12 comments

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  Andy Beard

  1 year ago

  The same argument would be true of Technorati who serve full text of an article on their site, with formatting removed and images removed. That is a derivative.
  
  I don't think the negative argument really has a context. A summary linking through to a full version seem to me an ideal option.
  
  If it is used by splogs, it would actually be a very legitimate option in my opinion, though I relalise our views often differ on many things ;)
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  JB

  1 year ago

  The problem with the Technorati comparison is simple. Nothing in Technorati is designed to actually replace the original feed. All links on Technorati that I have seen point back to the original site or original feed.
  
  You can subscribe to Technorati watchlists, but those only display the beginning snippets, not what is supposed to be the heart of the work, as RSS Brief does by their own description. Looking at fair use and transformative use decisions, I see bad things for RSS Brief.
  
  It's a separation of degrees, I grant, but search engines notoriously flirt with the line on fair use and RSS Brief seems to take that line and push it a few more steps into the really dark grey area.
  
  Strangely, the thing that might save RSS Brief is that it doesn't actually work. If it did and successfully replaced the original work, it'd have a much greater problem in my eyes.
  
  Once again though, if anyone wants an excerpt feed of PT, I'll offer it.
  
  (Note: You say that you've seen the full text of articles on the site, I haven't seen that. Here's PT's site link there:
  
  http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.plagiarismt...
  
  There are only intros to the articles and links to the page, admittedly the intros are a bit longer than on, say, Google, but nothing too outrageous. Is there a page I don't know about?)
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  Andy Beard

  1 year ago

  When logged in, click home so it is showing your Technorati favorites.
  
  Then click "Show Details" on one of the stories
  
  A window pops up with full content
  
  That has been there for as long as I remember (2 years maybe)
  
  The only thing I would be worried about with feeding the RSSBrief feeds to some kind of aggregated blog would be breaking the copyright of.... PayPerPost as they in theory are the copyright holder of the briefs.
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  Will

  1 year ago

  The concept of this service really bothers me. I don't mind an excerpt of something I write with a link back to the article. But... I do not want a machine or human summarizing what I write with the intent that there is then no need to read the full article. I already try to write posts as succinctly as possible, who are they to decide how to cut it down even further. There definitely needs to be an opt out for this, but then most people would probably opt out and RSS Brief would fail.
  
  I (think) Andy is right about the full content. I seem to remember that from a while ago. I tried to verify it just now, but the Technorati site is not loading the home page or favorites for me tonight.
  
  Glad you track this stuff Jonathan. Sometimes when I read one of your posts my head starts to spin!
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• 

  JB

  1 year ago

  Andy: Ah, I see what you're saying. That would make it basically an RSS reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader. At that point, you aren't replacing the feed, you're simplly subscribing to it and using Technorati to do it. Technorati doesn't appear to be creating a new feed that you are supposed to subscribe to instead of the original, like RSS Brief Does.
  
  Will: The concept bothers me too. There's a lot wrong with it from a legal and ethical standpoint. Hopefully this is just the alpha and we're going to see these issues addressed sooner rather than later.
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  Steve

  1 year ago

  As a lawyer and as a blogger, I this new service as a problem. I am concerned about the automated summaries it will produce of content from blogs and RSS or Atom feeds. If someone chooses to read the summary rather than my entire blog entry, they may finish their reading with a significantly different idea than if they had read the entire article.
  
  Depending on the accuracy and reliability of the algorithm that generates the summary, by omitting various words and phrases essential to the context of my blog entry, the RSS Brief service could, theoretically, defame me by attributing to me something I did not say or leaving out something important that I did say.
  
  This is a significantly different situation than, for example, my RSS aggregator which gives me the title and a hyperlink to a blog post, along with the first 15 or 20 words of that post so I can see how it begins. My RSS aggregator (FeedDemon) performs a very simple function, akin to presenting to me the first 2 lines of a page so I can read them quickly and decide if I want to read that item or skip to the next one.
  
  By contrast, it appears that RSS Brief might summarize the contents of RSS feeds, or the full text of the blog entries listed in the feeds, and present them to me instead of the entire blog entries themselves. However, I am somewhat confused about how it will work. I tested it with one of my blogs and I can't see the summaries it's currently producing as a reasonable substitute for the full blog entries.
  
  Of course, since we are seeing an alpha version, we can expect more sophistication to appear later. At the moment, we ought to monitor it to see what develops.
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• 

  JB

  1 year ago

  Steve,
  
  I'm glad to see that I"m not the only one that sees some serious problems with this service. Of course, I didn't even think about the defamation issue. That could be a very serious problem.
  
  If it summarized the sentence "I am not a plagiarist" into "I am a plagiarist" or something to that effect, it could be a major problem, I completely agree.
  
  I have to wonder if the makers of this service really thought the legal implications through.
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  Andy Beard

  1 year ago

  Well I find more problem with someone like the Associated Press take the content from a site, thin it down and don't provide a link, then syndicate it glogbally as a top10 instead of a top100
  
  http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/are-yahoo-guilty-of...
  
  Even worse the Yahoo article was the one that gained massive traffic from Digg, and 100s of links.
  
  That is long term financial damage
  
  If someone subscribes to a summary, they know it is a summary and can follow the link to the original article to clarify facts.
  
  I honestly have more problems with sharing with Google Reader than someone creating summaries of my content for easier consumption.
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  Will

  1 year ago

  I read Andy's article and that really seems out of line. I think a site like Yahoo should NEVER republish content of any amount without a link back to the ORIGINAL author. Even if the site Yahoo gets their story from neglected the link, Yahoo has an obligation, moral and ethical, if even maybe legal, to link to the original source. Yahoo can not claim innocence as they know only too well the value of something like this to the original author, and have the resources to get a link to the original writing.
  
  I would think an attorney could have a field day with a suit claiming damages to a writer when their content, in any form. is published on Yahoo without attribution and a link?
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• 

  JB

  1 year ago

  Andy and Will: For some reason my previous comment didn't take. I'll just say that I agree completely that what the AP and Yahoo did here is entirely wrong. If I had been the content owner, I would have sought to register the works with the USCO and then file against both of them considering what happened. That is especially true for the AP.
  
  I agree that these are worse sins than what RSS Brief is doing and that we have to prioritize our efforts. However, we to at least look at all types of content misuse. We can't ignore one type because it's not the worst possible. That's like ignoring assault because it's not murder.
  
  Still, I agree that the AP and Yahoo need to pay for this. This was a tremendous faux pas.
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  Ramana Rajgopaul

  1 year ago

  Apart from all that has been said in the various comments, I would take serious objection to the whole process on principle. The blogger has taken pains to be as detailed as he thinks is necessary. How can a precis convey what the writer wants to convey? If at all any one should be responsible for this, surely, this should be the original writer?
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  JB

  1 year ago

  Ramana: I wonder that myself. You simply can not summarize 1000 words of content in 50 words of summary. I noticed that no one, in email or comment, asked for a summary feed of this site. I'm going to guess that there is no interest in it.
  
  Therefore, I believe others here feel the same way.
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