WTF? Of course other business models exist, but if a business owner wants to be nice, he/she can actually create a profitable system without the end user having to pay a dime! It is really a beautiful system. People who don't like the advertisements just don't click on them, and read the content. People who find the advertisements too obtrusive, go elsewhere to get their content.
It is really a simple arrangment that requires little to no formal education to understand. It also requires little to no education to understand how that blocking the ads (pay-per-impression) prevents the site owner from earning revenue, but allows you to still access the cotent, thereby dissolving this once comfortable and profitable arrangement.
You are right, your tools ultimately will be better. And, subsequently, the content that you read will, eventually, be worse because you were unwilling to pay someone (by leaving up those ads) to do a good job.
Good work!
I truly hope that your tools in whatever business you have are better than the tools of those trying to steal from you!
Let's get things, this is not a chicken before egg issue. The complaints began with readers being upset with the ads they had to get through (pop-ups, banners, whatever) in order to read content and responded with tools and methods to circumvent the intentions and, ultimately, the remuneration, of the authors themselves.
It is not "whining" to defend yourself and your work from individuals who use it against your terms of service.
I believe that Science, and especially physics, is coming to an incredibly important crossroads. It is very possible, if not probable, that theory has and will continue to outpace experimental ability such that few if any verifiable predictions can exist.
For example, let's pretend that you want to determine what your girlfriend was doing 45 minutes ago in her car on the way home from work. This information may be unknowable if she is dead, was alone while driving, and the car is missing. While it may be completely true that she was drunk and went in the wrong direction off the side of a bridge onto a tug boat and is now on her way to the dump, this may be unknowable.
So is the case with String Theory and many other advanced scientific and mathematical theories. Although, in the case of string theory, the barriers to testing and experimentation may be far far greater than this. It is very possible that the physical world which we experience is unable to affect measurable change in the multiverse in a manner that would result in a reaction that is measurable back in the physical world. This does not make predictions or theory inaccurate, but simply untestable.
More importantly, it brings into question the value of Science as a whole. Science is not a tool that will guarantee answers. It may produce only accurate knowledge, but not necessarily the most thorough or useful knowledge. Assumptions and ideas are also valuable, as is art, music, and many other things that exist outside the parameters of testable and experimental knowledge.
If our smartest minds begin to abandon studies like String Theory because of these types of Scientific shortcomings, we may just get bad ideas and bad results, rather than good ideas with no results. I'd rather read a good book of ideas, than no books at all.
Intent to commit a crime is called conspiracy. In fact, if you conspire to commit a crime with a group of friends and then, at the last minute, decide to not go forward with it, you are still guilty of conspiracy.
Fair use has never, to this point, included duplication and reproduction of a complete work for financial gain. That is what I am getting at. We are not talking about snippets here, we are talking about the complete duplication of a copyrighted work being reprinted without author permission.
The burden, in past, has always been on the copyright licensor, not the copyright owner. For example, an author did not have to know the law to write a book, publish it, and prevent its contents from being fully redistributed for profit without his or her knowledge. Now, authors must be familiar with HTML (and have access to it, mind you, as many users publish to free blogs that do not grant this access) to prevent republication by Google.
Google is stealing traffic from authors by republishing their materials without direct consent.
The Google cache is absolutely ridiculous. As an individual who has had quite a bit of experience on both sides of the white hat / black hat search engine industry, the cache is NOT a webmaster's friend.
1. The cache removes content control away from the author. For example, a site like EzineArticles.com prevents scraping by using an IP blocking method based on the speed at which pages are spidered by that IP. It is absurdly easy to circumvent this by simply spidering the Google cache of that article instead of spidering the site. Google's IP blocking is far less restrictive, and combined with the powerful search tool, it allows for easy, anonymous contextual scraping of sites whose Terms of Service explicitly refuse it.
2. The cache extends access to removed content, often for months if not years at a time. Google rarely replaces 404 pages (perhaps it is because of their wish to have the largest number of indexed pages). I have clients who have nearly 48,000 non existent pages still cached in google that have not been present in over 14 months. Despite using 404s, 301s, etc. these pages have not yet been removed. Furthermore, Google's often mishandling of robots.txt, nocache, and nofollow leaves webmasters dependent upon search traffic hesitant to force removal of these pages using the supposedly standardized methods of removal.
3. The cache allows Google to serve site content anonymously. Don't want the owner of a site to know you are looking at their goods (think of companies grepping for competitor IPs), just watch the cache instead.
The list goes on and on. But I think the point is this...
Why should a web author have to be technologically savvy to keep his or her content from being reproduced by a multi-billion dollar US company? Content control used to be as simple as "you write it, its yours". It got a little more complicated with time to the point at which it might be useful to use, perhaps, a Terms of Service. Even a novice could write "No duplication allowed without expressed consent". Now, a web author must know how to manipulate HTML meta tags and/or a robots.txt file.
