10 ms·

The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down

357 points by gluejar 13y ago

tinco 13y ago
Catchy title, but: " I used their images/video to make a point. I can see how the video could fall under Fair Use" Frankly I don't see at all how that would fall under Fair Use, and The Times is absolutely right to C&D him. Also, "A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement." No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. NYT doesn't even claim that the reference is copyright infringement, the author just assumes that. edit: ok, I actually thought he had put a demo website online in which he used the images, so it would look like the NYT's page (but with lorem ipsum for text or something) but he just made an educational video of it, I can see that could be fair use. So I retract my absolute statement. (as should be done with absolute statements in general! (absolutely)) I still think the 'hundreds of hours' remark isn't cool, but perhaps the law is on his side there too.
- lucisferre 13y ago
  Could you elaborate on how or why it doesn't fall under fair use, or is this just an angrily expressed opinion on the matter?
  - mashmac2 13y ago
    Fair Use under US copyright isn't cut and dry, to say the least. Columbia University has released a checklist to determine if a use is 'fair' or not. http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-checklist/ http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-ch... Note: I don't think it's been challenged legally yet, but it's certainly a fair piece of policy and a strong guideline, from a professor who is very respected in the copyright law field.
- e40 13y ago
  No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not by public data is slander. That doesn't sound right. Sounds more like divulging a trade secret. Slander is telling an untruth about someone.
  - tinco 13y ago
    How can it be divulging a trade secret when he isn't in on NYT's trade secrets? I think it's slander because he does not know how many hours NYT spent on making it, he could be totally wrong yet he is stating it as fact. Anyhow it's an unfair comparison because NYT actually had to come up with this idea, he just had to replicate it.
    - mattdeboard 13y ago
      I think it's slander because he does not know how many hours NYT spent on making it You're confusing the legal concept of "slander" with the concept of "perhaps being wrong". For extra irony, by your definition of slander, you're guilty of it simply by accusing this guy of being guilty of it. edit: Whoops, by posting this I too am guilty of slander by your definition.
      - D9u 13y ago
        Actually, slander is spoken. When dealing with print, the term is libel.
        lazugod 13y ago
        Why is the difference meaningful?
        zbyszek 13y ago
        I presume because the relative permanence of the printed word relative to the spoken, leading to its potentially greater exposure.
        mattdeboard 13y ago
        I was going to point that out but it seems like such a trifling point to make when there's not even any defamation at hand.
      - tinco 13y ago
- gluejar 13y ago
  The takedown was for a video of the making of a technical reconstruction of a news feature. It was not a takedown of the reconstruction of the news feature. It's a little bit like a takedown of a paper airplane made of the new york times.
- palebluedot 13y ago
  No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not by public data is slander. No it is not.
  - tinco 13y ago
    Oh ok
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - stonemetal 13y ago
      slander is spoken, the term you are looking for is libel.
      - bspatafora 13y ago
        Here in the US, it's very difficult to prevail on a claim of either slander or libel (vis-a-vis many European countries), thanks to the First Amendment. While NYT Co may (may) be in the right regarding their first C&D, I would be shocked if they were to prevail on the second.
        messick 13y ago
        It's harder in the US than many European companies, because it's not slander/libel if the information is true. However, if the information is false, than the Times could have a case.
        MertsA 13y ago
        Only if the defendant knew it was false when they wrote it. It's not too easy to prove that in a lot of cases.
        stonemetal 13y ago
        That is pretty much what I thought too. To me the first seemed like over reach but understandable, the second is just silly.
- betterunix 13y ago
  The use of copyrighted material for criticism or comment (e.g. "to make a point") is, in fact, considered fair use: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 Additionally, the video was educational (it demonstrated how to create something), further bolstering the claim of fair use. The NYT is entirely out of line with the C&D, and it is particularly troubling that a newspaper -- which frequently engages in fair use, frequently reproducing material as part of their journalism and their criticism -- would send such a letter.
  - newhouseb 13y ago
    IANAL, but scrollkit appears to actually be a startup (judging from their about page), meaning that the video was more along the lines of a demonstration video of a product or even a advertisement than an educational video. My understanding of the rational for "fair use" is use for the benefit of the public good and explicitly not for the commercial purposes, this seems to me to be very commercial.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      Look at the actual definition of fair use. There is no requirement that the use be non-commercial, only criteria that include whether or not the use was commercial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
  - a_bonobo 13y ago
    I disagree, this video was educational about his product, so there was a commercial interest behind it. As such, this isn't a fair use case; there have been cases in the past where copy-shops copied parts of books for educational purposes, but because there was a commercial intent behind it US courts ruled that not to be fair use. See: Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996). http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/case-summaries/ http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/case-summar... Of course, that one sentence they told him later to take down is a different thing I can't understand.
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  > No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. That is not enough. It also needs to be untrue and it needs to harm the reputation of the company.
  - anotherbadlogin 13y ago
    Even that's not enough. You have to KNOW it's not true when you say or publish it.
- jimray 13y ago
  I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of fair use seems to be about as poor as everyone's. What Scrollkit did, though, was tacky, plain and simple. They built an impressive product but are using someone else's work to try to promote it[1]. Is that illegal? I doubt it. But it's tasteless. And the smarmy "we did this in an hour" attitude is not only off-putting, it stretches the truth to the point of breaking. Anyone who's followed a "build a blog in five minutes" demo knows there's more to building something than just scaffolding -- Andre Torrez probably [said it best](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours.html http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...). There are plenty of ways they could have demonstrated their product without resorting to this kind of shallow mimicry. "Have you been blown away by the incredible work like the New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? Want to build something similar yourself? We'd like to show you scrollkit." And then do a demo video with your own photography and reporting. Tells the same story without the shiteating grin. As it stands right now, though, they just look like they're jumping on a trend using someone else's work. [1] Disclaimer: I have friends who work at the Times, including ones that worked on Snowfall.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. whether slander or libel or whatever, this article states how much time NYT spent on it: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/ http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made... so much for backing it up. the author stating he did it in an hour, might be true or a boast, that's a claim about himself not the NYT, doesn't matter if it's true or not. i can see how they can ask him to remove the video (and the author complied), but I really don't get on what grounds they can ask him to remove all mentions of NYT from his site.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is an interesting question, I can see the argument that the NYT has the rights to do what ever they want with the Snow Fall story material but it seems an over-reach to ask Scroll kit to remove a reference to them in their description. That last bit seems like fair use. If I write a book "in the style of Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories'" by what reasoning would the Kipling estate ownership of that style?
