Permission to Speak Freely on RSS

After a few webloggers objected to his practice of reproducing their entries in full on his link site, Robert Scoble tied himself into an interesting knot, claiming that RSS is a format that only exists for software to reuse and remix, thus justifying his actions:

RSS is a community syndication system. If you don't like your content being reused in weird, dangerous, wacky ways DO NOT PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO RSS!!! Hint: RSS isn't for humans. It's for syndication and resyndication systems to use.

It's an opt-in system. If you don't want it reused, don't put it in! Easy. End of discussion.

Scoble's right to describe syndication as opt-in, and the availability of content in an XML format makes it easier to work with than HTML. But as we've seen with Google Toolbar and Greasemonkey, HTML's not exactly difficult for user agent software to parse. The markup's out there in plain text, making it a lot closer to RSS than to a reuse-inhibiting format like PDF.

One of the looming controversies for syndication is the legality of feed reuse and republication in the absence of an explicit license tag such as those offered by Creative Commons.

Before he shuttered his linkblog, Scoble seemed to be acting from the presumption that if a feed is online, he can do anything he wants with it, because the format's intended for reuse.

I don't mind that personally, because I want to encourage republication of my syndicated feeds, even on commercial sites. I just added the Creative Commons Attribution license to my feeds to make this policy official.

But in a general sense, it seems inarguable that the availability of a feed grants no legal rights to reuse its items, beyond fair use.

A feed is a copyrighted work. If a feed provider wants to forbid commercial reuse or public redistribution of the full text of items, that's something we ought to respect.

If high-profile reusers like Scoble make this a big deal, we'll take the informal situation today -- where feeds are republished in the absence of explicit permission -- and turn it into one where toolmakers have to examine license tags before allowing the functionality.

Perhaps this is a good thing, but it goes against an important principle I learned as a teen: It's always easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.

Rss · Publishing · 2005/03/24 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Sorry, I Broke the News

An e-mail to the Drudge Retort this afternoon revealed that Jeff Weise, the teen who allegedly shot up his Minnesota high school and killed himself Monday, was an active participant on a UFO, conspiracy, and cover-up site called AboveTopSecret.Com.

The posts appear legitimate and are corroborated by several other members who participated in the discussions with Weise, so I posted a news story about the messages.

Because this appears to be the first media report on these messages, I needed something that trumpeted the exclusive, but I didn't want to borrow Matt Drudge's famous siren.

By combining a few images from another alert graphic, I have created the News Alert Banana:

Journalism · 2005/03/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Politics 1, Medical Science 0

One of my favorite local bloggers, Attaboy, shares the sentiments of people who believe there's a possibility that Terri Schiavo is aware of her surroundings.

This isn't a situation where medical experts disagree: There's no realistic hope of recovery from brain damage as severe as Schiavo's, as a recent Newsday article makes clear:

Dr. Dana Lustbader, director of palliative care at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, said, "In this case, there is basically no hope of recovery."

Patients have awoken from comas with little or no lasting effects, but Lustbader said patients in Schiavo's condition, with normal wake-sleep cycles, are neither comatose nor brain dead. While awake, they cannot track objects or faces with their eyes. "The eyes are roving randomly, and they happen to follow, at times, people moving in the room," she said.

A behavioral researcher in neuroscience, posting on the ALAS weblog, writes that the the damage is so irreversibly severe that there's nothing left to make thought and reasoning possible:

There is no way any qualified brain doctor or scientist could look at this image and suggest that significant recovery of function is possible. The fact that we could have all this discussion on the subject is a triumph of politics over science. Tragic for Terri Schiavo, and really for us all.

Politics · 2005/03/22 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

The Geek Who Saved Christmas

I've been accused this week of being obsessive and creepy over an article I wrote several years ago about Janie Porche, the effusively perky real-life Apple Switch spokesmodel.

I know I titled the piece "Stalking Janie Porche," but I'm surprised that these bloggers took that literally. If I said that I was hungry enough to eat a horse, would they report me to PETA?

Porche, who now has her own weblog, read the article and sent me a friendly e-mail in response to a visitor's comment that included her address. She asked that I either remove it, which I did, or let her know otherwise so she could purchase a firearm in advance of any unexpected guests.

