8 ms·

The reason everyone is reacting the way they are is because this news really isn't about this particular website. It's about the fact that the largest corporati

by slivym 8y ago

The reason everyone is reacting the way they are is because this news really isn't about this particular website. It's about the fact that the largest corporation on earth has decided it can freeboot everyone else's content. It's part of a trend too. Google a topic and on the right hand side of the page you'll see the first paragraph from Wikipedia. How exactly do you expect wikipedia to survive if no one ever has to actually go there to get the information it publishes? Not only is it an unethical way of presenting content - providing information without referencing the source, but it's actively damaging the source of the information by intercepting users who would otherwise use the service. The fact that "Oh well, it was fine this time" isn't a valid justification for why they decided to do it in the first place.

zorked 8y ago
> How exactly do you expect wikipedia to survive if no one ever has to actually go there Did they start running ads or something?
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  They've been requesting for donations on their website, the main source of their income.
  - zorked 8y ago
    That doesn't mean you can't use Wikipedia's content in other ways, nor does it make it immoral to do so. I found this page which gives an overview of what's ok to do with their content. Mirroring is literally the first example they give. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
  - piva00 8y ago
    It doesn't mean that everyone that visits Wikipedia is going to donate. It means that they save a TON of bandwidth from people that would access Wikipedia for a specific information and bounce, it doesn't alienate the important part of Wikipedia's maintenance: editors and collaborators. So all-in-all the lost revenue from donations is more than covered by the savings in bandwidth.
    - piyush_soni 8y ago
      If we extrapolate what you're saying, no one visiting their website would mean all the bandwidth saving, but no income at all. So it doesn't hold good.
- always_good 8y ago
  Yes, they essentially run ads asking for donations. Sometimes entire above-the-fold ads. They can get pretty hardcore like those personal appeals from Jimmy Wales. Pretty much what it takes to get people to donate money to one of the most important and popular websites online.
aiaf 8y ago
Wikipedia's content license allows that and probably saves them a bunch of bandwidth costs to boot.
planb 8y ago
Again, this is not Apple using his work in their own software. This is Apple providing the downloadable source code (because a workflow inside Shortcuts is exactly that) to a program that accesses an image URL from his site. Most people complaining about those "evil large corps" probably don't want this to be illegal (neither for Apple nor for anyone else)!
- JW_00000 8y ago
  But the "downloadable source code" is written by Apple, so that workflow _is_ software by Apple that takes an image from his website and displays it without attribution.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    Well, not really: > When I clicked "show actions" it revealed the "actions" that make up the shortcut and I could finally see the JGuitar.com link in the URL section. I mean, that's not exactly a proper attribution notice, I'll give you that... but it's not just straight hot-linking without any visible attribution at all. (edit2: I mean, they are sending thousands of visitors to the OP's image service, it is hot-linking, which is legal but very improper without notice; you'd think these were some teenage hackers that never heard of "netiquette" before – it would have been pretty stand-up of them to give him a heads-up so he could be sure he had some proper CDNs set up in front of them, rather than sending his bandwidth bills through the ceiling with no notice... that's not really cool, and it puts them at risk too. If I was the author and I wasn't happy about this, my next step would be to update my website and then replace all of the hot-linked image URLs with something like a big FU to Apple, and it would take Apple some time to react to that and get the egg off their faces after their customers started calling to ask why the Shortcuts app is giving them the middle-finger. It would also ensure that they don't do this again, at least not with JGuitar.com – and I don't think the author wants that.)
    - kmonsen 8y ago
      That's the thing, it seems likely that this content could change it they could get some hostile website owner that changes some pictures to porn or whatever. Kind of risky for an Apple app. To be clear, I don't think Apple is wrong, just a bit risky.
cromwellian 8y ago
Google does reference the Wikipedia source, in fact the right hand box is the #1 way I end up on Wikipedia, I see a a summary, and click the Wikipedia link to read the full article. Wikipedia is the worse example you could have picked, because forking their content is encouraged.
- forthefuture 8y ago
  Much of the time I don't see a link to Wikipedia. If I Google "Malta" there is a paragraph on the right and no link to Wikipedia. This also happens in Google Maps, when you click on a city and they have the blurb, much of the time there is no link, so you have to leave the page to Wikipedia the name of the city. Actually having just tried a few different queries, it seems to be inconsistent. I'm not sure why they'd show the link sometimes and not every time, but definitely Malta doesn't show a link for me.
  - Micoloth 8y ago
    I don't know for geography, but for other things e.g. movies, the short plot description they put out now is Not from wikipedia. Hence no link. I've wondered what the source is for a while now, but if you go on the wikipedia page, that sentence is not from there
    - blktiger 8y ago
      I've assumed since there is no link that the content is something that Google has been adding.
  - greeneggs 8y ago
    Those Maps blurbs, like for Malta, do not come from Wikipedia.
    - forthefuture 8y ago
      But they all used to, which means functionally the only difference is now there isn't a link so I have to make an additional request, in a new tab, directly to Wikipedia for more information (Demographics, Economics, Government, etc).
kowdermeister 8y ago
The internet is about freebooting until you hit a paywall. Wikipedia is a very bad example, they literally put a free to copy license on their content.
- rchaud 8y ago
  > The internet is about freebooting until you hit a paywall. Just because something doesn't have a paywall doesn't mean the content creator intends for you to take his/her work with zero attribution. That's why those "Buy me a coffee"/"Donate to my Patreon" buttons exist. It's a way for the user to consume the information for free up front but have the option to support the creator.
cyborgx7 8y ago
The web was literally built do be usable this way. I know people have started to believe that the only allowable way to view "content" is in the way the website builders decided, but your browser is allowed to display the content it downloaded in any way it wants to you.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  You're right and I'm totally on board with that. But that doesn't seem to be how Apple works, if they freely share everything they put on line then, for sure, have at it. If they expect people to pay to access their IPR then they should, without prompting, pay others when they want access to their's.
  - cyborgx7 8y ago
    You're right, the big companies are the biggest offenders against this intended use of the web. And that's bad. And they aren't accessing others intellectual property with this. They are building custom tools to display other's intellectual property. Very different.
    - threeseed 8y ago
      So Google, Microsoft and Apple who fund and build the web browser you are currently using are against the intended use of the web. I wish more companies would "offend" then.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - gcb0 8y ago
        browser have very explicit rules against this very action by apple. in your browser, apple.com cannot access the content from jguitar.com
        boodrizz 8y ago
Kim_Bruning 8y ago
I expect wikipedia to survive just fine. Wikipedia is explicitly made for that. That said, google does recognize that a healthy web (and therefore google) benefits a lot from wikipedia and other wikimedia projects. They often donate to the wikimedia foundation, and sometimes do collaborations as well. + source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google#Donations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google#Donations
emodendroket 8y ago
Google scrapes a lot more content than that. They're practically doing the Cpedia thing, except coherent.
woodrowbarlow 8y ago
isn't this the impetus for the UK's "link tax" proposal?
ihuman 8y ago
How is this freebooting? Apple isn't rehosting the data from the website.
- benregenspan 8y ago
  It's not freebooting, it's more akin to hotlinking. Which is arguably worse - they're using the author's IP and hosting infrastructure without offering sufficient credit or so much as a heads-up. This could quickly make a side project unsustainable, if the owner of a (hypothetical, not this specific) project has limited $ for hosting costs. The author of the project can't make use of the obvious strategy of dropping in an ad or two to defray hosting costs because the images are being hotlinked. This kind of behavior would be a violation of the ToS on almost any site that has one; it would certainly be a violation of Apple's own ToS. But beyond that, it's just thoughtless and rude.
  - dcow 8y ago
    Hotlink sounds a lot like hyperlink. Really it just sounds like people need to protect their content with licenses and "website experiences" with terms if they want to enforce restrictions on how things they host publicly are used. I agree it seems rude that they didnt give the owner any warning, but meh.
    - jplayer01 8y ago
      Seems like you're just ignoring all his points because you don't care about the consequences. Plenty of us do happen to care.