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  It is not 'fair use', because it is not copyrighted in the first place. 'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z. Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use.
  - itafroma 13y ago
    > It is not 'fair use', because it is not copyrighted in the first place. > 'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z. > Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use. This is simply incorrect: I wish you'd stop replying to everyone who mentions "fair use" with this. Nominative fair use is the ability to use someone else's trademark for the purposes of comparison. Thus, NYT's second demand, to cease referring to "The New York Times" on Scrollkit's website is entirely about fair use. It has nothing to do with NYT's copyright claims.
    - greenyoda 13y ago
      But according to the three criteria described in this article on nominative use[1], it looks like using the New York Times' trademark in this case would be perfectly legitimate: The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if: 1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute). 2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol). 3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
jrochkind1 13y ago
It is especially ironic that a NEWS organization would claim that facts are protected by copyright, and one needs someone's permission to report factual claims. Such a legal theory is rather inimical to the business of news.
- donohoe 13y ago
  No - they claim Snow Fall is protected by copyright and that it us being used to promote a service.
  - jrochkind1 13y ago
    No - the copyright in the Snow Fall article indeed protects him from _copying_ the Snow Fall article (unless it is fair use). Yes, he may have violated copyright by doing so. The copyright in the Snow Fall article does not give anyone the rights to prevent someone from saying "The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding 'Snow Fall'. We made a replica in an hour." That quote from their letter is the part I was referring to.
    - donohoe 13y ago
      Gotcha. My bad. I'll re-read the post
lucisferre 13y ago
This Daft Punk article might be a suitable replacement for the author. http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/
- caycep 13y ago
  I wonder why we haven't heard as much from the development team at Pitchfork. The masthead lists Development team as: Matt Dennewitz Neil Wargo Andrew Gaerig They do amazing work with the Cover Story series. A blog post from them showing off their techniques would gain a huge amount of traction, at least here on HN
  - mattdennewitz 13y ago
    hey, matt here. we (pitchfork's dev and design teams) have traditionally kept a low profile, but that time is quickly moving behind us. i'd love to talk about how we build our cover stories, our philosophies on integrating tasteful advertising, etc. what would you like to hear about? edit: here are our cover stories: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/. we've been at it for a while, and you can see where the idea grew legs, learned to walk, and took off. pretty neat.
    - ZaAaV 13y ago
      Hey matt, thanks for that story, it is truly beautiful (both in content and container)... just wanted to mention it!
      - mattdennewitz 13y ago
        thanks for the kind words! my team is nothing w/o the incredible teams -- design, editorial, biz -- we work with every day. few names make it into the bright parallaxing lights of the final product, but really, everyone touches it, even if indirectly or tangentially.
    - caycep 13y ago
cimorene12 13y ago
Snow Fall (video/images) is protected by copyright, but ‘The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall.” We made a replica in an hour.' is nominative fair use. He might have to say something about not being affiliated with the NYT in any way, but he should be able to make that claim. Truth is a perfect defense.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  You are confusing your legal theories. It does not violate copyright, it is true, to say "The NYT spent hundreds of hours..." It is not 'fair use' though, because it is not a use of copyrighted material in the first place. 'Fair use' means fair use _of copyrighted material_, it is a defense against using copyrighted material without permission. 'Truth' is not in fact any kind of a defense against copyright. If you really _do_ copy someone's copyrighted work without permission, and it is not fair use, then it is completely irrelevant whether the text you copied was 'true' or not. But if did not copy someone's copyrighted work, then you can't possibly have violated their copyright. For instance, if someone else had first written an article that began "The NYT spent hundreds of hours...", and went on, and you copied that entire article yourself without permission, and you did not have a fair use defense -- you would be violating their copyright, regardless of how true or false the article was. 'nominative fair use' is a legal theory of _trademark_, and what you say may actually be more applicable to trademark, aha, okay. Important to be clear though.
  - itafroma 13y ago
    > 'nominative fair use' is a legal theory of _trademark_, and what you say may actually be more applicable to trademark, aha, okay. Important to be clear though. This part is the only part that matters here: the second C&D about the use of New York Times mark is entirely about whether it's fair use to use it.
  - cimorene12 13y ago
    Yes, nominative fair use is about trademarks. I'm sorry that I didn't make that sufficiently clear, since the first part of that sentence was about copyright and the second was about trademarks. And again, what I was talking about with truth was more about claims and less about copyright.
gamache 13y ago
This is equivalent to a Youtube video where someone demonstrates how to play a popular song on a guitar. Anyone against that is not on the same team as me.
- anonymousab 13y ago
  So...most major musicians, according to their representatives?
- methehack 13y ago
  I disagree that your example is equivalent. If I understand how the OP is using the times content, I think the equivalent would be using, without permission, the entirety of a popular video or song to demo a media player that you wrote. Personally, I'm acutely aware of and entirely in support of the times' need to protect their vast investment in generating the very best news that people are capable of generating. TBH, I'm a little surprised and confused that the OP is surprised and confused.
  - stonemetal 13y ago
    He used images to show how his implementation compared to the original. At the first C&D he took it down and replaced it a simple compare with the times article sentence. They sent him a C&D for that sentence. The first is understandable. The second not so much.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    > I think the equivalent would be using, without permission, the entirety of a popular video or song to demo a media player that you wrote. I disagree with that, since people who make money with movies and music tend to do that via selling access to the media, which the NYT doesn't seem to be doing in this case and the OP consequently doesn't interfere with (even before the OP apparently didn't reproduce the NYT content in its entirety).
    - doktrin 13y ago
