Dear Al-Jazeera: thank you for doing the right thing
scrollytelling.io
scrollytelling.io
The end result is, I now know there is an open source alternative, and if the need were to arise would use it.
I'll take scrollytelling at their word that they were doing this to take a stand for software copyright. Sure, I can respect that. But if you're fighting for a world where SaaS/PaaS developers are properly paid and valued, the most convincing victories are when developers (particularly ones that depend on open-source) and such platforms attract loyal, deep-pocketed clients who show everyone else that such a business can be viable.
This isn't like the case when The Oatmeal burned the HuffPo [1] for hotlinking. The Oatmeal presumably doesn't survive by syndicating to places like Huffpo. But clients who are somewhat unskilled at web production/hosting are the sole source of potential customers for ScrollyTelling, and ScrollyTelling demonstrated that it would rather burn them than mediate technical fuckups.
[0] https://twitter.com/Scrollytellio/status/769971459263459328
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/28/cartoonist-the...
edit: fixed typo in Oatmeal/Huffpo
From what I understand, they tried contacting them directly, but were given lots of promised callbacks / actions that never materialized. Is your opinion that the "professional" way to handle that just to ignore it and move on?
No. That's what courts are for.
This notion that you (in the general sense) should publicly shame businesses and people over private concerns is absurd.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but I can definitely see people at a large company working that sort of logic into their decision-making process. If all they had to do was ignore the "small guy" and he would eventually go away (due to the cost of long-protracted legal battle against an opponent with deep pockets), then they would.
https://twitter.com/dancow/status/777702314475819009
The earliest public Tweet I see about the issue is this, on Aug. 28, just a few weeks ago:
https://twitter.com/Scrollytellio/status/769971299317911552
So it looks like they've been emailing them at least before Aug. 28. But I disagree with the idea that there's nothing in between polite private emailing and then hostile subtweeting. Did Scrollytelling try the kind of gentle public shaming where they direct mention a few AJ editors about the matter? I don't see it.
Don't get me wrong, no matter what their intentions, AJ was in the wrong to host copyrighted frontend code, and in an ideal world, the wronged party shouldn't have to Google for Twitter contacts to get them to comply. But we don't live in an ideal world of instant feedback and retribution. Scrollytelling has the right, of course, to blow it up as they did. I'm just pointing out that it was not just limited to surrender vs. going nuclear on the blogosphere. And in the media world, media people are very quick to act on Twitter, even when they don't respond to emails. I once complained on Twitter about WSJ's paywall and immediately got a response from the executive editor of the WSJ. It ended up with him blocking me for probably being snarky, but the point is that media people up the chain can be reachable without Herculean effort.
And if you are a company whose customer base is completely reliant on media clients, it seems prudent to go for the constructive public outreach way rather than jumping right into "FUCK YOU PAY ME" discourse, especially when it seems that incompetence and not malice is the cause.
But as for how I'd handle this situation as a person, I'd consult a lawyer, and if a cease and desist wasn't likely to work, yes, I'd just ignore it and move on. Shooting yourself in the foot out of revenge isn't good for anyone even if you also manage to shoot the person using your content.
It's not that long in the business world, I'd personally wait about 90 days before making a public stink about anything except something that'd terminate my company before then.
They then moved on to AJ whom they have no relationship with. They got a response back, but not to the speed they wanted. No idea how long this was from the article.
Do you think the infringing code would have been removed without public shaming? Not necessarily out of malice, but in large organisations these matters tend to be forgotten or idle for a long time.
Anyway they did try to settle things amicably, to no avail.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the first public tweet regarding this matter is this: https://twitter.com/Scrollytellio/status/769971299317911552
> @Hiddemhigh poor form to actively link to a stolen ripoff of our code. cc @martijnvtol
I've had luck communicating with media folks by prodding them on Twitter, e.g. "Hey @editor, who is the best person to talk about etc etc". Did ScrollyTelling do that? Was it necessary to jump from private prodding to hostile accusation via subtweet?
Now in this case the public shaming seems tame and does not seem to have devolved to individual witch hunts. But look no further then 'dongle gate' where a single twitter post led to two relatively innocent people being fired (neither intended the consequences of their actions IMO) and you can see where public shaming in general gets us.
But they tried that first? From the first blog post:
> Hidde promised to resolve the situation. In addition we contacted you directly too. After waiting patiently we received no response. After many tries through your editorial office we got hold of an editor who promised to return our call. This never happened either. As a final measure we sent you a DMCA takedown request and waited patiently. No response.
