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Hi Brian, We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was missed. I apologize. We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments

by konsl 18y ago

Hi Brian, We try to respond to every single e-mail we get; not sure how yours was missed. I apologize. We've talked about our policy on re-publishing comments in a few places: - http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withbacktype-co-founder-chris-golda/#more-3814 http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/08/30/five-questions-withb... - http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ http://blog.backtype.com/2008/08/on-republishing-comments/ - etc In summary: what BackType is doing is very similar to other search engines. We make every effort to provide content publishers with familiar methods to restrict BackType from indexing their site's content: http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 http://www.backtype.com/faq#q14 We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We attribute comments to their authors so they can be rewarded for the thoughts and insights they share in comments across the web. Additionally, BackType is already becoming a recognized source of traffic for publishers and we want that to continue.

briansmith 18y ago
Please see the post on Plagiarism Today that was linked to from one of the pages you mentioned above: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republishing-comments/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republish... When I comment on TechCrunch or 37signals, I don't give them the copyright to my comment. I (implicitly) give them a license to republish the comment on their own website. However, I've never given Backtype a license to republish my comments on its website. Even if TechCrunch or 37signals chooses not to opt out of your system, you still don't have any legal rights to republish the comments. From the commenter's standpoint, does it make sense to let you republish my content? I think the answer is emphatically "no." If I republish my own comments myself then I can also monetize them myself. If I build a WordPress plug-in to assist others in doing this, and/or if I build an OpenID extension or robots.txt extension for making comment streams more discoverable, then I can help form a user expectation of "If I want to see all the comments by John Doe, I can find them on John Doe's website." Then all the John Does can decide on their own how they monetize their own content on their own website (e.g. AdSense). Consequently, really you are in direct competition with the people whose content you are re-publishing. AFAICT, you are saying "we're going to profit from your content without compensating you, regardless of the copyright, and there's no way that you can opt out except by refusing to publish new content." That sucks. In the posts you linked to, you are comparing yourself to search engines like Google. The difference between your company and Google is that your company republishes the content in full, but Google provides just a small clip of the content. Google has a fair claim that what they are doing is fair use. Their limited excerpting of content is also what allows them to use an opt-out model instead of an opt-in model. That is also what makes it is easy for content creators to profit from Google's indexing of their content--Google users have to click through to the original site to see the content. You are just re-publishing the content in aggregate form. I'm also curious about whether you think the DCMA safe harbor provisions apply to you when you are republishing others' content. As far as I can tell, they cannot, since you've really just built an automated plagiarism system. That is, there is no user-submitted content on your site; all the content published on your site is published by you yourself. Anyway, if you really didn't get the message I sent your company, it boils down to this: Please remove everything I've written from your website, or come up with a means of fairly compensating me. Thank you.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  How do you feel about Google?
  - briansmith 18y ago
    I edited my comment a little to add some thoughts about Google. But, it doesn't matter how I feel about Google because Google isn't republishing content beyond what is allowed by fair use. So, even if I hated what they were doing, I don't have any legal justification for asking them to stop.
    - konsl 18y ago
      I'm aware of the Plagiarism Today post as I exchanged e-mails with its author. I didn't link it because it contains inaccuracies (especially wrt SEO, etc). Individual comments make up a very small percentage of a page's content, so what we're doing is more similar to Google than you suggest (they also index your comments -- search for them). We display excerpts of pages; we attribute them liberally. A search result on Google leads you to the full page of content; a search result on BackType leads you to a full page of content. We index content for purposes of discovery i.e. search. == Fair use Also, it's pretty obvious that we're not in competition with content publishers, and we provide a very effective way to prohibit BackType from indexing comments.
      - briansmith 18y ago
        I didn't notice any inaccuracies in the Plagiarism Today post. The author of that weblog knows a lot about these issues since he has been helping people fight spam blogs for years. I'm not talking about the rights of the weblog owners. I'm talking about the rights of the commenters on those weblogs. If you search for my comments on backtype, you get the full text of each comment. That goes far beyond fair use. You can search for any fragment of any of my comments on Google and it won't show you the whole comment, it only shows a (fair use) excerpt. To be extra clear, you "excerpt" pages but you are not excerpting the individually-copyrighted comments. It is analogous to a website that republishes a book a page at a time and then claims that each page is a fair-use excerpt of the book. Anyway, I don't see how you can say that your assertion is obvious when I've already explained the ways you compete with content publishers and content authors. Besides that, as the Plagiarism Today piece mentions, you compete in SERP placement since you let search engines index the content you plagiarize.