      > I disagree with that, since people who make money with movies and music tend to do that via selling access to the media That is excessive rationalization. What the creators intend to do with their content is kinda up to them. The fact that they haven't tried to directly monetize it doesn't somehow make it fair game, and the OP even acknowledges this.
perlpimp 13y ago
seems news papers resemble entertainment companies closer and closer. Sad to see NYT - respectable News publication stoop this low. It is that or legal makes the company look like that.
6d0debc071 13y ago
When lawyers make demands they often don't have the law backing them. When there's no consequence for making spurious and vague legal threats, the system is going to be abused. Edit: It's unfortunate, but ... yeah. It might be worth forwarding your story to some legal blogs that specialise in free speech I suppose, but other than that. shrug I'm afraid I'm not sure what you can do if you don't have the money to fight them.
- DannyBee 13y ago
  If there were non-criminal consequences for making spurious and vague threats, lawyers would just make legal threats involving those consequences as a response to threats made to lawyers.
crisnoble 13y ago
Did it really take NYT hundreds of hours to create that story or did he pull that out of his hat?
- crazygringo 13y ago
  Hundreds of hours coule be reasonable if you included conception, explorations of alternatives, etc... Just think of multiple designers being involved. It's incredibly easier/quicker to code something when you're just copying someone else's end result.
  - crisnoble 13y ago
    I agree that it is reasonable, and the level of polish that they had in the final result is worthy of their time. I am sure that scrollkit has spent much more than 100s of hours creating the scrollkit toolbox and presumably the NYT did it from scratch. I am mostly wondering where he got that number from, was it a guess, did they quote it at some point?
    - gluejar 13y ago
      God took centuries to write the bible; Gutenberg reproduced the work in a few days.
hkmurakami 13y ago
>‘The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall.” We made a replica in an hour. It’s an unreasonable and baffling request for the New York Times to tell us to take down this statement. A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement. Can something like this be considered defamation? (or did NYT come out and publicly say that they spent hundreds of hours hand coding this?)
- itafroma 13y ago
  The main reference I found to the amount of time it took came from a Q&A[1] that appeared after it was published: > [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication. Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim. I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components: > We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in the past like the modal slideshows. But some tools/libraries include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address. In triggering scroll-based events, I took inspiration from Remy Sharp’s inview jquery plugin. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-at-tunnel-creek.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-a... [2]: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/ http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...
- chc 13y ago
losethos 13y ago
wha? God says... uncircumcised: three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it shall not be eaten of. 19:24 But in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy to praise the LORD withal. 19:25 And in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it may yield unto you the increase thereof: I am the LORD your God. 19:26 Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times. 19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. 19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. 19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness. ---- rare meat is evil!! I guess. God says... wasting punish tale redeem camp Denmark shone nineteenth motive dare I'm_not_sure weary exhalation contradict no_news_is_good_news Trojan aforetime take Project ARE happens mirthful motherly THIS ascribed well-ordering forethink condemns benefit revolting showedst established counted matters USE contend panting traveller 'knock derided
PonyGumbo 13y ago
About ten years ago I was working for a company that was featured in a (fairly glowing) article in the NYT. We linked to it from our media page, and a month or two later received a similar letter from their legal department instructing us to either remove the link, or pay them some outrageous amount of money (something like $4500, if I recall correctly). So we changed the link to an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google that took you directly to the article. Never heard about it again.
larrys 13y ago
"but we don’t have the resources to fight the Times’s legal department" My personal opinion (based on years of observation of this type of thing) is that it is well worth the money to invest in an IP lawyer to review and to see if you have a leg to stand on with respect to fair use. The reason being is that this is a tempest in a teapot [1] and has the potential to deliver gross amounts of publicity to the startup as it is discussed and dissected ad infinitum. As such if the IP attorney decides that there is a basis for fair use I would go with it if at all possible and keep the page up. In the end the Times isn't going to want the negative publicity over this (even if they have a reasonable case) and may very well end up backing down. Could end up being a Streisand effect as well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot
- bediger4000 13y ago
  invest in an IP lawyer to review... The problem I have with that is that only a trial can tell "fair use" from "not fair use". A few billable hours with a lawyer probably won't tell you anything more than that. Review is great, but it's not an absolute, as an IP lawyer is most definitely not the final authority.
  - larrys 13y ago
    All I am looking at is whether there is a basis to hang a hat on. And if that is the case then people will come to the defense of the accused and the complainant may back down or reevaluate their position. All with the resulting publicity (which actually would happen even if he was wrong but that's much more risky so I wouldn't advocate w/o some leg). In any event you have to ask yourself what their game is and whether they would seek damages (can't get blood from a stone you know) and whether they even want to spend (they aren't exactly super profitable or anything) resources on this. Consequently I don't care what would happen at trial because there isn't going to be a trial. The NYT isn't going to spend resources on this. This is all strategy based on my experience.[2] You ask 10 people you will get 10 opinions. All I'm saying is that it pays to have someone review before backing down in "3 days". [1] [1] Absolutely inconceivable that the NYT won't allow someone to locate an attorney to review which in no case is 3 days reasonable. There is no imminent harm to them. This is on the face the standard "scary lawyer letter" intended to cause exactly the reaction that it did. [2] I had two situations where both American Express and the NCAA came calling with scary lawyer letters many years ago and was able to keep them at bay with a reply letter from my attorney. And other things like this. Law and strategy are two different things.
pixelmonkey 13y ago
If this isn't a "native advertisement" for scrollkit, nothing is. I can't believe a piece of content marketing has gotten the #1 spot on HN.
- jaynos 13y ago
  I managed to read the article without further exploration of scrollkit. I think the front page (and most people's interest) is due to the copyright aspect.
  - calhoun137 13y ago
    I clicked the link, but only because ironically on my android tablet i couldnt scroll the page! I think it must be an android chrome overscroll-y issue, because i can scroll it on the native android browser.
- resu_nimda 13y ago
  Yeah really. Way too self-promotional and "hey everybody get mad at how I was wronged by BigCo" for my tastes. As others have noted, the hundreds of hours vs. one hour claim is very disingenuous. Cutting and pasting an existing work into your toolkit is not even close to designing and creating an original piece of investigative journalism. And, at the end there, actually calling on the NYT to advertise this scrollkit on panels? Because...why? The creator thinks it's really cool?