by slivym 8y ago

zorked 8y ago

> How exactly do you expect wikipedia to survive if no one ever has to actually go there Did they start running ads or something?

piyush_soni 8y ago
They've been requesting for donations on their website, the main source of their income.
- zorked 8y ago
  That doesn't mean you can't use Wikipedia's content in other ways, nor does it make it immoral to do so. I found this page which gives an overview of what's ok to do with their content. Mirroring is literally the first example they give. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- piva00 8y ago
  It doesn't mean that everyone that visits Wikipedia is going to donate. It means that they save a TON of bandwidth from people that would access Wikipedia for a specific information and bounce, it doesn't alienate the important part of Wikipedia's maintenance: editors and collaborators. So all-in-all the lost revenue from donations is more than covered by the savings in bandwidth.
  - piyush_soni 8y ago
    If we extrapolate what you're saying, no one visiting their website would mean all the bandwidth saving, but no income at all. So it doesn't hold good.
always_good 8y ago
Yes, they essentially run ads asking for donations. Sometimes entire above-the-fold ads. They can get pretty hardcore like those personal appeals from Jimmy Wales. Pretty much what it takes to get people to donate money to one of the most important and popular websites online.

aiaf 8y ago

Wikipedia's content license allows that and probably saves them a bunch of bandwidth costs to boot.

planb 8y ago

Again, this is not Apple using his work in their own software. This is Apple providing the downloadable source code (because a workflow inside Shortcuts is exactly that) to a program that accesses an image URL from his site. Most people complaining about those "evil large corps" probably don't want this to be illegal (neither for Apple nor for anyone else)!

