p2pnet and Ares: sorted
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- A Creative Commons license is handy, but it’s not a silver bullet when it comes to people using other people’s materials without permission.
That’s the bottom line following p2pnet’s re-print argument with Ares, a P2P application sales site which’d run our stories without acknowledgement or permission.
“It was never our intention to use p2pnet’s articles without the proper accreditation,” says Ares.
“This was a programming error in our RSS feed. We apologize for any hassles this has caused you. Rest assured, we are currently working with our programmers to have this problem corrected as soon as possible.”‘
Over the weekend, p2pnet complained Ares had hoisted p2pnet items wholesale, re-posting them as though they were Ares’ own, and without any kind of attribution.
I tried to contact Ares several times on Sunday and Monday morning, finally succeeding yesterday afternoon.
Now, “Once again, thank you for the great work that you do and we look forward to distributing your articles in the future with the proper mentions, sources and references tied to them,” promises its owner.
The Message
As I said in the first post, I have no problem with p2pnet stories being quoted in full or in part elsewhere, going on »»»
The idea is to get the message out and obviously, the more people carrying it, the better.
That’s why I publish under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada license.
Given that, is it cool for anyone, anywhere, to use p2pnet, or anyone else’s, material without any kind of reference? Is the message all that counts?
p2pnet copy gets grabbed all the time and usually, no worries. But this is a one-man news site, not an entrepreneurial venture, and when stories are used in bulk, and without a mention or a link back, to support a purely commercial operation, IMO, that’s going too far, particularly when posts are clearly run under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada license.
But I’m now squared away with the people at Ares, and that’s fine. That’s the way it should be.
On CC licenses, I asked the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann what, in his view, they’re worth.
“A Creative Commons license is not a silver bullet to solve all of a creator’s problems,” he said.
“CC is about permitting uses that would otherwise be forbidden. When it comes to forbidding uses that violate the license, the creator has all the other tools available to every Internet publisher – shaming, technical measures, DMCA takedown notices, and copyright lawsuits.”
Meanwhile, Ares is true to its word and has stopped the posts while it rejigs its code.
Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
Cheers!
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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January 14th, 2009 at 2:11 am
So Henry thinks I “missed the point” with the irony? Sorry, the potential is there: the megacorps put out material under a licence, and get pissed when people don’t follow it, and Jon puts out material under a licence and gets pissed when someone doesn’t follow it. Sure, the licences are different, but the irony is still there unless you choose not to see it.
However, clearly the situation was far more innocent than it first appeared – and that’s a nice outcome; I suspected it earlier, and I wish I’d had a chance to express it… I noticed that the Ares site did not link to the articles at all (as far as I could see). In other words, the articles were not a basic “product/content” of the site, but they were used as search fodder: just “stuff” that would attract surfers to come to the site, and download Ares.
I think if they had intended to properly rip-off Jon’s content, they would have had some kind of index of the articles available, so that people could browse them.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:51 am
So if someone just uses someone else’s stuff as search fodder to “attract surfers to come to the site, and download” whatever it is, that’s cool?
Cheers!
January 14th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Right Andy,
Ripping off someone is jsut bad if it is done properly or what?
I think this is great news for all the poor people that are (rightfully!) targeted by RIAA.
These Stupid low quality mp3 files with all this highly unorganised offer in the p2p networks with not properly indexed and categorised with proper and completely correct ID3 tags, these non-properly organised Rip-offs are not worth for Evil4 to “get pissed”.
Someone call those criminal(?) wrongdoings committing lawyers from the Holme Roberts & Owen LLP law firm with approximately 240 attorneys in offices in Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Salt Lake City and San Francisco [hereafter "HRO"] that work for Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian) [hereafter "Evil4"] and tell them to stop their wrongdoings!
January 14th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Why is everyone trying so hard to fail to understand the subtlety? I’m sure if I posted that murder was worse than theft, someone would come along and say “so you think theft is OK, do you?”. No, Jon, I am not saying that it’s “cool”, although it may be allowed under the CC licence, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that it would be /worse/ if their site were browsable. The fact that it isn’t, means that anyone wanting to read your content as a whole, cannot reasonably use their site to do it. A_F: no it’s not black and white – it’s not “jsut bad” if it’s done properly, it’s “worse”. For reasons that would be clear if you thought about it for a moment.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:43 am
I wasn’t asking for money, merely attribution, and I don’t understand why anyone would find that strange or ironic.
Cheers!