  - aptwebapps 13y ago
    Use of succinct language requires context and common sense. Would anyone actually think he was describing a magical content generator?
sharkweek 13y ago
I thought Snow Fall was great -- but I'd much rather tip my hat to Pitchfork.com for their "Cover Story" series when it comes to compelling online content publishing: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/
- caycep 13y ago
  Their technical lead Matt Dennewitz seems to post here too. It's high time for a blog post about Pitchfork Cover Story, Matt!
geuis 13y ago
I want to address the common demonstration of "it took you N * X hours to make something, but I replicated in N hours". We see this statement very often. When Pinterest got popular, how long until we saw replicas? When Medium and Svbtle were introduced, wasn't it just a matter of hours to me-too replicas came along? There was one fellow who's name escapes me that came up with the hidden-left interface menu that you swipe into view from the top that's now commonly used in the Facebook app and many, many mobile sites. None of this is new, and there's nothing wrong with it. Copying is the biggest form of flattery as is often said, and its a validation of your idea. What happens very often is that we see great ideas in their finished, polished form. Someone's showed us the path. When you show me how to build a bridge, I don't have to invent a bridge. In many cases, I see your awesome bridge and figure out even better ways to build it. But coming up with that first bridge, doing the engineering and testing and iterations on it, that's hard. That's really hard. So yeah, you can recreate what someone else made in a lot shorter time than it took them to invent it. But invent something new and you'll see it takes you a long time too.
- alttab 13y ago
  I dont like this as the top comment because its a tangent and doesn't address the topic of the article at all - The New York Times being crazy about what they consider copyright.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Completely OT, but when the hell did the asterisk-asterisk denoter for italics become multi-line? geuis: you should be able to fix it by adding spaces around the first asterisk, if you're so moved.
  - geuis 13y ago
    Thanks Sara. Glad I checked back in time to catch that.
    - jholman 13y ago
      Pro internet tip: use the name people have given you. In this case, either the username "saraid216", or the name given in the person's profile. And now that I've started on this topic, I'll also note that people make a lot of wrong guesses about gender, too.
js2 13y ago
How Snow Fall was Made: A Q&A with the NYT team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747788
ben0x539 13y ago
Does the NYT have a right (before we get into fair use or w/e) to demand that a video be deleted off youtube rather than made private? I thought copyright was (roughly) about limiting distribution, so even if NYT's copyright claims apply to that video, can they control what the OP does with it if its not being published?
- nness 13y ago
  If it were uploaded to YouTube servers, and shared across CDN's around the world, would that not be distribution in the finer sense? Additionally, "private" is different than unlisted, and the video can still be shared publicly, just in a limited sense.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    Ah, I thought youtube only had public/"only with link"/none sharing. Cheers.
taylodl 13y ago
Well played sir! You've managed to take a run-of-the-mill little David vs. the Big Media Goliath story and use it as a sales pitch for your scroll kit and made the front page of HN to boot!
ZaAaV 13y ago
just post it back already
prawn 13y ago
Surely if the tool is good, it can stand on its own? The author could easily have used greeking or content promoting ScrollKit to fill the site. Ripping off NYT's material is a dodgy way to start things IMO. Hell, write your own feature about a pet, or your grandparents' legacy or soup up a page of Wikipedia content with Creative Commons and attributed Flickr photos. I almost don't care what happened after that (the private YouTube video, the leveraging of their brand, etc). The reaction to the initial contact could've been overwhelmingly apologetic - complete removal of the video, no leveraging of Snow Fall and so on - but instead makes for linkbait. Even now, going to the demo gives the big "they made me do it" message when any text could've replaced their content very easily. You know, replicated in an hour... This story might've got the tool excellent publicity, but I don't view it positively as a result.
rdl 13y ago
I wonder if it's reasonable to put the snowfall replica back up now as it has become closer to an element of a fair use political speech over copyright overreach.
pekk 13y ago
Is it just me or has medium.com begun to dominate HN in the last month?
- GeorgeTirebiter 13y ago
  It's not just you. It's done by people who, apparently, hate the iPad pinch-to-zoom gesture --- since medium.com does not permit that.
peterwwillis 13y ago
Bad writing. Bloggers that start talking about something as if I know what it is, and never even take 2 sentences to describe it, really grind my gears. I still don't know what the story is about or why newsrooms would refer to it. On top of that, the piece is the most vain attempt at generating controversy for the sake traffic i've ever seen. Please, can't blatant attempts at advertising be taken off HN?
- spullara 13y ago
  I prefer this style. For those that don't know what it is there is Google. For those of us that do, we don't have to skip over it and find the start of the article. On your second point, I can concur.
GeorgeTirebiter 13y ago
This "medium.com" site causes the "pinch to zoom" function to not work on the iPad. This sucks. I refuse to read sites that break things like this. Why do they wish to disenfranchise iPad users?
- voyou 13y ago
  I've seen quite a few sites which prevent zooming on mobile browsers. I think it's to do with: "Mobile Safari often just zooms the page when changing from portrait to landscape, instead of laying out the page as it would if originally loaded in landscape. If web developers want their scale settings to remain consistent when switching orientations on the iPhone, they must add a maximum-scale value to prevent this zooming, which has the sometimes-unwanted side effect of preventing users from zooming in." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/View... Whatever the reason, it's pretty annoying.
bowerbird 13y ago
view-source on "snow fall" and you'll see that it's bloatware underneath, through and through. so i am pleased to see any kind of tool being offered to creative individuals that will help to simplify the matter of creating such sites. if i did a replica, i would scramble the text, and dummy the images and video, so as to avoid any copyright issues. but that's a side-issue. the important point is big-money corporations usually employ cost-inefficient methodologies. it'd be a mistake for individuals to think that such wasteful methodologies are the only route. so don't let the n.y. times bully you into the incorrect perception that only it can create a lush presentation a la "snow fall". you can too. -bowerbird
peripetylabs 13y ago
The fact that their website still doesn't have a viewable demonstration of their software suggests it actually isn't so easy to make interactive content like Snow Fall. The only thing I could find was this very annoying video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA62gHzVpA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA62gHzVpA
31reasons 13y ago
They feel so outdated compared with the internet culture of open source and sharing. You can almost feel the dinosaurs crumbling and dying!
ewest 13y ago
This is the first time I have heard of Snow Fall - and no wonder - it's nothing new. A bunch of moving pictures and some text. I don't see how this is any different than sites with irritating flash video ads (or just video) on them - text plus video/moving pictures. If I were someone at NYT, I would be flattered that someone took the time to replicate my stuff since it seems someone seems to think it's worth stealing/borrowing/copying/etc

