Dear Al-Jazeera: Why Steal Our Code?
scrollytelling.io
scrollytelling.io
If the Dutch paper did redistribute/re-license the story to AJ, and if that is in fact a violation of the scrollytelling license, then they(the paper) should be the customer that scrollytelling should be name/shaming and DMCAing. It is also likely that AJ views this(DMCA/blog post) as a upstream licensing issue, and the fact that they have a business relationship with the Dutch paper may lead them to take that up with the paper and not respond to scrollytelling. As, from AJ's point of view, they have already payed a license for the content in this scenario.
EDIT: If scrollytelling does not have a straightforward and integrated solution for redistribution licensing then this was bound to happen and probably has before, they just didn't notice because it wasn't an outlet the volume of AJ.
Also note that the twitter post is from August 28 and the blog post that was written is from today (September 18) So it seems that Al Jazeera was not that interested in resolving the issue.
Or they just didn't see a random tweet that happened to mention their handle. The post doesn't mention any direct communication from Scrollytelling.
Except: it seems unlikely to me that Al Jazeera English is hosted in the US, which would mean a DMCA request is not legally binding for them.
I can imagine that many companies could have an office and a legal entity in US while the actual service is run somewhere else, and I'd think that DMCA would still be enforceable towards the US legal entity.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/415046/#Commen...
[Of course, taking legal opinion from a random forum comment is probably a bad idea...]
Technically, and as a layman, I'd say a DMCA takedown would never be binding, because that's a provision intended for public online service providers like ISPs and website hosting platforms. Al Jazeera, as author and editor of their own site, does not qualify for the Safe Harbor protection, and can be sued outright by the aggrieved party, even if they did take down the article in response to the request.
> We contacted the author of the piece, Hidde Boersma, who promised to resolve the situation.
It's been a couple of weeks—how long do you think they should wait, while their costs keep mounting?
They could've just denied access to the assets so that the AJ webdevs would have to recopy-refix them, while at the same time continuing the legal press. A couple of weeks is not a long time when going through the legal system.
I'm not saying that winning a lawsuit is the ideal situation. I'm saying it leaves open the possibility that someone with actual power at AJ notices the problem, gets things fixed, and says, "Hey, this is a cool product, can we talk about a long-term deal for future stories?".
Now they not have virtually no chance in getting AJ as a customer, which is too bad because AJ actually has money for these kinds of deals. But even if scrollytelling didn't want to work with AJ out of principle, they've now unnecessarily turned off other big media clients. Big media clients, i.e. traditional outlets with the morals, lawyers, and funds to pay for proper distribution contracts. These companies generally have lawyers who do not like dealing with vendors who litigate over Twitter.
In addition to copying the code, they left some original asset urls in there as well. Which means that those come out of our bandwidth bill. So yeah ... we're a little mad. Not terribly so, though. Life's too short.
I don't know if it was intended, but that line is really funny.
There are journalists fighting the good fight all over the world (Greenwald etc). They shouldn't be demeaned just because they have colleagues like Judith Miller.
It's still wrong for Al Jazeera to use your code without licensing it, but you need to let your readers have all the facts. Without that detail, I was rather curious why de volkskrant wasn't also upset.
I mean, with a sentence like this, it's hard not to jump to the conclusion that there's more than hotlinking and code copyright going on: "We know you love us Al-Jazeera, but stealing from us and then ignoring us is not the way to express it."
I wouldn't call them unethical, just incomplete. We have a case here where someone paid Scrollytellio to create a story in their content-management system. Their system is such that, to a layperson (which I assume the reporter is when it comes to webdev), the code and presentation is inextricable from the content.
The reporter was wrong, but that's just one level of confusion and ambiguity where it's possible to understand why AJ messed up. Even more confusing is that AJ itself uses the same open-source tech that ScrollyTelling does:
https://twitter.com/Hiddemhigh/status/777535017383845890
https://twitter.com/pageflow_io/status/777562569468964864
A web dev/producer at a media company not knowing the difference between the open-source code they've used in the past, and the modified version that a freelancer has given to them for this one package? Yeah, incompetent, but not malicious.
