Slashdot Mirror
NY Times Asks Twitter To Shut Down Retweeting Feed
WesternActor writes "According to PCMag.com, the New York Times has asked Twitter to shut down the FreeNYT Twitter feed that basically retweets all of the Times' articles. Is this really possible? After all, the feed just points to a list of Times Twitter accounts, all of which can also be found on the Times' website. If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."
It would violate the twitter TOS, and its usage model... NYT can't have it both ways. Either they use twitter, or they don't
Won't people just create replacements using lists?
If NYT doesn't want their material tweeted, then maybe they should stop tweeting them.
Just like the WSJ, and FT, this simply means that I won't be pointing any tweets to the NYT. No traffic driven to the site, no ad revenue. Maybe the $300 a year they want for an ipad subscription will generate sufficient revenue.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So obvious, I predicted it as soon as I read the first story.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why doesn't Twitter first open up their walled garden?
"it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general".
Eh, no. Just no. Stop it.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
The NYT is backing itself into a corner, and is putting itself in a similar position as the RIAA. They are antagonizing their fans and readers. I just wonder how long it will be until they start suing people who regularly access their content through 'backdoor' means.
Luckily there are alternatives like http://identi.ca/ . Great joy for developers (lots of api access), and it's distributed, so they cant pull stunts like the ones twitter has been doing lately. Also, it can sync with twitter so you only have to type all your microblogs just once.
NYT: Please refrain from letting anything newsworthy happen until we have reported on it... Thank you.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."
Anything that has a chilling effect on Twitter can't be all bad!
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
The title for this post should be "New York Times Asks Twitter to Shut Down Paywall-Evading Account". The actual story here is how NYT's paywall is flawed
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
After their fervent Wikileaks support, and their history of publishing classified documents, now they're on the other side of the coin with people publishing information that they want to have control over.
Seems like poetic justice to me.
"Chilling effect" is something the government does to Free Speech, and is illegal so they can't do it when the courts say they can't. Private organizations can't do it at all without your cooperation. Not even the NY Times. They can ask nice, but fuck 'em if I keep aggregating their shit.
That a commercial entity requests that Twitter not automatically feed all of their news articles to the world hardly seems like an affront to free speech. You or I may not care for that policy but I must admit, the NYT isn't making much money off of me either way. The news reporting business in general is struggling to find a way to stay afloat and the cry that they owe it to us gratis doesn't help.
"According to PCMag.com, the New York Times has asked Twitter to shut down the FreeNYT Twitter feed that basically retweets all of the Times' articles. Is this really possible? After all, the feed just points to a list of Times Twitter accounts, all of which can also be found on the Times' website. If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general."
So, @freenyt is retweeting @nytimes. And @nytimes is the official twitter feed. Is that correct?
I just don't see why anyone would follow @freenyt when they could follow @nytimes. Surely both are available on twitter.
Speech isn't free, slashdot. It has a cost: Stop using Twitter. But that's not convenient, is it? And that, right there, is how freedom dies.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sure they could do those things, but they have chosen not to and want twitter to act as their agent. Unless they plan to pay twitter it might as well ignore them.
This is not bypassing anything, NY Times allows you to read articles if you came from twitter. These links on twitter do just that. This is exactly what they should have expected would happen. If I announce that everyone who comes to my house with a red shirt gets free a free meal, I bet lots of folks would take me up on the offer and someone may start selling red shirts outside my house.
There is no chilling effect, that is total hyperbole. To have a chilling effect there has to be possible negative consequences or reprisal for an action. Having a free twitter account where all you do is retweet shutdown is not going to give anyone the chills. You can create new one in 5min.
Now if they sued the person who set the account up or something that might have chilling effect.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The New York Times is not a biased news source! Stop saying it is! It is the oasis of objective news in a world of bribed sources. You might as well say that National Public Radio doesn't represent the Public of the Nation via the medium of Radio.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Tweet should have an option for "do not allow retweet for this tweet". Problem solved.
Of course, it doesn't forbid people manually copy/paste the text, but still, this could be a useful feature.
The twitter account in question isn't retweeting the URLs.
There is no automated bot in play here.
All this guy did was create a "Twitter List" of the ~40 official Twitter Accounts used by the NYTimes (they seem to have one per section of their site) ...
https://twitter.com/#!/FreeNYT/firehose/members
You would get access to the same URLs if you followed each of those ~40 individual twitter accounts directly.
Essentially the NYT is complaining that someone is promoting the existence of their twitter accounts.
-- The Hoss Man
the NY Times tweets their headlines under 20 or so different accounts (nytimesarts, nytimesopinions, etc). freenyt has a list of all of them. You could do the same with any twitter client, too.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No it doesn't. The penalty for ToS violations is account termination or suspension, not complaining to twitter.
1.1 If you choose to use NYTimes.com (the “Site”), NYT’s mobile sites and applications, any of the features of this site, including but not limited to RSS, API, software and other downloads (collectively, the "NYT Services"), you will be agreeing to abide by all of the terms and conditions of these Terms of Service between you and The New York Times Company ("NYT", “us” or “we”).
10.2 NYT may, in its sole discretion, terminate or suspend your access to all or part of the Services for any reason, including, without limitation, breach or assignment of these Terms of Service.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Which of those is it doing?
It does not seem to do any as far as I can tell.