JW_00000 8y ago
But the "downloadable source code" is written by Apple, so that workflow _is_ software by Apple that takes an image from his website and displays it without attribution.
- yebyen 8y ago
  Well, not really: > When I clicked "show actions" it revealed the "actions" that make up the shortcut and I could finally see the JGuitar.com link in the URL section. I mean, that's not exactly a proper attribution notice, I'll give you that... but it's not just straight hot-linking without any visible attribution at all. (edit2: I mean, they are sending thousands of visitors to the OP's image service, it is hot-linking, which is legal but very improper without notice; you'd think these were some teenage hackers that never heard of "netiquette" before – it would have been pretty stand-up of them to give him a heads-up so he could be sure he had some proper CDNs set up in front of them, rather than sending his bandwidth bills through the ceiling with no notice... that's not really cool, and it puts them at risk too. If I was the author and I wasn't happy about this, my next step would be to update my website and then replace all of the hot-linked image URLs with something like a big FU to Apple, and it would take Apple some time to react to that and get the egg off their faces after their customers started calling to ask why the Shortcuts app is giving them the middle-finger. It would also ensure that they don't do this again, at least not with JGuitar.com – and I don't think the author wants that.)
  - kmonsen 8y ago
    That's the thing, it seems likely that this content could change it they could get some hostile website owner that changes some pictures to porn or whatever. Kind of risky for an Apple app. To be clear, I don't think Apple is wrong, just a bit risky.

cromwellian 8y ago

Google does reference the Wikipedia source, in fact the right hand box is the #1 way I end up on Wikipedia, I see a a summary, and click the Wikipedia link to read the full article. Wikipedia is the worse example you could have picked, because forking their content is encouraged.

forthefuture 8y ago
Much of the time I don't see a link to Wikipedia. If I Google "Malta" there is a paragraph on the right and no link to Wikipedia. This also happens in Google Maps, when you click on a city and they have the blurb, much of the time there is no link, so you have to leave the page to Wikipedia the name of the city. Actually having just tried a few different queries, it seems to be inconsistent. I'm not sure why they'd show the link sometimes and not every time, but definitely Malta doesn't show a link for me.
- Micoloth 8y ago
  I don't know for geography, but for other things e.g. movies, the short plot description they put out now is Not from wikipedia. Hence no link. I've wondered what the source is for a while now, but if you go on the wikipedia page, that sentence is not from there
  - blktiger 8y ago
    I've assumed since there is no link that the content is something that Google has been adding.
- greeneggs 8y ago
  Those Maps blurbs, like for Malta, do not come from Wikipedia.
  - forthefuture 8y ago
    But they all used to, which means functionally the only difference is now there isn't a link so I have to make an additional request, in a new tab, directly to Wikipedia for more information (Demographics, Economics, Government, etc).

kowdermeister 8y ago

The internet is about freebooting until you hit a paywall. Wikipedia is a very bad example, they literally put a free to copy license on their content.

rchaud 8y ago
> The internet is about freebooting until you hit a paywall. Just because something doesn't have a paywall doesn't mean the content creator intends for you to take his/her work with zero attribution. That's why those "Buy me a coffee"/"Donate to my Patreon" buttons exist. It's a way for the user to consume the information for free up front but have the option to support the creator.

cyborgx7 8y ago

The web was literally built do be usable this way. I know people have started to believe that the only allowable way to view "content" is in the way the website builders decided, but your browser is allowed to display the content it downloaded in any way it wants to you.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
You're right and I'm totally on board with that. But that doesn't seem to be how Apple works, if they freely share everything they put on line then, for sure, have at it. If they expect people to pay to access their IPR then they should, without prompting, pay others when they want access to their's.
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  You're right, the big companies are the biggest offenders against this intended use of the web. And that's bad. And they aren't accessing others intellectual property with this. They are building custom tools to display other's intellectual property. Very different.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    So Google, Microsoft and Apple who fund and build the web browser you are currently using are against the intended use of the web. I wish more companies would "offend" then.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gcb0 8y ago
      browser have very explicit rules against this very action by apple. in your browser, apple.com cannot access the content from jguitar.com
      - boodrizz 8y ago

Kim_Bruning 8y ago

I expect wikipedia to survive just fine. Wikipedia is explicitly made for that. That said, google does recognize that a healthy web (and therefore google) benefits a lot from wikipedia and other wikimedia projects. They often donate to the wikimedia foundation, and sometimes do collaborations as well. + source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google#Donations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google#Donations

emodendroket 8y ago

Google scrapes a lot more content than that. They're practically doing the Cpedia thing, except coherent.

woodrowbarlow 8y ago

isn't this the impetus for the UK's "link tax" proposal?

ihuman 8y ago

How is this freebooting? Apple isn't rehosting the data from the website.

benregenspan 8y ago
It's not freebooting, it's more akin to hotlinking. Which is arguably worse - they're using the author's IP and hosting infrastructure without offering sufficient credit or so much as a heads-up. This could quickly make a side project unsustainable, if the owner of a (hypothetical, not this specific) project has limited $ for hosting costs. The author of the project can't make use of the obvious strategy of dropping in an ad or two to defray hosting costs because the images are being hotlinked. This kind of behavior would be a violation of the ToS on almost any site that has one; it would certainly be a violation of Apple's own ToS. But beyond that, it's just thoughtless and rude.
- dcow 8y ago
  Hotlink sounds a lot like hyperlink. Really it just sounds like people need to protect their content with licenses and "website experiences" with terms if they want to enforce restrictions on how things they host publicly are used. I agree it seems rude that they didnt give the owner any warning, but meh.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    Seems like you're just ignoring all his points because you don't care about the consequences. Plenty of us do happen to care.