Besides, it's far from a secret that we're standing on the shoulders of Pageflow. It's on our homepage, and we have a good relationship with them. We are overall #5 contributor to Pageflow: https://github.com/codevise/pageflow/graphs/contributors
Al-Jazeera had been using Pageflow for a long time and it's great that they continue doing so. This outcome is perfect as far as we are concerned!
So, after poking around, it looks like pageflow is the actual creators of this stuff, and scrollytelling, has built a business around supporting it and hosting it?
While concurrently, it appears pageflow can also be paid to support and host their own product?
Weirdly, pageflow appears cheaper too!
Am I missing something? Would this be equivalent of someone opening up a competitor to wordpress.com, powered by wordpress?
It actually was completely legal because they were (in the fine print) selling support - the software was free, of course.
A lot of bigger companies sell support for OSS products they don't build. This can be legitimate. It just depends on how forthright you are with who built what.
And non-copyleft licenses let you do whatever you want. You can take non-copyleft open-source software, add your proprietary junk and sell it at a killing, if you want. You don't even have to provide the source.
Especially in a consumer context, where support is usually a small fraction of the cost.
Companies take open source software and package up management, hosting, and consulting services. That's basically what Red Hat does, for example.
https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
So while many hosters will offer a single instance (as it's more flexible), some, often companies doing it internally will use multisite just like wordpress.com.
Ultimately, it sounds like someone screwed up and used a tool they shouldn't have to build the layout. (That tool being Scrollytelling.)
The lesson here, apparently, is that if you're syndicating content, open-source tools are best.
The "guilty" party in this scenario also seems to be EJC for not properly licensing the original content.
Edit: It also seem very reasonable to think that AJ thought scrollytelling was simply a host of the opensource resource, and removed all links backs except the CDN file that was obfuscated.
I can not determine how in either model having the story that has already been paid for hosted remotely would be not a good thing, unless there is a license were somehow scrollytelling retains the ownership of the product they were paid to produce.
I am not sure why they would want to bare the cost of an AJ level distributed, if they are a hosting company. But, if they are a content creation firm maybe they are not actually creating content for the purchaser, but allowing the purchaser to use scrollytelling content, which the purchaser already owned?
Edit: In short I don't understand why the purchaser would not be able to redistribute.
Anyways, I have no idea how the model works inside its industry context, and if I am confused even with the current context provided by the OP, I can not imagine that a journalist would not be.
The journalist has to come up with the content and multimedia assets themselves, unless they hire ScrollyTelling to do it. I'm assuming that's not the case here as most independent journalists who cover these kind of stories are capable of collecting video/photos and writing text themselves (I mean, that's the whole damn appeal of being such a journalist).
So this journalist "sold" the story to one outlet who already had a hosting deal with scrollytelling. Then the journalist sent the story over to Al-Jazeera -- I'm not sure if anything was really "sold", per se, as Al-Jazeera has a syndication relationship with the original outlet. Either way, someone at AJ thought this meant that the assets that the original newspaper paid for was fair game, and then apparently decided to copy some and hotlink other assets from the newspaper's site.
Neither the newspaper nor the journalist nor Al-Jazeera realized that the CSS design (like the little dots used to navigate) and cloud storage was meant to be redistributed. Sure, that's on them, and AJ and the other parties are definitely at fault for not acting sooner. But I could easily see this as being a case of each stakeholder thinking that it's the other parties' job to deal with what seems like a confusing technicality. And this is a case where the stakeholders are a freelancer, a Dutch newspaper, and a global news network, three entities that normally have communication problems.
If you put the CDN bandwidth tester file aside.
Wouldn't a paying client of scrollytelling be able to distribute that product (CSS included) if they wanted to? If their platform is a content creator/editor then the purchaser should be able to redistribute, and if they are a production shop then the same would be true. If not wouldn't it be similar to photoshop or sublime claiming copyright on something created with those tools, and if they are a production shop something similar to a commercial studio claiming copyright to something they produced and then sold to someone after they resold it.
I understand they are providing a service and a value add, but wouldn't the output belong to the purchaser? I assume scrollytelling could have a very onerous license that prohibits this, but it seems if their customers knew those limitation they would probably be hesitant to purchase.
