Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50 | Hacker News Reader

Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50

techcrunch.com

314 pointsdwynings46 comments

Does TechCrunch add anything to this story? Seems like we could have just linked to Woot.com instead of a page of quotes and a quip that TC doesn't talk about the AP.

It's TechCrunch.

It brings the story to attention, just like HN does. TC does it with link + headline + text + discussion. HN does link + headline + discussion. I don't see a problem with that.

Edit: Why the down-votes?

Probably because you can say the same thing about all blog spam.

Not really. TechCrunch is in my Rss reader; Woot is not. Most blogspam is on little unheard-of blogs to make a few bucks on ad revenue from that particular post; TechCrunch serves as an aggregator, kind of like HN.

The difference to me is that HN doesn't reproduce the content of the source - interesting discussion here tends to drive me to the source site, giving them the benefit. TC gives enough info and commentary in their summary that I rarely go to the source, robbing them (in a way of speaking) of my eyes.

Sometimes they quote/summarize too much rather than directing you to the source, I'll grant you that, but as a website TC still has its place. If I want information about who's getting funded/doing what, that's where I go. I don't think it should cease to exist.

But I agree with you that aggregators shouldn't link to sites like TC, but rather the original source.

They're a news aggregator; there's no reason to post this article here. If they had additional commentary, then there might be. Like the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) say, "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter".

The link will still point to this story tomorrow.

Honest question, do you know if each blurb on the front page of Woot has a permalink?

http://www.woot.com/Blog/

ok, then yes, it may have been a better idea to link to http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13420

That is an ugly permalink. Why aren't they running WordPress with more SEO friendly permalinks?

Because their blogging platform (and their site) runs on ASP.net?

Haven't worked with ASP.net in years, but afaik it's hard to do custom URL routing in it.

(Basically, ASP.net doesn't let you do things you can shoot yourself in the foot with, but that doesn't keep you from shooting yourself in the foot in the language: I remember running into an issue a back-end developer I was working with had with returning JSON from a webservice. We ended up wrapping the JSON in an XML document to make ASP.net happy)

It's not hard. With a tool like UrlRewriter.Net or similar, custom URL schemes are quite easy. And I believe the MVC framework for .Net has custom routes built in.

Good to know - I haven't done any .net development in ~3 years.

IIS7 and above have URL Redirection built in... No longer need to do 3rd party custom stuff anymore.

It would also look nicer if the script was in default.aspx instead of ViewEntry.aspx and the url was written like this:

http://www.woot.com/Blog/?Id=13420

It would look nicer still if it was lower case and they got rid of the dub-dub-dub:

http://woot.com/blog/?id=13420

I dunno, maybe they got sick of being rooted if they forget to patch their install twice a week.

I can't help but feel that TC has become the ebaumsworld of tech blog. Nothing interesting, intellectual, relevant; just grab whatever you find on the internet, copy paste 90% of the contents and BAM you have a blog post.

I think TC suffers from the same disease as Gizmodo, where the "authors" are encouraged to do whatever they want as long as it brings in traffic. They get bonus on traffic, who cares if its silly even for high-school standard.

This is totally false. We don't get a bonus based on traffic, and we never have (and hopefully never will).

Are you defending TC or Gizmodo?

I assumed he was defending TC since he states that he is a writer in his profile here on HN.

You call out TC for adding nothing interesting or relevant, and go ahead to say the same thing that 12 other people say at every TC post on HN. As well as adding a false statement about their process.

We get it, a lot of people don't like TC.

Yes, Linking the TechCrunch article here was unnecessary. Saying they are unnecessary, though? People follow them because of the stories they bring in, wether interesting commentary was added or not. How else would someone who doesn't read the Woot blog on a regular basis find out about this?

Well they DID casually mention they did this same stunt years ago...

and it’s actually similar to something we did a couple years ago, trying to charge the AP $12.50 for their usage of quotes from us.

Anything that keeps MG Siegler from writing another post about Apple, Foursquare or Twitter for even a few minutes is a huge win in my book.

I actually visited woot.com today, saw the headphones and moved on. It wasn't until the techcrunch article pointed me back to it that I read the whole thing. The TC points you to the right bit.

Although I suppose that could have been done with a clever title.

Wow props to Woot to sticking it to AP. The woot writers should write a book of all the funny comments that couldn't go on the front page. It must be pretty epic.

I totally agree =) Woot should get a good pat on the back. I curious to see whether AP responds.