The only reason they can even ask for this is that the feed has "NYT" in its name. They should just relaunch under the name "FreeGreyLady" or something ("the grey lady" being an old-school nickname for the New York TImes, even though it's been in color for a while now.) Assuming the Times' hasn't trademarked that, I'd think they couldn't touch it.
Zill writes
...all of which can also be found on the Times' website...
I just checked and that page is no longer available on the NYT website -- no surprise there given their request to Twitter.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
By stopping it at its source. So shutdown the NYTimes twitter account - that way there will be no way to re-tweet it.
-CF
Can't you see, this paywall thing, facebook, and all the app stuff ist just AWESOME!
finally, all the frakking idiots are hidden from the internet. The internet(TM) is going to be cleaned.
nasty discussions about fake journalism are taking place aside from the public, nobody gives a shit if polititian A really did boink his dog. THAT'S JUST AWESOME!
All the idiots discussing farts behind closed doors on facebook. Please, PLEASE, more paywalls and the like.
Appify everything that mainstream-retards like, make them pay for it. REALLY REALLY pay for it (money I mean).
I for one welcome our new Closed Curtain Overlords!
Don't read it, don't buy it, and for damn certain don't pay for online access to it. Good lord, read your news anywhere else; these guys are out of control.
Violate freedom of speech? Where have you been the past few months...
Shutting it down will only trigger imitators. Heck, asking for shutdown may have already done that.
Um, no, that's not the right analogy. It's more like:
Read slashdot without ads:
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotYourRightsOnline
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
They aren't even doing that.
All they are doing is making a list of the NYT's twitter accounts. That's it. That's not 'retweeting', the article summary is very wrong. (What else is new?)
They are literally asking Twitter to stop someone from saying 'Here are the twitter feeds of the New York Times'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The New York Times did not intend people to collect all feeds in a singular location to make it easier for people to read articles for free. The intention was to allow genuine subscribers to share articles, and hopefully entice others to subscribe to get the full content.
Whether it violates Tweeter policy or is illegal does not matter; clearly, that feed goes against the original intention of the NYT and tries to exploit a loophole so that all freeloaders can bypass the pay wall completely.
But, hey! I get it. They screwed up by opening themselves to exploitation, so they deserve what they get, right? It's not like we need to be civil or anything; after all it is our god given right to get the The New York Times for free. How dare they try to make money, those evil, nasty corporations.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
...could just attract enough online advertisers?
I hope that the NYTimes can find a business model that works on the web. I really do. I hope they manage to persuade people to pay for their journalism.
But, and I cannot stress this enough, I hope their model is one that works without having to make special arrangements with, or otherwise threaten and interfere with, other providers of content on the web and ISPs.
Their problem is that they want the promotion benefits of sites like Twitter, and they want to make the NYT free to people who come from there so that Twitter users don't complain that following a link has taken them up to their limit of free pages. But they also want to encourage users to come to them via other routes as well. This is so very much like wanting to eat their cake and have it to that it deserves to fail horribly.
What no one has managed to do is make a paywall that has the simplicity (and lack of commitment) of buying a paper newspaper. I was tempted to buy the London Times online, until I saw that I needed to sign up for a subscription and hand over my bank details first. Give me a way to pay 50p or 75c for my morning newspaper without any other fuss and I'll gladly pay the daily fee, as readily as I buy cheap iPhone applications. Not, of course, that I'm the first to think in these terms, though Apple for the moment are keeping their offering on the iPad.
like this one Hedge Fund Bets $40 Million That Twitter Can Predict The Stock Market
NYT is trying to make a flexible paywall system which still allows limited linking to articles. It's a lot better than current systems like the Wall Street Journal Online. What do the users of the internet do? Try and abuse it to get stuff for free. What's going to happen is not that free speech on Twitter will be chilled. What will happen is that the NYT will go behind a tougher paywall, monetization be damned. Net users have to work with companies some, they can't pounce on every single attempt to make distribution cheaper and easier and try to make content free.
Who the fuck cares what they intended? J. Random Twitter user is not required to divine the Times's intent, let alone respect it. The Times itself tweeted these articles, the Times itself provided those feeds, and in doing so they did not somehow create an obligation (legal or otherwise) to anyone else not to link to them.
What's uncivil is to try to apply your own personal rules of civility to the rest of the world at large. If the NYT doesn't want to provide Twitter users free articles, they can feel free to stop. If they don't want to feed the links to twitter themselves, again, they can feel free to stop. However, for them to demand that they be able to feed the links to twitter but expect that no one else point this out is not at all civil.
This is how Twitter works. If NYT has a problem with it, then they didn't do they homework when they've opened their feed(s). But no worries - they can always stop using it now if they don't like the model.
I stand by what I said, and your comments reinforce my position.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
no, their model wouldn't work on that, they're apparently so expensive to run as an organization.
they need paying customers on top of the ad money on the pages, if the ads on the pages were sufficient on their own then no paywall would have made any sense to put up. also, this is actually why huffington post got bought for so much money while nyt needs to throw away tens of millions to just keep a web site running(network costs are not in that i reckon..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
>If the Times succeeds in shutting this down, it could have a chilling effect for Twitter and online free speech in general.
When are we going to stick with tech news, reading your daily times through twitter hardly counts as geekspeak dudes, wake up and smell the java, or fire cmdtaco for letting it turn this bad, but do something!