The New York Times Told Me To Take This Down
medium.com
medium.com
We see this statement very often. When Pinterest got popular, how long until we saw replicas? When Medium and Svbtle were introduced, wasn't it just a matter of hours to me-too replicas came along? There was one fellow who's name escapes me that came up with the hidden-left interface menu that you swipe into view from the top that's now commonly used in the Facebook app and many, many mobile sites.
None of this is new, and there's nothing wrong with it. Copying is the biggest form of flattery as is often said, and its a validation of your idea.
What happens very often is that we see great ideas in their finished, polished form. Someone's showed us the path.
When you show me how to build a bridge, I don't have to invent a bridge. In many cases, I see your awesome bridge and figure out even better ways to build it. But coming up with that first bridge, doing the engineering and testing and iterations on it, that's hard.
That's really hard.
So yeah, you can recreate what someone else made in a lot shorter time than it took them to invent it. But invent something new and you'll see it takes you a long time too.
It took them six months and a powerful multi-person dev team to hand-code it [...] this is why we’ve spent the past year creating a tool that opens the ability to produce these stories
He doesn't seem to be making a, "meh, StackOverflow - I could write that in a weekend" kind of comment. Instead he's saying they made a tool that helps automate the process.
I'm branching off from the original discussion to talk about something tangentially related but often overlooked.
Is an hour fast for making a replica? I don't know, probably. But i'm not sure what amount of time i would expect someone to be able to replicate Snowfall. An afternoon i suppose?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn/how_much_evidence_does_it_take/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/
Relevant quotes from the second post:
(...) you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space. It's not a question of justifying anything to anyone. If there's a hundred million alternatives, you need at least 27 bits of evidence just to focus your attention uniquely on the correct answer.
At the time of first formulating the hypothesis - the very first time the equations popped into his head - Einstein must have had, already in his possession, sufficient observational evidence to single out the complex equations of General Relativity for his unique attention. Or he couldn't have gotten them right.
That sounds like operative part of the Feynman Algorithm:
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.
Where the harder part is in actually defining the problem which you're trying to solve, then writing that down.
These arguments are always a form of "Whole > Sum of Parts".
There is no such thing as private ideas.
It's always unwarrented-self-importance and greed that asserts otherwise.
geuis: you should be able to fix it by adding spaces around the first asterisk, if you're so moved.
I'd say since forever. I don't remember it working differently, and I've been around for some time now (old account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pygy)
And now that I've started on this topic, I'll also note that people make a lot of wrong guesses about gender, too.
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=28&n=36
(look at Δ(MeV), the mass excess)
The binding energy per nucleon is lower, as the other guy points out, but that's the wrong metric because Cu-65 has one more nucleon. The free neutron coming in has zero binding energy.
It's a multifaceted coin with many things to discuss, but let's take an easy one to start.
"It took me 3 minutes to run a mile."
Neglecting history, it took you three minutes to run a mile. What about all the running you've done before? What about all the healthy decisions you've made to bring your time down, all the discipline it took to stay on task and the motivation to accomplish that 3 minute mile.
It took you X years (age) to run a mile in 3 minutes. Every single decision that you made in your life influenced (positively, negatively, or neutrally) your ability to run a mile in 3 minutes. That's a lot of information to hold, but it's not just the output that is important - it's the progression from input -> output that's the important and time consuming process.
The difference between creating Snow Fall in 6 months and replicating Snow Fall in 1 hour is the difference in the questions asked (the input->output that brings you there). With Snow Fall, there wasn't an 'end' to know when you're done, you can't get to singletons, you have to build forward and decide when you're done. When you replicate, you start with a singleton, and you recreate that system. You have an end point, and you have the lightning bolt of all decisions, contemplations, and ponderings that created Snow Fall.