Typical double standards by the AP. Great to see Woot having some humor with the matter.

The AP just act like the dinosaur they are, no wonder they're worried about going extinct

An interesting study I wish I could read is: who exactly is the AP, and what motivates them? They aren't a for-profit company with the normal ownership and corporate structure, but a cooperative of newspapers. But surely it's not something as nebulous as "all newspapers in the U.S., acting collectively" that makes the decisions; I'd imagine most newspapers in the US see the AP roughly like we do, as this entity that someone else runs, who they just get content from and don't have any real control over. But then who makes the decisions, what influences them, and why?

They're the bad guys, just like that other non-profit trade association, the MPAA. We can hate on them while still loving our newspapers and movies.

Two good places to start are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press and http://www.ap.org/pages/about/faq.html. As you mention, AP is a cooperative, owned by its members. Member organizations both contribute content to the AP (often by default), and get the right to re-print or re-broadcast its content.

As with most cooperatives, the AP is a separate (not-for-profit) corporation, with its own board of directors primarily comprising executives from its members, and its own CEO, Tom Curley. Given that, I would expect that the AP, as an organization, acts in its own self-interest. One could imagine that this includes defending its IP against re-use by those who are not paying for it.

The only thing better than this would be if Woot took the AP to Small Claims Court over the bill.

That would be a priceless win-win situation. Either AP would have to take it on the chin and pay up to Woot, or fight the case, win, and create precedent that fair use of online material in a news report is not a copyright violation.

You're missing a third possibility: take the case to court and, lose.

Losing would "create precedent that fair use of online material in a news report is not a copyright violation," which is the whole crux of this joke. "Losing" the court case would force AP to change their (questionably legal) terms of use.

I think you and I are calling a boolean variable by opposite names. What do you mean by "lose"?

I was solely addressing the missing options, and approaching the matter strictly from a truth-table perspective :-)

AP has two options: pay up, or go to court. Where each has two outcomes, "Success" or "Failure" from Woot's point of view. If AP pays, it's a success, if it doesn't and ignores it's a muted failure, since Woot doesn't need the 18 bucks. If AP goes to court and wins (i.e. doesn't have to pay) it's a success, but if it loses and is forced to pay, then that will do nothing but establish that online content should be paid for.

It seems like you and the parent are ignoring that nasty bottom-right quadrant.

If this wasn't a joke, and Woot pushed the issue to court, and "won", they risk being the first jackasses to sell everyone's online freedom for $17.50.

Given how flippant Woot is about this, and how hard the AP would fight if this actually went to court (since having to pay every source would damage its business model way more than people copy-pasting does), the bottom-right quadrant may as well not exist. The AP wants that outcome even less than we or Woot do.

I don't think small claims court is usually seen as a setter of precedent... :)

Maybe they could sue for 17.50 plus some punitive damages (or emotional distress or something), to push it into civil court. Imagine the briefs and testimony you'd get from the Woot staff. :)

Stare decisis--the legal doctrine upon which binding precedents are made--is not something that I think would apply to small claims courts. You wouldn't have a precedent unless it reached a federal appeals court.

Also, since copyright is federal law, you may need to sue them in federal court to begin with. Do the feds even run small claims courts? I don't think they do.

I am embarrassed not to be able to decode what's going on here. The backstory and such, yes, I understand, but what's this about an e-mail receipt for headphones? Did Woot buy headphones and bill them to the AP? Is Woot saying that the AP has to go out and buy the headphones themselves, then prove that they've done so?

I know that it's a joke, and I (think I) get the major thrust of it, but I just can't seem to understand what's the actual suggested mechanism of the alternative payment scheme.

Woot's telling the AP that, if they buy the two-pack of headphones and send Woot the receipt, Woot will let the $17.50 citation charge slide.

Visiting woot.com might clarify things.

Woot's business (from their FAQ page: http://woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx) is about selling one item a day, at a really good price. The Sennheiser headphones are today's item... and in that space where they're calling out AP, they usually talk up the day's product. They work in the sales pitch later in the text, though it isn't included in the TechCrunch article.

So their alternative payment is buying their product instead of paying them directly. (But really, it's just a lead-in to the marketing pitch they usually have. I think. It's my first time there, too.)

I like concept here of creating controversy and buzz and shifting the attention to selling. The blog post serves 2 purposes: sticking it to AP AND selling the latest Woot deal.

They did something similar with the Amazon deal announcement with the Kindle deal.

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