Her weblog confirms my original assessment that Porche is much more deserving of the Internet's affection than Ellen Feiss, considering her interest in such matters as German beer laws and Futura Bold.

Television · 2005/03/22 · Comment · Link

A visitor to the Drudge Retort remembers Andre Norton, the science fiction author who died Thursday at age 93:

I was an indifferent and sullen youth, prone to acting out at school occasionally, and as a result, was sent to the library as a kind of holding cell/punishment. One day, bored out of my mind, I reached back and grabbed the first book that my hand fell upon and started reading. It was Ms. Norton's Witch World. My love of reading started with that book, which led me to Bradbury, Heinlein and, ultimately, a world I thought was shut to someone of my economic class. I would have wound up dropping out of school and traveling the road that kind of decision leads to had it not been for her influence. I wrote her a letter in the early '80s telling her of my journey and her part in it. She wrote back a most gracious and encouraging letter. Although I'm an atheist, I actually went through the motions of praying for her, just in case.

The authors I discovered during dead time in high school were Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip Jose Farmer, and Sinclair Lewis.

My favorite week of detention hall at Lloyd V. Berkner was spent devouring Arrowsmith. The other reprobates made fun of me when I showed visible distress after Leora was killed by bubonic plague.

Publishing · Science Fiction · 2005/03/21 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Free Terri Schiavo

Terry Schiavo's brain no longer has a cerebral cortex. She will never again talk, experience a thought, or feel an emotion. The best her parents can hope for is that she will occasionally mimic lifelike responses because of involuntary brainstem activity.

No act of Congress will change this. All the Republicans and the religious right are accomplishing with this barbaric grandstanding is to prolong her family's suffering.

Michael Schiavo fought for years to find a cure for his wife, and he even went back to college to become a nurse so that he could better care for her. He wrote in 2003:

I never wanted Terri to die. I still don't. After more than seven years of desperately searching for a cure for Terri, the death of my own mother helped me realize that I was fooling myself. More important, I was hiding behind my hope, and selfishly ignoring Terri's wishes. I wanted my wife to be with me so much that I denied her true condition.

Terri told me on several occasions before this happened that she would not want to live in her current condition. If we had been older, I am sure she would have signed a living will making it clear that she did not to be kept alive on tubes and machines. She never had the chance.

That left me to carry out her wishes. It has been hard. In fact, it is the hardest thing I have ever done. In the end, I did what I believe Terri would have wanted me to do.

Is there a single person among the parade of ghouls exploiting this tragedy who would wish to be kept alive in Terri's condition? Someone should ask Tom DeLay and other politicians if they have living wills.

Medical science gets better every day at keeping people alive in conditions no one would ever choose to experience. The right to opt out of life-prolonging treatment is exercised every day in this country:

My grandfather died at home at the age of ninety, after a slow decline from Alzheimer's disease. He died in his own familiar bed, surrounded by people who loved him. He was not in pain. His breathing slowed and slowed, and finally stopped. If it is "killing" to refuse life-preserving medical treatment, then my grandmother murdered my grandfather when she failed to call the paramedics. The others present at his death were accessories to murder. But who would have benefited had my grandfather been forced to squeeze out a few extra days in an intensive care unit, on a respirator, confused and disoriented? In what way would that have furthered a culture of life?

We should all be as lucky as Terri Schiavo has been, to have a spouse who would fight so hard for our right to die in such circumstances. The easiest thing in the world would be for Michael Schiavo to give up, raise the young children he has with another woman, and let Terri continue to linger hopelessly between life and death.

The only good thing to come from this sickening spectacle is that thousands of people, myself included, will be rushing to draft living wills.

Politics · 2005/03/21 · 23 COMMENTS · Link

Tina Brown compared bloggers to the East German secret police in Sunday's Washington Post:

We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with transcripts available. No matter who you are, someone is ready and willing to rat you out. Even the rats themselves have to look over their shoulders, because some smaller rat is always waiting in the wings. Bloggers are the new Stasi. All the timidity this engenders, all this watching your mouth has started to feel positively un-American.

I'm going to report her for this.

Journalism · Publishing · 2005/03/21 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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