357 points by gluejar 13y ago

tinco 13y ago

Catchy title, but: " I used their images/video to make a point. I can see how the video could fall under Fair Use" Frankly I don't see at all how that would fall under Fair Use, and The Times is absolutely right to C&D him. Also, "A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement." No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. NYT doesn't even claim that the reference is copyright infringement, the author just assumes that. edit: ok, I actually thought he had put a demo website online in which he used the images, so it would look like the NYT's page (but with lorem ipsum for text or something) but he just made an educational video of it, I can see that could be fair use. So I retract my absolute statement. (as should be done with absolute statements in general! (absolutely)) I still think the 'hundreds of hours' remark isn't cool, but perhaps the law is on his side there too.

lucisferre 13y ago
Could you elaborate on how or why it doesn't fall under fair use, or is this just an angrily expressed opinion on the matter?
- mashmac2 13y ago
  Fair Use under US copyright isn't cut and dry, to say the least. Columbia University has released a checklist to determine if a use is 'fair' or not. http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-checklist/ http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-ch... Note: I don't think it's been challenged legally yet, but it's certainly a fair piece of policy and a strong guideline, from a professor who is very respected in the copyright law field.
e40 13y ago
No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not by public data is slander. That doesn't sound right. Sounds more like divulging a trade secret. Slander is telling an untruth about someone.
- tinco 13y ago
  How can it be divulging a trade secret when he isn't in on NYT's trade secrets? I think it's slander because he does not know how many hours NYT spent on making it, he could be totally wrong yet he is stating it as fact. Anyhow it's an unfair comparison because NYT actually had to come up with this idea, he just had to replicate it.
  - mattdeboard 13y ago
    I think it's slander because he does not know how many hours NYT spent on making it You're confusing the legal concept of "slander" with the concept of "perhaps being wrong". For extra irony, by your definition of slander, you're guilty of it simply by accusing this guy of being guilty of it. edit: Whoops, by posting this I too am guilty of slander by your definition.
    - D9u 13y ago
      Actually, slander is spoken. When dealing with print, the term is libel.
      - lazugod 13y ago
        Why is the difference meaningful?
        zbyszek 13y ago
        I presume because the relative permanence of the printed word relative to the spoken, leading to its potentially greater exposure.
      - mattdeboard 13y ago
        I was going to point that out but it seems like such a trifling point to make when there's not even any defamation at hand.
    - tinco 13y ago
gluejar 13y ago
The takedown was for a video of the making of a technical reconstruction of a news feature. It was not a takedown of the reconstruction of the news feature. It's a little bit like a takedown of a paper airplane made of the new york times.
palebluedot 13y ago
No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not by public data is slander. No it is not.
- tinco 13y ago
  Oh ok
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - stonemetal 13y ago
    slander is spoken, the term you are looking for is libel.
    - bspatafora 13y ago
      Here in the US, it's very difficult to prevail on a claim of either slander or libel (vis-a-vis many European countries), thanks to the First Amendment. While NYT Co may (may) be in the right regarding their first C&D, I would be shocked if they were to prevail on the second.
      - messick 13y ago
        It's harder in the US than many European companies, because it's not slander/libel if the information is true. However, if the information is false, than the Times could have a case.
        MertsA 13y ago
        Only if the defendant knew it was false when they wrote it. It's not too easy to prove that in a lot of cases.
      - stonemetal 13y ago
        That is pretty much what I thought too. To me the first seemed like over reach but understandable, the second is just silly.
betterunix 13y ago
The use of copyrighted material for criticism or comment (e.g. "to make a point") is, in fact, considered fair use: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 Additionally, the video was educational (it demonstrated how to create something), further bolstering the claim of fair use. The NYT is entirely out of line with the C&D, and it is particularly troubling that a newspaper -- which frequently engages in fair use, frequently reproducing material as part of their journalism and their criticism -- would send such a letter.
- newhouseb 13y ago
  IANAL, but scrollkit appears to actually be a startup (judging from their about page), meaning that the video was more along the lines of a demonstration video of a product or even a advertisement than an educational video. My understanding of the rational for "fair use" is use for the benefit of the public good and explicitly not for the commercial purposes, this seems to me to be very commercial.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    Look at the actual definition of fair use. There is no requirement that the use be non-commercial, only criteria that include whether or not the use was commercial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- a_bonobo 13y ago
  I disagree, this video was educational about his product, so there was a commercial interest behind it. As such, this isn't a fair use case; there have been cases in the past where copy-shops copied parts of books for educational purposes, but because there was a commercial intent behind it US courts ruled that not to be fair use. See: Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996). http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/case-summaries/ http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/case-summar... Of course, that one sentence they told him later to take down is a different thing I can't understand.
Ma8ee 13y ago
> No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. That is not enough. It also needs to be untrue and it needs to harm the reputation of the company.
- anotherbadlogin 13y ago
  Even that's not enough. You have to KNOW it's not true when you say or publish it.
jimray 13y ago
I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of fair use seems to be about as poor as everyone's. What Scrollkit did, though, was tacky, plain and simple. They built an impressive product but are using someone else's work to try to promote it[1]. Is that illegal? I doubt it. But it's tasteless. And the smarmy "we did this in an hour" attitude is not only off-putting, it stretches the truth to the point of breaking. Anyone who's followed a "build a blog in five minutes" demo knows there's more to building something than just scaffolding -- Andre Torrez probably [said it best](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours.html http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...). There are plenty of ways they could have demonstrated their product without resorting to this kind of shallow mimicry. "Have you been blown away by the incredible work like the New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? Want to build something similar yourself? We'd like to show you scrollkit." And then do a demo video with your own photography and reporting. Tells the same story without the shiteating grin. As it stands right now, though, they just look like they're jumping on a trend using someone else's work. [1] Disclaimer: I have friends who work at the Times, including ones that worked on Snowfall.
tripzilch 13y ago
> No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. whether slander or libel or whatever, this article states how much time NYT spent on it: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/ http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made... so much for backing it up. the author stating he did it in an hour, might be true or a boast, that's a claim about himself not the NYT, doesn't matter if it's true or not. i can see how they can ask him to remove the video (and the author complied), but I really don't get on what grounds they can ask him to remove all mentions of NYT from his site.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This is an interesting question, I can see the argument that the NYT has the rights to do what ever they want with the Snow Fall story material but it seems an over-reach to ask Scroll kit to remove a reference to them in their description. That last bit seems like fair use. If I write a book "in the style of Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories'" by what reasoning would the Kipling estate ownership of that style?

