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I'm not alright with what twine.com is doing
09/10/08
(update Sept. 13) There are two additional posts that chronicle me and Twine.com. Find them here and here
I was browsing through my server logs today and noticed a referral from twine.com. When I checked the referring URL I was shocked to find a complete copy of one of my more popular EEEPC articles that one of their users had bookmarked. I checked a few other articles to see what was going on and found that some of them are one line summaries, others are partial reprints while others are complete reprints. All of the reprinted material does include links to the original articles but that certainly doesn't absolve twine.com of their responsibility to get permission from copyright holders. There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern, my 370 word article was reprinted in full while another 170 word article was excerpted to 85 words. There are also quite a few engadget articles reprinted in their entirety. I guess it's time for me to figure out how to send a DMCA take down notice before more people try to trample on my copyright without permission. Maybe I should drop a note to Weblogs Inc. and see what they think of twine.com using their stuff.
I think I'll send them a email first, perhaps it's an honest mistake and their Semantic Web technology. We shall see.
(update Sept. 10) Twine.com responded very quickly and removed the infringing article. They also appeared to have removed the engadget.com stuff too.
7 comments
Your RSS feed includes the entire text of the articles, whereas the other sites’ RSS feeds probably only include a summary.
interesting, I haven’t decided whether to agree with you or not yet, however if I pulled an RSS feed from a blog, combined it in Google Reader with some others and then made that tag public, wouldn’t you have a similar effect? There are probably a whole host of examples that are similar. Surely the key is that the post is attributed to the correct source.
So true (see previous posts) … These patents / copyright issues may be strongly connected to RSS feeds & the way how information can be spread nowadays ..
Actually it has nothing to do with RSS. According to what I understand about this case, some user submitted your content in full, against our policies. This was reported and the content has been deleted. We follow DMCA copyright guidelines. Once we receive a complaint we act on it.
If it was user generated rather than automatically pulling in the text, it doesn’t seem to be something that can be blamed no the the Twine platform.
Still seems there are going to be some outstanding questions though, what are the implications of syndicating a fulltext RSS feed that might be viewed in all manner of places and situations.
Syndicating an rss feed does not give blanket permission to reprint the content, it’s an alternate delivery method only. I am curious how easy it is for twine users to repost someone elses content. Twine is still in closed beta, I’ve applied for access and will comment more if and when I get in.
