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Content ownership, fair use and attribution

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There is a very lively debate between a blogger, Jason Calacanis and the CTO of Skweezer, a "Web
portal that reformats Web pages, searches, and e-mail for handheld
devices, such as PDA's, smartphones, and most XHTML-enabled cell
phones."

At the heart of the discussion is the fair use of content. Jason's complaint is this:

"It’s one thing to take headlines.
It’s one thing to take an excerpt—like the good folks at Google, Topix.net, Feedster or Technorati do—to help people navigate.
It’s
a whole other thing to take your entire feed, wrap your own ads around
it, and try to sell a service on top of the content!"

See Skweezer's version of blogs.msdn.com as an example.

Jason goes on...

"However, their execution of this business idea is to take all of our websites and then:
1. Republish them on their website
2. Place their own advertisements on them
3. Sell a “professional” version of their software based on our content
4. Deny us the ability to track our page views and readers"

A detailed explanation of what Skweezer does and how it does it is provided on blog posting by Barnabas Kendall, CTO of the company. In the same blog posting called 'Why Skweezer is good for Content Publishers', Barnabas tries to explain the company's position:

"Here is a quote from Jim Elve,
which he permitted me to reproduce here, and I think illustrates a
content producer's frustration with Skweezer at first glance: "The
content on my site represents thousands of hours of work. That work is
copyrighted. You are displaying my intellectual property on your site.
You are stripping my ads from my content. You are displaying your ads
with my content. The ad revenue you are receiving is, indeed,
misappropriated."

Barnabas goes on...

"First, the Skweezer service does not interfere with a publisher's visibility of their audience, except for IP address. Publishers will serve the same HTML content traffic
(and slightly less image traffic), hit for hit, which they would
otherwise serve to these mobile browsers, except that these mobile
browsers can actually view and experience the content. Also, nowhere does Skweezer explicitly remove advertising,
unlike a pop-up blocker. Images are removed in accordance with view
mode and size constraints; many advertising images remain intact. The
fact that text ads do not show is a by-product of JavaScript being
removed, not some malicious intent to steal content. How is this
different than someone browsing a site with images and JavaScript
turned off?"

I'm
not sure whether Jason has been pacified or not by Skweezer's genuine
efforts to explain how the service works, but there are a number
of questions that concern bloggers / content creators in
general:

  • When is it ok, is it ok to render content dynamically/statically created by another author on another site/service?
  • What is fair use, what is not?
  • Is
    it ok to take snippets of others' content and republish (as I have done
    above)..if so, how much is content is too much...10%, 50%, 80%,
    100%?
  • If you do use a snippet, should you link to original source? (personally I think this should ALWAYS be the case)

Anyway, if you are introducing any friends to blogging, point them to a little blogging etiquette advice from Cafe Mama and Seton Hill.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2004
    So long as there is a hyperlink back to the original content, I see no problem with such services. I am, however, biased against companies that make usability decisions based on money instead of actual usability. Even when you consider the money alternative, this type of site forces those who do care about money to provide a mobile-accessible alternative to their standard site if they wish to remain in business.

    From his presentation at my college, Ted Nelson showed a vision of hypertext in which microcontent could be freely copied back and forth between sites and their relationships kept intact. The current Web model does not show such relationships to the best extent, but there is room for such improvement.

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2005
    Blog link of the week 53

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2005
    Interesting post regarding copyright:

    'Copyright myths and creative common(s) sense', http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2004/12/copyright_myths.html

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 11, 2005
    Denise Howell interviews (mp3) Bob Wyman (CEO of PubSub) about the thorny subject of the legalities of...

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2006
    PingBack from http://blog.kibin.ru/2006/07/feed-and-rss-tools-in-5-steps/

  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2008
    There is a very lively debate between a blogger, Jason Calacanis and the CTO of Skweezer , a " Web portal that reformats Web pages, searches, and e-mail for handheld devices, such as PDA's, smartphones, and most XHTML-enabled cell phones." At

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2008
    There is a very lively debate between a blogger, Jason Calacanis and the CTO of Skweezer , a " Web portal that reformats Web pages, searches, and e-mail for handheld devices, such as PDA's, smartphones, and most XHTML-enabled cell phones." At

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2009
    PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=alex-barnett-s-blog-content-ownership-fair-use-and-attribution

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
    PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=8665