jrochkind1 13y ago
It is not 'fair use', because it is not copyrighted in the first place. 'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z. Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use.
- itafroma 13y ago
  > It is not 'fair use', because it is not copyrighted in the first place. > 'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z. > Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use. This is simply incorrect: I wish you'd stop replying to everyone who mentions "fair use" with this. Nominative fair use is the ability to use someone else's trademark for the purposes of comparison. Thus, NYT's second demand, to cease referring to "The New York Times" on Scrollkit's website is entirely about fair use. It has nothing to do with NYT's copyright claims.
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    But according to the three criteria described in this article on nominative use[1], it looks like using the New York Times' trademark in this case would be perfectly legitimate: The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if: 1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute). 2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol). 3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

jrochkind1 13y ago

It is especially ironic that a NEWS organization would claim that facts are protected by copyright, and one needs someone's permission to report factual claims. Such a legal theory is rather inimical to the business of news.

donohoe 13y ago
No - they claim Snow Fall is protected by copyright and that it us being used to promote a service.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  No - the copyright in the Snow Fall article indeed protects him from _copying_ the Snow Fall article (unless it is fair use). Yes, he may have violated copyright by doing so. The copyright in the Snow Fall article does not give anyone the rights to prevent someone from saying "The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding 'Snow Fall'. We made a replica in an hour." That quote from their letter is the part I was referring to.
  - donohoe 13y ago
    Gotcha. My bad. I'll re-read the post

lucisferre 13y ago

This Daft Punk article might be a suitable replacement for the author. http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/daft-punk/

caycep 13y ago
I wonder why we haven't heard as much from the development team at Pitchfork. The masthead lists Development team as: Matt Dennewitz Neil Wargo Andrew Gaerig They do amazing work with the Cover Story series. A blog post from them showing off their techniques would gain a huge amount of traction, at least here on HN
- mattdennewitz 13y ago
  hey, matt here. we (pitchfork's dev and design teams) have traditionally kept a low profile, but that time is quickly moving behind us. i'd love to talk about how we build our cover stories, our philosophies on integrating tasteful advertising, etc. what would you like to hear about? edit: here are our cover stories: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/. we've been at it for a while, and you can see where the idea grew legs, learned to walk, and took off. pretty neat.
  - ZaAaV 13y ago
    Hey matt, thanks for that story, it is truly beautiful (both in content and container)... just wanted to mention it!
    - mattdennewitz 13y ago
      thanks for the kind words! my team is nothing w/o the incredible teams -- design, editorial, biz -- we work with every day. few names make it into the bright parallaxing lights of the final product, but really, everyone touches it, even if indirectly or tangentially.
  - caycep 13y ago

cimorene12 13y ago

Snow Fall (video/images) is protected by copyright, but ‘The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall.” We made a replica in an hour.' is nominative fair use. He might have to say something about not being affiliated with the NYT in any way, but he should be able to make that claim. Truth is a perfect defense.

jrochkind1 13y ago
You are confusing your legal theories. It does not violate copyright, it is true, to say "The NYT spent hundreds of hours..." It is not 'fair use' though, because it is not a use of copyrighted material in the first place. 'Fair use' means fair use _of copyrighted material_, it is a defense against using copyrighted material without permission. 'Truth' is not in fact any kind of a defense against copyright. If you really _do_ copy someone's copyrighted work without permission, and it is not fair use, then it is completely irrelevant whether the text you copied was 'true' or not. But if did not copy someone's copyrighted work, then you can't possibly have violated their copyright. For instance, if someone else had first written an article that began "The NYT spent hundreds of hours...", and went on, and you copied that entire article yourself without permission, and you did not have a fair use defense -- you would be violating their copyright, regardless of how true or false the article was. 'nominative fair use' is a legal theory of _trademark_, and what you say may actually be more applicable to trademark, aha, okay. Important to be clear though.
- itafroma 13y ago
  > 'nominative fair use' is a legal theory of _trademark_, and what you say may actually be more applicable to trademark, aha, okay. Important to be clear though. This part is the only part that matters here: the second C&D about the use of New York Times mark is entirely about whether it's fair use to use it.
- cimorene12 13y ago
  Yes, nominative fair use is about trademarks. I'm sorry that I didn't make that sufficiently clear, since the first part of that sentence was about copyright and the second was about trademarks. And again, what I was talking about with truth was more about claims and less about copyright.

gamache 13y ago

This is equivalent to a Youtube video where someone demonstrates how to play a popular song on a guitar. Anyone against that is not on the same team as me.

anonymousab 13y ago
So...most major musicians, according to their representatives?
methehack 13y ago
I disagree that your example is equivalent. If I understand how the OP is using the times content, I think the equivalent would be using, without permission, the entirety of a popular video or song to demo a media player that you wrote. Personally, I'm acutely aware of and entirely in support of the times' need to protect their vast investment in generating the very best news that people are capable of generating. TBH, I'm a little surprised and confused that the OP is surprised and confused.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  He used images to show how his implementation compared to the original. At the first C&D he took it down and replaced it a simple compare with the times article sentence. They sent him a C&D for that sentence. The first is understandable. The second not so much.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  > I think the equivalent would be using, without permission, the entirety of a popular video or song to demo a media player that you wrote. I disagree with that, since people who make money with movies and music tend to do that via selling access to the media, which the NYT doesn't seem to be doing in this case and the OP consequently doesn't interfere with (even before the OP apparently didn't reproduce the NYT content in its entirety).
  - doktrin 13y ago
    > I disagree with that, since people who make money with movies and music tend to do that via selling access to the media That is excessive rationalization. What the creators intend to do with their content is kinda up to them. The fact that they haven't tried to directly monetize it doesn't somehow make it fair game, and the OP even acknowledges this.

perlpimp 13y ago

seems news papers resemble entertainment companies closer and closer. Sad to see NYT - respectable News publication stoop this low. It is that or legal makes the company look like that.

