the issue.
That is all. Carry on.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The bad guys in this case are Ziff-Davis Media, publishers of the print magazines and the www.eweek.com/ website that was linked to in pocketpctools.com's article.
ZDNet, which originally was Ziff-Davis's umbrella web prescence now has nothing to do with Ziff-Davis, and thus ZDNet is an innocent party here, so mentioning its name (as the story summary does twice) is completely inaccurate.
In fact, as it stands, the Slashdot story summary is highly actionable, as it places ZDNet in a very negative light for the misdeeds of a totally unrelated company. But, despite the fact that they're almost certainly libelling ZDNet here, the chances of the Slashdot editors actually doing something about it and changing the story summary are minimal.
Yes, confusing Ziff-Davis Media and ZDNet is a mistake that pocketpctools.com themselves make but the Slashdot editors should know better. Some basic fact-checking on their part wouldn't go amiss but that would involve an actual editorial review process, something that Slashdot has never really had, hence the dupes, fakes, spelling and grammar mistakes, inaccuracies, etc that plague virtually every story summary.
Maybe ZDNet initiating legal action against Slashdot would be a good thing. It might actually wake Taco and co. up to the fact that getting it right does matter.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm sure like many busy professionals, I don't have time to sort the wheat from the chaff on all the different computer news and magazines sites. I've come to rely on a couple of specialist/niche weblogs to point me to the stories that I need.
ZD's actions are going to result in nobody linking to their material, and thus ZD will effectively disappear from the eyeballs of people like me.
The real question, the business question, is how long it'll take them (or their advertisers) to figure that out.
--Rob
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is no absolute yardstick for fair use. The law doesn't specify that quoting anything below a specific percentage of a copyrighted work is fair use, or that anything above is not.
That's why copyright is a civil, not criminal issue. Ziff-Davis probably sends these letters to hundreds of sites every year. (And, it seems to work. When was the last time you saw someone pointing, regularly, to Z-D sites?) Most sites lack the money and means to challenge Z-D in court. Z-D knows they might lose a Fair Use case, but also knows that the recipients won't take them to court. Hence the letters.
It's a silly thing to do -- driving away potential traffic -- but Z-D has the right to do this. And, they will keep on doing it until someone takes them to court and wins.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Well ZDNET might say watterever they wan't, it's not because they are preparing a syndicated news service (paid of course) that they can bypass law.
... so if it's front page or second page you're safe.
The fact is, you have the right to link to their story as long as you cite the source and you have the right to give an exerp of the story as long as it's not a condensed version of the story (meaning that if you understand the whole thing w/o going to ZDnet this means that your exerp has gone too far)
Usualy a 2-3 line expert is considered ok by copyright law.
You're gonna talk about deep linking heh ? Well deep linking has been defined as roughfly more than 4 clicks to the story (there is no magical number)
This is JUST the sort of thing that very much needs to be settled in a court of law.
It appears that the pocketpctools site was totally within the law, and that Ziff-Davis has gone well beyond their legitimate ownership rights into harassment. I suspect they are depending on the difference in size to make the smaller opponent simply fold rather than fight them.
We need one of the organizations (EFF?) with the ability, muscle, and money to push this one right back into Ziff-Davis' face. This sort of abuse needs to be stopped, and needs to be stopped hard.
Since this particular incident appears to have clear, clean boundries it might be an ideal one to clear up the legal questions, and to set hard limits.
--
Tomas
Um, nobody (I think) has posted this yet, so here goes...
I always thought that linking to your website was a GOOD thing, especially when it's your JOB that's depending upon people visiting your site. If all websites started doing this, search engines would be out of business and nobody would be able to find anything on the web.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
It amazes me the sheer level of pedantry that goes on here...and how quickly being right stops being important as soon as you're wrong...
And learn what a "web" is.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy, both here and on PocketPCTools: This was a total screw-up involving an overzealous legal intern, not anybody on our online team. There's still some education that needs to happen within our company about what constitutes fair use on the Web -- and unfortunately, this warning went out without the knowledge or approval of our online team. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content. Nevertheless this is manifestly NOT one of those occasions! In fact, I didn't know that this hornet's nest had been stirred until it hit Slashdot. That's clearly a breakdown of communication, since I'm the guy running the site! :-)
We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was obviously acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was obviously mistaken in issuing this warning.