by konsl 18y ago

briansmith 18y ago

Please see the post on Plagiarism Today that was linked to from one of the pages you mentioned above: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republishing-comments/ http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/09/11/backtype-republish... When I comment on TechCrunch or 37signals, I don't give them the copyright to my comment. I (implicitly) give them a license to republish the comment on their own website. However, I've never given Backtype a license to republish my comments on its website. Even if TechCrunch or 37signals chooses not to opt out of your system, you still don't have any legal rights to republish the comments. From the commenter's standpoint, does it make sense to let you republish my content? I think the answer is emphatically "no." If I republish my own comments myself then I can also monetize them myself. If I build a WordPress plug-in to assist others in doing this, and/or if I build an OpenID extension or robots.txt extension for making comment streams more discoverable, then I can help form a user expectation of "If I want to see all the comments by John Doe, I can find them on John Doe's website." Then all the John Does can decide on their own how they monetize their own content on their own website (e.g. AdSense). Consequently, really you are in direct competition with the people whose content you are re-publishing. AFAICT, you are saying "we're going to profit from your content without compensating you, regardless of the copyright, and there's no way that you can opt out except by refusing to publish new content." That sucks. In the posts you linked to, you are comparing yourself to search engines like Google. The difference between your company and Google is that your company republishes the content in full, but Google provides just a small clip of the content. Google has a fair claim that what they are doing is fair use. Their limited excerpting of content is also what allows them to use an opt-out model instead of an opt-in model. That is also what makes it is easy for content creators to profit from Google's indexing of their content--Google users have to click through to the original site to see the content. You are just re-publishing the content in aggregate form. I'm also curious about whether you think the DCMA safe harbor provisions apply to you when you are republishing others' content. As far as I can tell, they cannot, since you've really just built an automated plagiarism system. That is, there is no user-submitted content on your site; all the content published on your site is published by you yourself. Anyway, if you really didn't get the message I sent your company, it boils down to this: Please remove everything I've written from your website, or come up with a means of fairly compensating me. Thank you.

fallentimes 18y ago
How do you feel about Google?
- briansmith 18y ago
  I edited my comment a little to add some thoughts about Google. But, it doesn't matter how I feel about Google because Google isn't republishing content beyond what is allowed by fair use. So, even if I hated what they were doing, I don't have any legal justification for asking them to stop.
  - konsl 18y ago
    I'm aware of the Plagiarism Today post as I exchanged e-mails with its author. I didn't link it because it contains inaccuracies (especially wrt SEO, etc). Individual comments make up a very small percentage of a page's content, so what we're doing is more similar to Google than you suggest (they also index your comments -- search for them). We display excerpts of pages; we attribute them liberally. A search result on Google leads you to the full page of content; a search result on BackType leads you to a full page of content. We index content for purposes of discovery i.e. search. == Fair use Also, it's pretty obvious that we're not in competition with content publishers, and we provide a very effective way to prohibit BackType from indexing comments.
    - briansmith 18y ago
      I didn't notice any inaccuracies in the Plagiarism Today post. The author of that weblog knows a lot about these issues since he has been helping people fight spam blogs for years. I'm not talking about the rights of the weblog owners. I'm talking about the rights of the commenters on those weblogs. If you search for my comments on backtype, you get the full text of each comment. That goes far beyond fair use. You can search for any fragment of any of my comments on Google and it won't show you the whole comment, it only shows a (fair use) excerpt. To be extra clear, you "excerpt" pages but you are not excerpting the individually-copyrighted comments. It is analogous to a website that republishes a book a page at a time and then claims that each page is a fair-use excerpt of the book. Anyway, I don't see how you can say that your assertion is obvious when I've already explained the ways you compete with content publishers and content authors. Besides that, as the Plagiarism Today piece mentions, you compete in SERP placement since you let search engines index the content you plagiarize.