Again, it doesn't excuse AJ, their web producer, and the reporter, for not following up with more speed. But I can see why it's more likely that incompetency is the culprit and not malice.
2. In the updated conversation it seems the reporter doesn't think any thing was wrong here and it was not his responsibility, which seems odd after said he was working on it back on 28th Aug.
So it looks like there was messup on both sides.
Though there are some things which are still not clear: 1. What were the specific terms of contract scrollytelling had? Did it in any form bar sharing of content? 2. Who was the initial owner of the contract - volkskrant or the reporter? If it was volkskrant, they have to talk to them first about allowing this to happen.
This would have been a great opportunity to work through Scrollytelling's existing relationships with their clients (and their clients' reporters) to get in front of AJ and make a case for their platform (and only go for the lawyers if talks broke down). Instead they've now ensured that, regardless of anything else, at least one reporter is never going to use their platform again and is going to be one hell of a net detractor. For a small company, garnering a reputation as being troublesome loose cannons isn't a good way to grow market share.
I know for example that typography companies or stock photo agencies crawl the web seeking for unlicensed use for their .woff files or pictures.
(I'm just curious, I have a CC subscription)
I'm inspired by how you stood up for yourself.
"a reputation as being troublesome loose cannons isn't a good way to grow market share."
They sent a DMCA notice that was ignored and are justified in being angry. Perhaps a reputation as someone worth copying who doesn't put up with bullshit is exactly the reputation they want vs. willing to roll over because we think we might make some money somehow, or want to win the approval of others.
There is a misconception that being "angry" is somehow a character flaw. We live in this world where everyone is pretending to be "happy" and we shame others for expressing anger.. Anger is a super healthy emotion and when acknowledged and not stuffed into your shadow it can help drive amazing progress.
We're not treating them as a sales lead. What they did is not a great start to a fruitful relationship. We just would like them to take down the infringing code and at the very least stop using our bandwidth for their stories. It's kind of ridiculous.
As you say, we're small. So when a large bully steals from us, that makes it okay? I really don't understand. People go to jail for copyright infringement but when Al-Jazeera does it to a small startup nobody bats an eye. We chose to speak up after it was clear that Al-Jazeera would keep ignoring our friendly requests and formal demands.
I get the feeling that you've got a mismatch between your market's expectations and what you're providing -- they seem to think of your service as an authoring tool that gives them rights to the generated results, whereas -- as I understand it -- you see yourselves as a service provider that retains full rights. Given how low your price points are, I wonder if this experience might suggest a change in direction; for example, a more expensive tier that allows a client to repackage content for distribution.
Finally, I'm going to risk being a bit stentorian here and say that ethics in business is a one-way street; it puts a lot of demands (quite rightly) on us, but doesn't help when someone acts unethically and even unlawfully towards us. When it happens -- and it will happen, repeatedly -- you have to put aside any moral indignation and just focus on turning the situation to whatever advantage you can wrest from it.
In this case, what's your BATNA -- your "best alternative to negotiated agreement?" If, for example, your clients, their reporters, and AJ all ignore you, what is your best option? What course of action protects your rights without damaging your prospects and incurring needless costs? That becomes your new baseline and, combined with the other players' BATNAs, becomes the context in which you try to build negotiations.
Now that you've knocked on the door of legal with a DCMA request, you need to have an escalation path. My experience is that legal action is generally used to force negotiations, not end them, and a DCMA request is actually a pretty canny way of starting the process since it's short of actually filing a lawsuit. But if this doesn't lead to getting everyone in a room to discuss options, then you'll need to determine whether you have to escalate or break off. Difficult problem, really.