Fair use is for users, for people, not multi-billion dollar companies.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? Of course other business models exist, but if a business owner wants to be nice, he/she can actually create a profitable system without the end user having to pay a dime! It is really a beautiful system. People who don't like the advertisements just don't click on them, and read the content. People who find the advertisements too obtrusive, go elsewhere to get their content. It is really a simple arrangment that requires little to no formal education to understand. It also requires little to no education to understand how that blocking the ads (pay-per-impression) prevents the site owner from earning revenue, but allows you to still access the cotent, thereby dissolving this once comfortable and profitable arrangement.
Oh, it is certainly not legally binding. But it doesn't mean you aren't an asshole for circumventing it.
You are right, your tools ultimately will be better. And, subsequently, the content that you read will, eventually, be worse because you were unwilling to pay someone (by leaving up those ads) to do a good job. Good work! I truly hope that your tools in whatever business you have are better than the tools of those trying to steal from you!
Let's get things, this is not a chicken before egg issue. The complaints began with readers being upset with the ads they had to get through (pop-ups, banners, whatever) in order to read content and responded with tools and methods to circumvent the intentions and, ultimately, the remuneration, of the authors themselves.
It is not "whining" to defend yourself and your work from individuals who use it against your terms of service.
I have a better idea ---
How about you just don't patronize sites that show ads?
"What? But then I don't get to read the free content???"
Tough. Stop whining. Either look at the ads and read, or dont look at the ads and dont read.
I believe that Science, and especially physics, is coming to an incredibly important crossroads. It is very possible, if not probable, that theory has and will continue to outpace experimental ability such that few if any verifiable predictions can exist.
For example, let's pretend that you want to determine what your girlfriend was doing 45 minutes ago in her car on the way home from work. This information may be unknowable if she is dead, was alone while driving, and the car is missing. While it may be completely true that she was drunk and went in the wrong direction off the side of a bridge onto a tug boat and is now on her way to the dump, this may be unknowable.
So is the case with String Theory and many other advanced scientific and mathematical theories. Although, in the case of string theory, the barriers to testing and experimentation may be far far greater than this. It is very possible that the physical world which we experience is unable to affect measurable change in the multiverse in a manner that would result in a reaction that is measurable back in the physical world. This does not make predictions or theory inaccurate, but simply untestable.
More importantly, it brings into question the value of Science as a whole. Science is not a tool that will guarantee answers. It may produce only accurate knowledge, but not necessarily the most thorough or useful knowledge. Assumptions and ideas are also valuable, as is art, music, and many other things that exist outside the parameters of testable and experimental knowledge.
If our smartest minds begin to abandon studies like String Theory because of these types of Scientific shortcomings, we may just get bad ideas and bad results, rather than good ideas with no results. I'd rather read a good book of ideas, than no books at all.
Intent to commit a crime is called conspiracy. In fact, if you conspire to commit a crime with a group of friends and then, at the last minute, decide to not go forward with it, you are still guilty of conspiracy.
Fair use has never, to this point, included duplication and reproduction of a complete work for financial gain. That is what I am getting at. We are not talking about snippets here, we are talking about the complete duplication of a copyrighted work being reprinted without author permission. The burden, in past, has always been on the copyright licensor, not the copyright owner. For example, an author did not have to know the law to write a book, publish it, and prevent its contents from being fully redistributed for profit without his or her knowledge. Now, authors must be familiar with HTML (and have access to it, mind you, as many users publish to free blogs that do not grant this access) to prevent republication by Google. Google is stealing traffic from authors by republishing their materials without direct consent.
The Google cache is absolutely ridiculous. As an individual who has had quite a bit of experience on both sides of the white hat / black hat search engine industry, the cache is NOT a webmaster's friend.
1. The cache removes content control away from the author. For example, a site like EzineArticles.com prevents scraping by using an IP blocking method based on the speed at which pages are spidered by that IP. It is absurdly easy to circumvent this by simply spidering the Google cache of that article instead of spidering the site. Google's IP blocking is far less restrictive, and combined with the powerful search tool, it allows for easy, anonymous contextual scraping of sites whose Terms of Service explicitly refuse it.
2. The cache extends access to removed content, often for months if not years at a time. Google rarely replaces 404 pages (perhaps it is because of their wish to have the largest number of indexed pages). I have clients who have nearly 48,000 non existent pages still cached in google that have not been present in over 14 months. Despite using 404s, 301s, etc. these pages have not yet been removed. Furthermore, Google's often mishandling of robots.txt, nocache, and nofollow leaves webmasters dependent upon search traffic hesitant to force removal of these pages using the supposedly standardized methods of removal.
3. The cache allows Google to serve site content anonymously. Don't want the owner of a site to know you are looking at their goods (think of companies grepping for competitor IPs), just watch the cache instead.
The list goes on and on. But I think the point is this...
Why should a web author have to be technologically savvy to keep his or her content from being reproduced by a multi-billion dollar US company? Content control used to be as simple as "you write it, its yours". It got a little more complicated with time to the point at which it might be useful to use, perhaps, a Terms of Service. Even a novice could write "No duplication allowed without expressed consent". Now, a web author must know how to manipulate HTML meta tags and/or a robots.txt file.
Fair use is for users, for people, not multi-billion dollar companies.