6d0debc071 13y ago

When lawyers make demands they often don't have the law backing them. When there's no consequence for making spurious and vague legal threats, the system is going to be abused. Edit: It's unfortunate, but ... yeah. It might be worth forwarding your story to some legal blogs that specialise in free speech I suppose, but other than that. shrug I'm afraid I'm not sure what you can do if you don't have the money to fight them.

DannyBee 13y ago
If there were non-criminal consequences for making spurious and vague threats, lawyers would just make legal threats involving those consequences as a response to threats made to lawyers.

crisnoble 13y ago

Did it really take NYT hundreds of hours to create that story or did he pull that out of his hat?

crazygringo 13y ago
Hundreds of hours coule be reasonable if you included conception, explorations of alternatives, etc... Just think of multiple designers being involved. It's incredibly easier/quicker to code something when you're just copying someone else's end result.
- crisnoble 13y ago
  I agree that it is reasonable, and the level of polish that they had in the final result is worthy of their time. I am sure that scrollkit has spent much more than 100s of hours creating the scrollkit toolbox and presumably the NYT did it from scratch. I am mostly wondering where he got that number from, was it a guess, did they quote it at some point?
  - gluejar 13y ago
    God took centuries to write the bible; Gutenberg reproduced the work in a few days.

hkmurakami 13y ago

>‘The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall.” We made a replica in an hour. It’s an unreasonable and baffling request for the New York Times to tell us to take down this statement. A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement. Can something like this be considered defamation? (or did NYT come out and publicly say that they spent hundreds of hours hand coding this?)

itafroma 13y ago
The main reference I found to the amount of time it took came from a Q&A[1] that appeared after it was published: > [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication. Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim. I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components: > We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in the past like the modal slideshows. But some tools/libraries include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address. In triggering scroll-based events, I took inspiration from Remy Sharp’s inview jquery plugin. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-at-tunnel-creek.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-a... [2]: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/ http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...
chc 13y ago

losethos 13y ago

wha? God says... uncircumcised: three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it shall not be eaten of. 19:24 But in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy to praise the LORD withal. 19:25 And in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it may yield unto you the increase thereof: I am the LORD your God. 19:26 Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times. 19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. 19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. 19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness. ---- rare meat is evil!! I guess. God says... wasting punish tale redeem camp Denmark shone nineteenth motive dare I'm_not_sure weary exhalation contradict no_news_is_good_news Trojan aforetime take Project ARE happens mirthful motherly THIS ascribed well-ordering forethink condemns benefit revolting showedst established counted matters USE contend panting traveller 'knock derided

PonyGumbo 13y ago

About ten years ago I was working for a company that was featured in a (fairly glowing) article in the NYT. We linked to it from our media page, and a month or two later received a similar letter from their legal department instructing us to either remove the link, or pay them some outrageous amount of money (something like $4500, if I recall correctly). So we changed the link to an "I'm feeling lucky" search on Google that took you directly to the article. Never heard about it again.

larrys 13y ago

"but we don’t have the resources to fight the Times’s legal department" My personal opinion (based on years of observation of this type of thing) is that it is well worth the money to invest in an IP lawyer to review and to see if you have a leg to stand on with respect to fair use. The reason being is that this is a tempest in a teapot [1] and has the potential to deliver gross amounts of publicity to the startup as it is discussed and dissected ad infinitum. As such if the IP attorney decides that there is a basis for fair use I would go with it if at all possible and keep the page up. In the end the Times isn't going to want the negative publicity over this (even if they have a reasonable case) and may very well end up backing down. Could end up being a Streisand effect as well. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot

bediger4000 13y ago
invest in an IP lawyer to review... The problem I have with that is that only a trial can tell "fair use" from "not fair use". A few billable hours with a lawyer probably won't tell you anything more than that. Review is great, but it's not an absolute, as an IP lawyer is most definitely not the final authority.
- larrys 13y ago
  All I am looking at is whether there is a basis to hang a hat on. And if that is the case then people will come to the defense of the accused and the complainant may back down or reevaluate their position. All with the resulting publicity (which actually would happen even if he was wrong but that's much more risky so I wouldn't advocate w/o some leg). In any event you have to ask yourself what their game is and whether they would seek damages (can't get blood from a stone you know) and whether they even want to spend (they aren't exactly super profitable or anything) resources on this. Consequently I don't care what would happen at trial because there isn't going to be a trial. The NYT isn't going to spend resources on this. This is all strategy based on my experience.[2] You ask 10 people you will get 10 opinions. All I'm saying is that it pays to have someone review before backing down in "3 days". [1] [1] Absolutely inconceivable that the NYT won't allow someone to locate an attorney to review which in no case is 3 days reasonable. There is no imminent harm to them. This is on the face the standard "scary lawyer letter" intended to cause exactly the reaction that it did. [2] I had two situations where both American Express and the NCAA came calling with scary lawyer letters many years ago and was able to keep them at bay with a reply letter from my attorney. And other things like this. Law and strategy are two different things.

pixelmonkey 13y ago

If this isn't a "native advertisement" for scrollkit, nothing is. I can't believe a piece of content marketing has gotten the #1 spot on HN.

jaynos 13y ago
I managed to read the article without further exploration of scrollkit. I think the front page (and most people's interest) is due to the copyright aspect.
- calhoun137 13y ago
  I clicked the link, but only because ironically on my android tablet i couldnt scroll the page! I think it must be an android chrome overscroll-y issue, because i can scroll it on the native android browser.
resu_nimda 13y ago
Yeah really. Way too self-promotional and "hey everybody get mad at how I was wronged by BigCo" for my tastes. As others have noted, the hundreds of hours vs. one hour claim is very disingenuous. Cutting and pasting an existing work into your toolkit is not even close to designing and creating an original piece of investigative journalism. And, at the end there, actually calling on the NYT to advertise this scrollkit on panels? Because...why? The creator thinks it's really cool?
- aptwebapps 13y ago
  Use of succinct language requires context and common sense. Would anyone actually think he was describing a magical content generator?

sharkweek 13y ago

I thought Snow Fall was great -- but I'd much rather tip my hat to Pitchfork.com for their "Cover Story" series when it comes to compelling online content publishing: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/

caycep 13y ago
Their technical lead Matt Dennewitz seems to post here too. It's high time for a blog post about Pitchfork Cover Story, Matt!

