there’s been an interesting discussion on
the “fairness” of quoteblogs
, which pull whole posts and only “weakly” attribute the source, if
at all. the
original inluminent post
contains several examples of quoteblogs that are causing the
concern, including
scoble’s
soon to be continued
quoteblog
.
i had recently become quite a fan of scoble’s quoteblog because it
was such a relatively effficient way to find things that i wouldn’t
have found any other way, except that it was always irritating that
it was rough to decipher where the original post came from. i had
tended to think of it as a “readibility” issue, since it’s clear
that scoble’s intent was never to “steal” and it was usually easy
to determine where the post was coming from after doing a little
digging. i’m a bit less comfortable about sites like
stargeek
that don’t make it clear at all that they are
swiping content without attribution
. it certainly seems like
stargeek
is playing fast and loose with any reasonable definition of “fair
use”.
i’ve actually dealt with similar issues with the other sections of
the which aren’t quite linkblogs, but aren’t quite quoteblogs.
years ago when i started, say,
conflux
i had a simple idea of keeping track of all the little quote
snippets that i would collect related to issues that interested me
and see how they would evolve over time.
conflux
with a broader scope and “contextual threading”. in the naive salad
days of yore, i had the vague impression that it probably wouldn’t
be o.k. to quote whole articles, that i probably shouldn’t link
to “for fee” content unless it was part of a freely available
summary and that i should probably make it obvious where the link
was coming from. i didn’t think in terms of the legal definition of
“fair use”, but it seemed to be fair to me and i didn’t think
anyone would be concerned with the half a dozen readers i might
get.
i think it took a year before i got a mildly threatening letter
from an editor at a publication asking if i knew that my site was
“illegal” and likely to expose me to the whims of the
interpretation of “fair use”? i promptly responded that i’d be
happy to remove all links to their publication and alert readers as
to why i had done so. after a few more emails the editor decided
that i was harmless and let the issue go without getting any
lawyers involved.
but now it’s years later and i found myself with a few more than
the original handful of readers and every once in awhile, i wonder
what would happen if i placed ads on the site and started
collecting some pocket change. is it fair for me to make money off
“collecting” other people’s content? does it make a difference if
money is involved [ the editor said that it did factor in her
decision to not pursue the issue further ]? is it “fair” to pull
five sentences? how about ten? twenty? does the length of the original article matter?