What if to recreate Snow Fall, you first had to learn to use a computer. Then you had to learn to code. Then you had to learn how to browse the web. Then you had to find Snow Fall. Then you had to decide you want to recreate Snow Fall. Then you recreate Snow Fall. That might take a little bit longer than an hour. Relative to you it's an hour, relative to someone who was just born, that's years apart, and this particular problem probably won't matter in their lives.
It's easy to follow the path down the mountain. It's much harder to be the first to climb the mountain.
"The initial implementation took X people Y months to complete. We've labored hard to create a tool that will let you do the same thing in Z hour(s)."
The second step is always easier than the first. It's just that even the first step is always the second step to someone else's first (and second) steps.
" I used their images/video to make a point. I can see how the video could fall under Fair Use"
Frankly I don't see at all how that would fall under Fair Use, and The Times is absolutely right to C&D him.
Also, "A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement."
No, but a statement of fact about a company that is not backed by public data is slander. NYT doesn't even claim that the reference is copyright infringement, the author just assumes that.
edit: ok, I actually thought he had put a demo website online in which he used the images, so it would look like the NYT's page (but with lorem ipsum for text or something) but he just made an educational video of it, I can see that could be fair use. So I retract my absolute statement. (as should be done with absolute statements in general! (absolutely)) I still think the 'hundreds of hours' remark isn't cool, but perhaps the law is on his side there too.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Additionally, the video was educational (it demonstrated how to create something), further bolstering the claim of fair use. The NYT is entirely out of line with the C&D, and it is particularly troubling that a newspaper -- which frequently engages in fair use, frequently reproducing material as part of their journalism and their criticism -- would send such a letter.
As such, this isn't a fair use case; there have been cases in the past where copy-shops copied parts of books for educational purposes, but because there was a commercial intent behind it US courts ruled that not to be fair use.
See: Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir. 1996).
http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/case-summar...
Of course, that one sentence they told him later to take down is a different thing I can't understand.
The case of textbook publishing is different, because the copies compete with the original in the same market.
Really though, my point was not about the educational nature. Even if we assume there is no educational value to the video, it is still a case of criticism/commentary, which is still fair use. The author is not in any way reducing the value of the Times article. The article was not copied in full. These are all things that support the claim that this is fair use.
My understanding of the rational for "fair use" is use for the benefit of the public good and explicitly not for the commercial purposes, this seems to me to be very commercial.
No it is not.
In-house counsel is such a pain is butt. I'm dealing with John Deere's law-talkers right now and I feel for you... I'm willing to bet anyone associated with creative at the Times could give a rat's ass about your site... but the lawyers... they have to justify their existence.
Pick your battles.
That is not enough. It also needs to be untrue and it needs to harm the reputation of the company.
That doesn't sound right. Sounds more like divulging a trade secret. Slander is telling an untruth about someone.
I think it's slander because he does not know how many hours NYT spent on making it, he could be totally wrong yet he is stating it as fact.
Anyhow it's an unfair comparison because NYT actually had to come up with this idea, he just had to replicate it.
You're confusing the legal concept of "slander" with the concept of "perhaps being wrong". For extra irony, by your definition of slander, you're guilty of it simply by accusing this guy of being guilty of it.
edit: Whoops, by posting this I too am guilty of slander by your definition.
When dealing with print, the term is libel.
| Anyhow it's an unfair comparison because
| NYT actually had to come up with this idea,
| he just had to replicate it.
The NYT spend a bunch of time and money to create
Snow Fall. Using this product (scrollkit), you can
create the same thing in about an hour. Call now!
Operators are standing by.http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/fair-use-ch...
Note: I don't think it's been challenged legally yet, but it's certainly a fair piece of policy and a strong guideline, from a professor who is very respected in the copyright law field.
What Scrollkit did, though, was tacky, plain and simple. They built an impressive product but are using someone else's work to try to promote it[1]. Is that illegal? I doubt it. But it's tasteless. And the smarmy "we did this in an hour" attitude is not only off-putting, it stretches the truth to the point of breaking. Anyone who's followed a "build a blog in five minutes" demo knows there's more to building something than just scaffolding -- Andre Torrez probably [said it best](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...).