My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error, and I'm personally going to see that it isn't repeated in the future.
Matthew Rothenberg
Executive editor
Ziff Davis Internet
http://blog.ziffdavis.com/rothenberg
Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy, both here and on PocketPCTools:
This was a total screw-up involving an overzealous legal intern, not anybody on our online team. There's still some education that needs to happen within our company about what constitutes fair use on the Web -- and unfortunately, this warning went out without the knowledge or approval of our online team.
There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content. Nevertheless this is manifestly NOT one of those occasions!
In fact, I didn't know that this hornet's nest had been stirred until it hit Slashdot. That's clearly a breakdown of communication, since I'm the guy running the site! :-)
We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was obviously acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was obviously mistaken in issuing this warning.
My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error, and I'm personally going to see that it isn't repeated in the future.
Matthew Rothenberg
Executive editor
Ziff Davis Internet
http://blog.ziffdavis.com/rothenberg
I've been aggregating news headlines and links on the Net for longer than I care to remember (I'm in my tenth year) and I can tell you that this is nothing new.
:-)
:-)
Way back in 1998 I had a battle with The Nando Times when I was running 7am.com which was one of the most successful aggregators of all time.
Nando said "pay us $100 per month for the right to link or we'll sue"
I said "bring it on"
They said "um, err, well okay we won't" and then attributed their back-down to the fact that I was in New Zealand and they were in the USA so such a legal battle would be too hard to wage.
The reality was that I formed an informal group of other online publishers and aggregators who simply stood up to these ridiculous tactics. Seeing they were outnumbered and copping a heap of flack in the media, they gave up their ill-conceived efforts.
When I asked the head of Nando.Net why they were averse to me effectively extending their reach and delivering huge numbers of eager-eyes to their ad-laden pages I was told that their ad revenues weren't enough to cover the cost of serving up those pages so more traffic meant more cost.
Someone ought to have taught those guys how to run an online publishing business!
I've also had similar battles with other publishers such as Television New Zealand here in NZ who simlarly threatened me with all manner of dire consequences if I didn't stop linking to them.
Once again I invited them to do their worst and they backed down.
At one stage I was involved in (and winning) so many battles over the issue of hypertext linking and the intellectual property rights associated with such things that I regularly was invited to talk to the legal profession (some of my stuff even scoring a mention in the US Bar Association's Journal) and other online publishers.
I should point out that at all times I linked ethically -- this meant no framing, full attributions and only ever using the headline and sometimes the first line of the article.
One thing *all* publishers should do is publish a linking policy on their website so as to let other sites know what they consider to be fair and reasonable. I do this on my Aardvark daily internet commentary and I also continue to aggregate headlines (including some from eWeek when they're running something worth a mention). The funny thing is that these days, nobody tries to pick a fight with me
But, if Ziff Davis/eWeek are thinking about doing so, I once again say "Bring it on! And let the good times roll (again
Somehow I find this interesting:
Current moderation of first post (poorly spaced): 100% Informative.
Current moderation of second post (spacing fixed): 70% Interesting, 30% Informative.
I'm not sure that the sample size is really large enough to draw any conclusions, but still... Does
adding spacing
to your posts make
them
interesting (or, conversely, less informative)?
Do we like Ziff-Davis now ... or hate 'em?
First off, it is misleading to call this a "warning": the letter was, according to the site admin "pretty much 'cease and desist' or we will come after you." That's a threat.
Wonderful to know how easy it is for lawyers to make up these letters. They mean nothing and are written as easily as ordinary people burn toast -- but they can sure intimidate. For those willing to give Ziff Davis a pass, I wonder if the Pocket site admins are willing to post the content of the e-mails they received? Perhaps you'd feel a little differently about "legal mistakes" when you see what they're really like.
It's ridiculous that companies have such power; were it not for slashdot, I wonder if Ziff Davis would have done a thing after the fact? The mere fact that Ziff Davis employees can fire off a letter that can effectively force sites to censor themselves should be a wake up call to folks everywhere.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
a. We'd be kinda DUMB; and
b. We'd have to expect that people would take umbrage, right?
c. PROFIT!!