It would seem equally likely that your original client was the entity that performed the white labeling. In which case they white labeled the site, and sold that cleaned product to AJ. In that scenario, AJ never saw a copyright, and your client is not only responsible for the issue, but also for distribution of copyrighted material for profit, which may not be in the best interest of your business. You have not mentioned any communication with the original client, which I doubt is the case, but I would tread lightly as the Dutch seem to be pushing for criminal pirated resale guidance from the EU, unless you are comfortable with that escalation.
There is some philosophical debate to be had regarding whether your code is deserving of copyright protections. Precisely what parts were duplicated? Just the CSS? Is there a better way to write those parts? If your way was the best way, copyright laws cannot prevent someone else from duplicating that method. This is known as reverse engineering, and is completely legal.
I'm a designer and developer myself so I understand your perspective, but you are not necessarily the righteous ones in a battle of good vs evil. It is definitely a blurry grey area.
Quite frankly, "code borrowing" happens everywhere in development. Most lessons on "How to learn to code" encourage people to explore other's code and adapt it for their own projects as a means to learn. The history of computing supports borrowing and adapting other people's code. You probably aren't aware of these things.
Tacking on small concessions is how the most evil people in American politics are able to pass insane and crooked laws.
Was that necessary? I mean, at that point, how much resistance had they been giving you? They are in the wrong no matter what you call them on Twitter, but I can see them being even more recalcitrant after that. Having worked for and with media orgs, this feels like a classic case of crossed wires and ineptitude; the vast majority of editors and reporters at Al-Jazeera and elsewhere have no clue about what copying CSS/assets mean. That is, they think of webpages as being some immutable discrete package, as if someone had sold them a video.
Being a big news org makes them move a bit slower than is ideal. Throw in the factor of this being freelance work, and then the tech component, and yeah, I could see incompetency being the reason rather than malice. I agree with the original commenter that this was a possible sales opportunity with one of the few online media orgs with actual money and runway to try out different story-telling forms and vendors. This was a needless way to antagonize them.
More importantly, you've dampened the possibilities for other relationships to news orgs. Web devs/techies at media companies, having had to deal with a decade of Web incompetency by media cos, are likely to side with the possibility that this was an honest mistake. And these web devs are already reluctant to outsource content-production/delivery to a third-party. If they're ever asked about using scrollytelling.io vs. any of the other possible vendors, this incident is not going to weigh in your favor.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/Hiddemhigh/status/777509638002634...
[2] http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2015/BanishedNepal/
[1] http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/gmo-eggplants-aube...
> We’d love to work with you Al-Jazeera. But not like this.
> So how about starting over and signing up for an account.
> We will even keep that eggplant emoji in there for you.
> We look forward to hearing from you.
This is pure marketing. They go out of their way to explain what features their product has and why it is beneficial to sign up. If they get even just 2 new sign-ups with this article, it has already paid off. The "our service is great!" message is not there to remedy things with Al-Jazeera.
If these guys were seriously angry at Al-Jazeera I'm sure they'd have done the same.
Still, doing so as a business would be just stupid, frankly. Simply cut them off (send an HTTP error) and send them an email.
That does not seem like the best way to start a business relationship...
Update: clarified that we exhaustively tried to resolve the situation amicably, but our friendly requests over multiple channels were ignored. The DMCA request was our last resort.
There are more specific details a little later in the article, and the line quoted in the parent post appears to have been amended.
Lesson #2 - Seriously. Do NOT let 20 yo bro-grammers handle the business and marketing.
Noone could care less about your code + The DMCA notice is plain silly. This is exactly how you SHOULD NOT handle business leads and customers.
2. Seeing as they're a small start-up, the bro-grammers can do jsut fine without business and marketing. Which cannot be said about business and marketing doing well without bro-grammers.
3a. Who cares about what Peter Noone thinks?
3b. I agree, the DMCA is notice is plain silly, they should have sued them outright as per breach of the issuing contract.
Is that really the most appropriate way to start?
If you are in the business that storytelling.io is in, you have to assume that some fraction of people are going to make mistakes. You also have to assume that most of those people will not be in the US. Al-Jazeera is in Qatar. Qatar only joined the Berne convention in the year 2000. Their attitude toward a DMCA request is pretty predictable.
