Publishing

Eric Goldman, a Marquette Law professor who was formerly the Epinions.com general counsel, weighs in on the Google Toolbar: From a legal standpoint, AutoLink looks questionable. The tool modifies publisher's web pages by adding hypertext links without the publisher's consent. While this modification isn't a huge change, I could still see some (many?) courts treating them as unauthorized derivative works. Honestly, it seems like a fairly routine copyright infringement. ... (read more)

2005/03/05

ESPN.Com and other Web sites published by the Walt Disney Internet Group have terms of use. The Restrictions on Use of Materials section appears to forbid users from running remix software like the Google Toolbar on their sites (emphasis mine): No material from any WDIG Site or any Internet site owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by us may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of the materials on ... (read more)

2005/03/05

The Too-Much-Information Age

I'm extremely grateful that weblogs were not around when I was the caught in the perfect storm of raging hormones, youthful inexperience, and clumsy romantic yearning. In 1986 I spent an entire semester obsessed with a red-haired nape perched inches in front of me in a cramped history class at Richland Junior College. I quietly plotted for months, finally asking the nape's owner for a study date in a nauseous mumble, and she shot me down before I got all of the words out. Given a worldwide ... (read more)

2005/03/05

My Content-Altering Experience

Brian Carnell writes: Its amazing how quickly so many web publishers have turned into RIAA/MPAA-wannabes, locking down their wares and complaining about the users who dare to remix or modify content in their browser in ways that the user finds helpful. I don't think it's that amazing, given the natural desire to preserve the integrity of your work or (cue horror music) decide who profits from it. Even the most remix-friendly Web publishers, those who have adopted a Creative Commons license, ... (read more)

2005/03/05

Et Tu, Rafe Colburn?

Rafe Colburn has an interesting confession regarding the Web nerd cage match we're having over Google Toolbar and other content-manipulation tools: I have a Firefox extension installed called Adblock. All it does is prevent the browser from downloading resources containing the patterns that I specify. I installed it for one reason, to keep my browser from downloading any content from BlogAds. I make money with BlogAds on two sites, so I could write an impassioned essay about how Colburn is ... (read more)

2005/02/24

Prying Into the Google Crowbar

I'm studying the technical implementation of the Google Toolbar to find a JavaScript technique a Web publisher could use to detect and defeat autolinking. I wouldn't use it on Workbench, but if I were Barnes & Noble or another online bookseller, I wouldn't have much patience for software that adds links to my competitors on my pages. I thought I might be able to compare document.fileSize to the size of the page in document.body.innerHTML.length, but these values don't match and don't change ... (read more)

2005/02/22

Google Wants to Play Tag

I see it as an issue of 'Who owns the content being displayed?' Google does not own the content, and when it uses the content of others to make money, it often will be violating the intellectual property laws. -- Attorney Terence Ross on the Google Toolbar's new autolink feature I can understand the appeal of the argument that anything that exists on your computer is yours to edit, archive, or transform as you see fit. Roger Benningfield sums it up nicely: "My house, my rules." But we don't ... (read more)

2005/02/21

Trying the New Google Crowbar

I'm researching the new Google Toolbar beta, which enables Internet Explorer users to click an AutoLink button that edits Web pages, adding links when it recognizes a book's ISBN number, street address, or package tracking number in the text of a page. Though it's a cool hack, as I said on Jason Levine's weblog, at first glance this seems like overstepping the boundaries of copyright. Robert Scoble voices similar concerns. I fund my Web server in part through the revenue generated by affiliate ... (read more)

2005/02/20

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution

I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move. Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm. Google's support for a ... (read more)

2005/01/19

Blogger Payments No Kos for Alarm

A Wall Street Journal story and the invisible backhand of the blogosphere are attempting to make the publishers of Daily Kos and MyDD the liberal versions of Armstrong "No Bribe Left Behind" Williams: Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide. There's no comparison between these situations. Jerome ... (read more)

2005/01/14

Read More Entries