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Web Copyright Crackdown On the Way
Hugh Pickens writes "Journalist Alan D. Mutter reports on his blog 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' that a coalition of traditional and digital publishers is launching the first-ever concerted crackdown on copyright pirates on the Web. Initially targeting violators who use large numbers of intact articles, the first offending sites to be targeted will be those using 80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month. In the first stage of a multi-step process, online publishers identified by Silicon Valley startup Attributor will be sent a letter informing them of the violations and urging them to enter into license agreements with the publishers whose content appears on their sites. In the second stage Attributor will ask hosting services to take down pirate sites. 'We are not going after past damages' from sites running unauthorized content says Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor. The emphasis, Pitkow says is 'to engage with publishers to bring them into compliance' by getting them to agree to pay license fees to copyright holders in the future. Offshore sites will not be immune from the crackdown: almost all of them depend on banner ads served by US-based services, and the DMCA requires the ad service to act against any violator. Attributor says it can interdict the revenue lifeline at any offending site in the world." One possible weakness in Attributor's business plan, unless they intend to violate the robots.txt convention: they find violators by crawling the Web.
Seriously. Following robots.txt is not law, only convention. I'm sure it doesn't take much to convince themselves to ignore it. Money, "doing the right thing", etc. If you view the copyright infringers as pirates, then why should Attributor follow their wishes?
is there some written law that holds people to following robots.txt? if not, how is it even possible to call it a weakness?
This one.
On the other hand, that's an utterly asinine comment to have made (the one you quote, not yours). Of course they'll ignore it, why on Earth wouldn't they? It is in no way binding, and robots are free to ignore it, just as site owners are free to block connections from specific incoming IP addresses, the owners of those IPs are free to switch to new ones, and so on, ad infinitum.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sounds like they've learned their lesson from the RIAA. I'm not saying I agree with them and think they are right to do this. But, if you're going to try to enforce your interpretation of the law, this is at least a sane philosophy of doing so. Not going after damages is a smart move.
And in the process take down all those inane blogs whose sole purpose is to scrape and repost articles so they get an advertising hit.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Are you kidding? ACTA's going to harmonise everything so closely to the US that they'll be able to prosecute anyone.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Unless an article is very short, quoting 80% of it is not fair use. So for now, I think they have every right to take steps against sites making money from their content without compensation.
Yes, I am cynical enough to expect the reasonable 80% limit to be lowered over time until it reaches unreasonable levels. But let's hold the flames until they have actually crossed that line.
80% is a reasonable starting point. If they start lowering it, we'll have to express our righteous indignation then. Fair use, when interpreted, is generally considered a LOT lower than routinely cutting-and-pasting 80% of articles, so they have a long way to lower it before we can honestly call our indignation righteous.
Seriously, this really isn't a "slippery slope" situation. It seems to be a well-thought-out and sane set of guidelines. If anything, they are being a bit generous for now, and they can still tighten this quite a bit without coming close to busting "fair use" or even "reasonable use".
Basically they are saying, "if you routinely use 80%+ of our articles as your own content, we're asking you to stop. We won't sue you for any past uses, we just want to make it clear that this isn't cool any more."
A fair usage (not the lack of quotes, I am not talking about a legal doctrine) would be to use about 20% of the source article (properly attributed) with a link back to the original article. Give credit where it's due (and cite your sources). Then add your own thoughts, or don't. But don't take whole-cloth articles and post them on your own site with your own ads.
Every discussion board I've ever participated in has pretty much recommended some really close variant to this anyway. It usually reads something like "cite a paragraph or two at most and have a link to the source article plainly visible nearby".
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Right... because a judge will find that offer, consideration, and acceptance of a contract took place between a webserver and a bot? The court case you cite is irrelevant to an automated program that has no understanding and cannot accept conditions presented online.
Awesome, so anyone can DoS a server, send mass spam or distribute a virus as long as a bot does it, because a judge will rule that the bot acted on its own and wasn't developed or set loose by anyone at all.
If the software wrote itself you might have a point, otherwise the people who wrote it are the ones responsible for how it acts.