geuis 13y ago

I want to address the common demonstration of "it took you N * X hours to make something, but I replicated in N hours". We see this statement very often. When Pinterest got popular, how long until we saw replicas? When Medium and Svbtle were introduced, wasn't it just a matter of hours to me-too replicas came along? There was one fellow who's name escapes me that came up with the hidden-left interface menu that you swipe into view from the top that's now commonly used in the Facebook app and many, many mobile sites. None of this is new, and there's nothing wrong with it. Copying is the biggest form of flattery as is often said, and its a validation of your idea. What happens very often is that we see great ideas in their finished, polished form. Someone's showed us the path. When you show me how to build a bridge, I don't have to invent a bridge. In many cases, I see your awesome bridge and figure out even better ways to build it. But coming up with that first bridge, doing the engineering and testing and iterations on it, that's hard. That's really hard. So yeah, you can recreate what someone else made in a lot shorter time than it took them to invent it. But invent something new and you'll see it takes you a long time too.

alttab 13y ago
I dont like this as the top comment because its a tangent and doesn't address the topic of the article at all - The New York Times being crazy about what they consider copyright.
saraid216 13y ago
Completely OT, but when the hell did the asterisk-asterisk denoter for italics become multi-line? geuis: you should be able to fix it by adding spaces around the first asterisk, if you're so moved.
- geuis 13y ago
  Thanks Sara. Glad I checked back in time to catch that.
  - jholman 13y ago
    Pro internet tip: use the name people have given you. In this case, either the username "saraid216", or the name given in the person's profile. And now that I've started on this topic, I'll also note that people make a lot of wrong guesses about gender, too.

js2 13y ago

How Snow Fall was Made: A Q&A with the NYT team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747788

ben0x539 13y ago

Does the NYT have a right (before we get into fair use or w/e) to demand that a video be deleted off youtube rather than made private? I thought copyright was (roughly) about limiting distribution, so even if NYT's copyright claims apply to that video, can they control what the OP does with it if its not being published?

nness 13y ago
If it were uploaded to YouTube servers, and shared across CDN's around the world, would that not be distribution in the finer sense? Additionally, "private" is different than unlisted, and the video can still be shared publicly, just in a limited sense.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  Ah, I thought youtube only had public/"only with link"/none sharing. Cheers.

taylodl 13y ago

Well played sir! You've managed to take a run-of-the-mill little David vs. the Big Media Goliath story and use it as a sales pitch for your scroll kit and made the front page of HN to boot!

ZaAaV 13y ago

just post it back already

prawn 13y ago

Surely if the tool is good, it can stand on its own? The author could easily have used greeking or content promoting ScrollKit to fill the site. Ripping off NYT's material is a dodgy way to start things IMO. Hell, write your own feature about a pet, or your grandparents' legacy or soup up a page of Wikipedia content with Creative Commons and attributed Flickr photos. I almost don't care what happened after that (the private YouTube video, the leveraging of their brand, etc). The reaction to the initial contact could've been overwhelmingly apologetic - complete removal of the video, no leveraging of Snow Fall and so on - but instead makes for linkbait. Even now, going to the demo gives the big "they made me do it" message when any text could've replaced their content very easily. You know, replicated in an hour... This story might've got the tool excellent publicity, but I don't view it positively as a result.

rdl 13y ago

I wonder if it's reasonable to put the snowfall replica back up now as it has become closer to an element of a fair use political speech over copyright overreach.

pekk 13y ago

Is it just me or has medium.com begun to dominate HN in the last month?

GeorgeTirebiter 13y ago
It's not just you. It's done by people who, apparently, hate the iPad pinch-to-zoom gesture --- since medium.com does not permit that.

peterwwillis 13y ago

Bad writing. Bloggers that start talking about something as if I know what it is, and never even take 2 sentences to describe it, really grind my gears. I still don't know what the story is about or why newsrooms would refer to it. On top of that, the piece is the most vain attempt at generating controversy for the sake traffic i've ever seen. Please, can't blatant attempts at advertising be taken off HN?

spullara 13y ago
I prefer this style. For those that don't know what it is there is Google. For those of us that do, we don't have to skip over it and find the start of the article. On your second point, I can concur.

GeorgeTirebiter 13y ago

This "medium.com" site causes the "pinch to zoom" function to not work on the iPad. This sucks. I refuse to read sites that break things like this. Why do they wish to disenfranchise iPad users?

voyou 13y ago
I've seen quite a few sites which prevent zooming on mobile browsers. I think it's to do with: "Mobile Safari often just zooms the page when changing from portrait to landscape, instead of laying out the page as it would if originally loaded in landscape. If web developers want their scale settings to remain consistent when switching orientations on the iPhone, they must add a maximum-scale value to prevent this zooming, which has the sometimes-unwanted side effect of preventing users from zooming in." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/View... Whatever the reason, it's pretty annoying.

bowerbird 13y ago

view-source on "snow fall" and you'll see that it's bloatware underneath, through and through. so i am pleased to see any kind of tool being offered to creative individuals that will help to simplify the matter of creating such sites. if i did a replica, i would scramble the text, and dummy the images and video, so as to avoid any copyright issues. but that's a side-issue. the important point is big-money corporations usually employ cost-inefficient methodologies. it'd be a mistake for individuals to think that such wasteful methodologies are the only route. so don't let the n.y. times bully you into the incorrect perception that only it can create a lush presentation a la "snow fall". you can too. -bowerbird

peripetylabs 13y ago

The fact that their website still doesn't have a viewable demonstration of their software suggests it actually isn't so easy to make interactive content like Snow Fall. The only thing I could find was this very annoying video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA62gHzVpA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA62gHzVpA

31reasons 13y ago

They feel so outdated compared with the internet culture of open source and sharing. You can almost feel the dinosaurs crumbling and dying!

ewest 13y ago

This is the first time I have heard of Snow Fall - and no wonder - it's nothing new. A bunch of moving pictures and some text. I don't see how this is any different than sites with irritating flash video ads (or just video) on them - text plus video/moving pictures. If I were someone at NYT, I would be flattered that someone took the time to replicate my stuff since it seems someone seems to think it's worth stealing/borrowing/copying/etc