There are plenty of ways they could have demonstrated their product without resorting to this kind of shallow mimicry. "Have you been blown away by the incredible work like the New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? Want to build something similar yourself? We'd like to show you scrollkit." And then do a demo video with your own photography and reporting. Tells the same story without the shiteating grin.
As it stands right now, though, they just look like they're jumping on a trend using someone else's work.
[1] Disclaimer: I have friends who work at the Times, including ones that worked on Snowfall.
whether slander or libel or whatever, this article states how much time NYT spent on it:
http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...
so much for backing it up. the author stating he did it in an hour, might be true or a boast, that's a claim about himself not the NYT, doesn't matter if it's true or not.
i can see how they can ask him to remove the video (and the author complied), but I really don't get on what grounds they can ask him to remove all mentions of NYT from his site.
As others have noted, the hundreds of hours vs. one hour claim is very disingenuous. Cutting and pasting an existing work into your toolkit is not even close to designing and creating an original piece of investigative journalism.
And, at the end there, actually calling on the NYT to advertise this scrollkit on panels? Because...why? The creator thinks it's really cool?
Anyone against that is not on the same team as me.
The guy could have used any generic content in the world to demonstrate scrollkit. He could have used "lorem ipsum" and random Creative Commons images from Flickr. He could have done his own investigation about the avalanche and created his own article. He could have made an article about some other event. He could have written an article about scrollkit and used it to demonstrate scrollkit. There are practically an infinite number of ways he could have avoided this.
Instead he used very specific copyrighted content from an article by a huge media company.
I almost want to say the guy is just trolling for page views. He copied an entire NY Times article, and he's surprised the NY Times has a problem? Who is that dumb?
No, they didn't. They took issue with the fact that he merely set the video to "private" instead of taking it down and with the continued use of their name. They did not make the claim that the use of their name was copyright infringement: in reality, the new claim they make in the second C&D is trademark infringement. It's still specious (nominative use of trademarks is generally fine), but not nearly as absurd.
What I wrote in my comment is in reference to the entire request, including the highlighted part of the email. Asking someone to remove something or cease and desist is not solely the domain of copyright infringement. The only part of the second C&D that deals with copyright infringement is the first sentence, where they state that changing the video status to private is unacceptable.
The other claim they make, starting at "Further, you need to remove any reference..." and ending with "...We made a replica in under an hour" is a claim of trademark, not copyright, infringement, contrary to GGP's belief. Nowhere in the C&D does the NYT assert copyright over the use of the quoted text: they only made a claim of copyright infringement in the first C&D with respect to "any New York Times content", not the text referencing their name.
This situation really isn't that hard to parse and requires no speculation: just read all of what the New York Times sent instead of relying on the OP's misinterpretation that everything the NYT is claiming is all just something absurd about copyright infringement.
Personally, I'm acutely aware of and entirely in support of the times' need to protect their vast investment in generating the very best news that people are capable of generating. TBH, I'm a little surprised and confused that the OP is surprised and confused.
I disagree with that, since people who make money with movies and music tend to do that via selling access to the media, which the NYT doesn't seem to be doing in this case and the OP consequently doesn't interfere with (even before the OP apparently didn't reproduce the NYT content in its entirety).
That is excessive rationalization. What the creators intend to do with their content is kinda up to them. The fact that they haven't tried to directly monetize it doesn't somehow make it fair game, and the OP even acknowledges this.
Edit: It's unfortunate, but ... yeah. It might be worth forwarding your story to some legal blogs that specialise in free speech I suppose, but other than that. shrug I'm afraid I'm not sure what you can do if you don't have the money to fight them.