Honestly, I found the article insulting, myopic and reactionary. The imprecise (and legally incorrect) usage of the word "stealing" is simply used to justify their outrage. Even though they appear to have edited their page 2 or 3 times to improve the content based on suggestions in this thread, it still has no details on how the original transaction was handled (what did the original author sell?). There is no indication that storytelling.io made any attempt to rectify the situation other than sending an incorrect legal request and then complaining on social media.
To be totally blunt, if I were thinking of using a service like theirs, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole because they really appear to have absolutely no idea what they are doing on the legal front -- something which seems to be crucial to their business survival.
I hope they can figure it out. I'd start with realising that even when you are in the right, you can do the absolute wrong thing to try to correct it. This is going to happen again, so back up, take stock and ask yourself how you are going to improve your reaction next time.
This knee-jerk cry of "don't blame the victim" is just that: a knee-jerk response. Few people want to humiliate victims, but I don't see a reason not to ask pointed questions.
I mean no disrespect, but I think comments like yours lower the level of discourse and are pretty toxic despite their good intentions.
Welcome to Hacker News.
For example, appears the company makes money selling their code to online newspapers, but when a major media company uses their code the response is to tell them to stop doing it.
I would be curious to see the take down notice that was sent literally said.
As for what to do, volumes of books are published on the topic. If the content was hosted in the US, the next step would be contact the ISP that's hosting the content.
They were so mad about this event, they photoshoped Al Jazeera's logo.
> We are ready for you hitting the big time. We make sure your stories keep being told, even if they're on the frontpage of The New York Times.
So they wouldn't have send the DMCA to NYT?
But I wouldn't be surprised as it's a "scrollytelling" website, which is probably made to hijack lots of browser controls, especially those to do with scrolling. We all hate it, but I guess it looks cool if you're trying to be a modern newspaper.
When reprinting it's common to include a 'with permission of' or 'originally published in' or especially 'translated from the original'. I might have missed it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't there.
At best you can call them out for not properly attributing merit where merit is due.
Aside from that, I do think it is theft in the sense that AJ is using bandwidth not paid for by them.
But, what I don't understand is, why didn't they call it plagiarism, which is usually what you would call a copied story.
both are copyright violations, but is one worse in terms of law?
[1] From Dowling v. United States:
"It is less clear, however, that the taking that occurs when an infringer arrogates the use of another's protected work comfortably fits the terms associated with physical removal (...). The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."
> What Happened to Journalistic Integrity?
But then, a shocking number of people seem to love Russia Today in the UK, so it really is a sad state of affairs.
The point I was trying to make is that front-end devs are like the creators of Stranger Things. We may not outright copy code character for character on the front-end, but we sure do give a lot of nods to the greatest hits. And the web is a better place for it
Even if you can read the details, the copyright still stands. You do not need to compile/obfuscate your work in order to have it be protected by copyright.
If I'm in the jury and I can easily cut/paste - than that is on you. Obfuscation has to get better in HTML5. There are now some paid tools that obfuscate CSS and HTML5 variables, not just Base64, and inject that it can run on only one domain.
Did they do any of that?
Why? I learned development by looking at the source for sites that interested me.
Other than that, just because you can steal other people's hard work doesn't mean you should.
You clearly do not understand this situation.
You clearly do not understand the tech. Most (good) web sites are SASS, and that gets compiled for one.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
Actually, I managed to reverse all of the Google apps as compsci student in a matter of weeks, within the legal boundaries, and write specifications how to write apps to replace them.
Android is far less obfuscated than most stuff on the web.
To not do anything is silly. I lock the door to my house. Can you pick a lock: Yes. And that is the point. Do something.
A copy-paste litmus test is silly. You don't get to copy and paste Harry Potter just because it's in plaintext. Creators don't surrender their rights just because it's easy to steal them.
Lock the door. Yes you can pick a lock, but that is not my point. Do something.