Slashdot Mirror
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.
A lot of aggregator sites like this one base a lot of their topical content on articles printed elsewhere. While most (incl. /.) don't print whole articles intact, a lot of them do quote heavily (what used to be called "fair use," back when that phrase actually meant anything). So their first step is to go after the sites that reprint the articles whole-cloth. But will they stop there?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Robots exclusion standard. Not that it will stop them; as others have pointed out, if they think they're "doing the right thing," I'm sure they will not be concerned about such a standard.
The worry here really isn't so much for the people who are hosting sites with infringing content. I'm sure a moral argument could be made that Attributor is well within the right to disregard the wishes of those who are breaking copyright law. However, I run several sites that have no infringing content whatsoever, sites with things that have content that, while not private, I don't particularly want spiders crawling. I'm not so naive to think that they don't do it anyway; I have server logs proving that they do. However, in this case, we have a company that is claiming to be legitimate completely ignoring my--someone who is not infringing--wishes and doing it.
Put another way, by convention, my neighbors don't use binoculars to peer into my house windows to see what I'm doing although there's currently not really anything stopping them from doing so. Even though I don't particularly have anything to hide, if I find that they are violating our polite social contract, then I'll put up shades just because it's none of their damn business.
I don't think that the robots.txt convention will be the thing that stops Attributor. I think that it will be that it won't take long for web site authors to figure out what user agents, IP address, etc. that Attributor is using and will block access from Attributor to their sites. Like I said, I have no infringing content on my sites, but if Attributor is going to ignore me politely asking their robots not to scan my sites, then I'm fully in the right to take further steps to forcibly prevent them from doing so.