Matt Dennewitz Neil Wargo Andrew Gaerig
They do amazing work with the Cover Story series. A blog post from them showing off their techniques would gain a huge amount of traction, at least here on HN
edit: here are our cover stories: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/. we've been at it for a while, and you can see where the idea grew legs, learned to walk, and took off. pretty neat.
What would be interesting too is how the visual designers work, i.e. for the cover stories. The imagery and visual language of the music industry is totally different from what typically goes on HN, and would be a really interesting contrast.
On top of that, the piece is the most vain attempt at generating controversy for the sake traffic i've ever seen. Please, can't blatant attempts at advertising be taken off HN?
On your second point, I can concur.
The author could easily have used greeking or content promoting ScrollKit to fill the site. Ripping off NYT's material is a dodgy way to start things IMO. Hell, write your own feature about a pet, or your grandparents' legacy or soup up a page of Wikipedia content with Creative Commons and attributed Flickr photos.
I almost don't care what happened after that (the private YouTube video, the leveraging of their brand, etc). The reaction to the initial contact could've been overwhelmingly apologetic - complete removal of the video, no leveraging of Snow Fall and so on - but instead makes for linkbait.
Even now, going to the demo gives the big "they made me do it" message when any text could've replaced their content very easily. You know, replicated in an hour...
This story might've got the tool excellent publicity, but I don't view it positively as a result.
The copyright in the Snow Fall article does not give anyone the rights to prevent someone from saying "The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding 'Snow Fall'. We made a replica in an hour." That quote from their letter is the part I was referring to.
It does not violate copyright, it is true, to say "The NYT spent hundreds of hours..." It is not 'fair use' though, because it is not a use of copyrighted material in the first place. 'Fair use' means fair use _of copyrighted material_, it is a defense against using copyrighted material without permission.
'Truth' is not in fact any kind of a defense against copyright. If you really _do_ copy someone's copyrighted work without permission, and it is not fair use, then it is completely irrelevant whether the text you copied was 'true' or not. But if did not copy someone's copyrighted work, then you can't possibly have violated their copyright.
For instance, if someone else had first written an article that began "The NYT spent hundreds of hours...", and went on, and you copied that entire article yourself without permission, and you did not have a fair use defense -- you would be violating their copyright, regardless of how true or false the article was.
'nominative fair use' is a legal theory of _trademark_, and what you say may actually be more applicable to trademark, aha, okay. Important to be clear though.
This part is the only part that matters here: the second C&D about the use of New York Times mark is entirely about whether it's fair use to use it.
And again, what I was talking about with truth was more about claims and less about copyright.
That last bit seems like fair use. If I write a book "in the style of Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories'" by what reasoning would the Kipling estate ownership of that style?
'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z.
Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use.
> 'Fair use' is a legal defense to make copies of copyrighted material. Yes, it is copyrighted, but it is a fair use anyway, if X, Y and Z.
> Facts and factual statements are not copyrightable in the US in the first place. Nor does copyright, in the US, prevent someone from comparing something to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. So you are correct that there is no legal basis under copyright to prevent such a comparison, but it's not about fair use.
This is simply incorrect: I wish you'd stop replying to everyone who mentions "fair use" with this. Nominative fair use is the ability to use someone else's trademark for the purposes of comparison. Thus, NYT's second demand, to cease referring to "The New York Times" on Scrollkit's website is entirely about fair use. It has nothing to do with NYT's copyright claims.
The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if:
1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).
2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).
3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial...
My issue was with GGP's insistence that it had nothing to do with fair use or that people talking about fair use were necessarily talking about NYT's copyright claims. Fair use also applies to trademarks.
It’s an unreasonable and baffling request for the New York Times to tell us to take down this statement. A statement of fact about a company is not a copyright infringement.
Can something like this be considered defamation? (or did NYT come out and publicly say that they spent hundreds of hours hand coding this?)