They are providing a hosting service and product, based on Pageflow. Which is mentioned right on it's homepage!
They contacted Al Jazeera directly and were brushed off (can easily happen in a large company, doesn't imply malice).
The page would probably never have been taken down without the media coverage. And said coverage might have informed some devs about Pageflow, but it's also good publicity.
People often forget that one actually has to make money too. If you do that based on an open source product without violating any licenses, and even contribute back, why not?
They have every right to shame companies using their product without paying for it.
Now I learned it was actually open source, and in my head I'm like .. lol that must be embarrassing!
looking at the story that was copied[1] I don't see a copyright notice anywhere. What gives?
[1] https://verhalen.volkskrant.nl/anti-armoe-aubergine#2220
Given this is in fact the source code that the developer in question has admitted was the basis for their code, it would be interesting to know if they were correctly using the MIT License here: https://github.com/codevise/pageflow/blob/master/MIT-LICENSE
Yes, this is very similar to Wordpress companies. However it is still their source code, and scrollytelling's webpages are better... dare i say.
Pageflow - Interactive Storytelling
I'm lost. Why wouldn't they then take this chance to tell me why I should pay for them if I was in the market for heavy, non-free javascript?
Scrollytelling would have written much the same post, except "AJ was using us in an article without their knowledge, we asked them to credit us, they did, and gave us this awesome testimonial as well".
I guess that is a win, but then again I am not likely customer in the first place.
All that tells me is, you can never trust doing business with scrollytelling.
Per the discussions here yesterday Scrolly hadn't included that in its first draft. Once alerted by this bigger publicity AJ fixed their stuff and responded professionally.
There are several faults here, on both sides. But much can be attributed to the simple mistake that people make when trying to get work done. There was clearly no conspiracy, No one intentionally hurt anyone, no one had to take it all the way to way, and I don't remember any unreasonable threats of legal action.
This could have been much worse and I have personally dealt with much less reasonable companies trying to screw me harder.
Scrolly assumed bad faith in their initial post.
"In other words, our code had been stolen, by you."
Then they got ahold of the person who caused this mess, and he said he would resolve the situation.
"We contacted the author of the piece, Hidde Boersma, who told us he sold his piece to you. This is fine. Our source code however was not included in the sale, nor could it have been. Hidde promised to resolve the situation."
Then they contacted AJ, who didn't respond back quickly. They had no relationship with Scrolly, and it's not unreasonable that this didn't get taken care of. Hidde was their man.
"In order to clarify any potential confusion on your side, here is what we were confronted with."
Dramatic language.
"In the long run, it’s likely to have been a lot more expensive to have a developer copy our code, copy the assets and put these on a server. The links not only had to have been updated by hand, inside the document, but someone would have had to un-optimize our JavaScript code, and do all the other work that allows the production to be somewhat available.
They didn't even do a good job. They did not rip many images, leading to a bad experience for your readers:"
Just being dickish, to the party that wasn't aware of Hidde's issue.
"To add insult to injury, you didn’t do a great job at ripping the code either."
More dickishness.
"Al-Jazeera, we know you understand all about journalistic integrity. You have a whole section of your website dedicated to it. The first point states:"
This is college newspaper level lame writing. You'd almost expect it to have read,
Webster's dictionary defines "ethics" as....
I'll stop now, but I don't see two parties coming out of this looking professional and reasonable, just one.
I didn't say voicing wrongdoing makes a company untrusted, but instead that doing it in an unprofessional way makes you someone that I wouldn't do business with.
The article that they rapidly fixed.
Its almost like you expect perfection and a complete lack of mistakes from companies despite the fact that companies are made of people like you and me.
If a group is willing to acknowledge a public mistake and fix it that is great news to me. So many fear critique like yours and would rather keep doing something wrong than fix it.
"In addition we contacted you directly too. After waiting patiently we received no response. After many tries through your editorial office we got hold of an editor who promised to return our call. This never happened either. As a final measure we sent you a DMCA takedown request and waited patiently. No response."
"Initially we were taken aback and confused. We knew there must be some mistake, so we quickly sent you a DMCA takedown requests and waited patiently."
They "clarified" it after a while, but if someone read the original version of the article and did not see the update, it could be easy to miss.
That makes it sound like the DMCA takedown was the first response -- I'm surprised that a gently worded e-mail wasn't tried first. "Hey guys, it looks like you are using this ... I'm sure it was unintentional, but .... "