> [...]I spent much of the summer getting to know the people involved (sometimes with the photographer Ruth Fremson and the video journalist Catherine Spangler in tow) and the loved ones left behind, and attended the 2012 International Snow Science Workshop in September to help understand the world of avalanches and snow. And I started writing, which took a few weeks. By then, The New York Times had committed to telling this story through multimedia. And, as I hope people see in the credits at the bottom of the article, it was quite a team of graphic artists and designers and editors. Unlike me, they all had plenty of other duties this fall — the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy — but really devoted much of the past month to the publication.
Based on that, it seems the NYT is claiming it took a team working part time—in an unusually busy news time—about a month to complete. The credits for Snow Fall list 11 people on the design team: to get to 200 hours, the minimum needed to qualify as "hundreds", it'd be 18 hours per person. Plausible, but it would be better if he could cite that claim.
I couldn't find any claim to the part about "hand-coding" (whatever that means). In fact, in a different Q&A[2], they mention using a mixture of prior custom work and off-the-shelf components:
> We used a number of custom components that we’ve used in other projects in the past like the modal slideshows. But some tools/libraries include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address. In triggering scroll-based events, I took inspiration from Remy Sharp’s inview jquery plugin.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/sports/q-a-the-avalanche-a... [2]: http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made...
Here in the US, it's very difficult to prevail on a claim of either slander or libel (vis-a-vis many European countries), thanks to the First Amendment. While NYT Co may (may) be in the right regarding their first C&D, I would be shocked if they were to prevail on the second.
The only thing I could find was this very annoying video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA62gHzVpA
My personal opinion (based on years of observation of this type of thing) is that it is well worth the money to invest in an IP lawyer to review and to see if you have a leg to stand on with respect to fair use.
The reason being is that this is a tempest in a teapot [1] and has the potential to deliver gross amounts of publicity to the startup as it is discussed and dissected ad infinitum. As such if the IP attorney decides that there is a basis for fair use I would go with it if at all possible and keep the page up. In the end the Times isn't going to want the negative publicity over this (even if they have a reasonable case) and may very well end up backing down. Could end up being a Streisand effect as well.
The problem I have with that is that only a trial can tell "fair use" from "not fair use". A few billable hours with a lawyer probably won't tell you anything more than that. Review is great, but it's not an absolute, as an IP lawyer is most definitely not the final authority.
And if that is the case then people will come to the defense of the accused and the complainant may back down or reevaluate their position. All with the resulting publicity (which actually would happen even if he was wrong but that's much more risky so I wouldn't advocate w/o some leg). In any event you have to ask yourself what their game is and whether they would seek damages (can't get blood from a stone you know) and whether they even want to spend (they aren't exactly super profitable or anything) resources on this.
Consequently I don't care what would happen at trial because there isn't going to be a trial. The NYT isn't going to spend resources on this.
This is all strategy based on my experience.[2] You ask 10 people you will get 10 opinions. All I'm saying is that it pays to have someone review before backing down in "3 days". [1]
[1] Absolutely inconceivable that the NYT won't allow someone to locate an attorney to review which in no case is 3 days reasonable. There is no imminent harm to them. This is on the face the standard "scary lawyer letter" intended to cause exactly the reaction that it did.
[2] I had two situations where both American Express and the NCAA came calling with scary lawyer letters many years ago and was able to keep them at bay with a reply letter from my attorney. And other things like this. Law and strategy are two different things.
so i am pleased to see any kind of tool being offered to creative individuals that will help to simplify the matter of creating such sites.
if i did a replica, i would scramble the text, and dummy the images and video, so as to avoid any copyright issues. but that's a side-issue.
the important point is big-money corporations usually employ cost-inefficient methodologies. it'd be a mistake for individuals to think that such wasteful methodologies are the only route. so don't let the n.y. times bully you into the incorrect perception that only it can create a lush presentation a la "snow fall". you can too.
-bowerbird
If I were someone at NYT, I would be flattered that someone took the time to replicate my stuff since it seems someone seems to think it's worth stealing/borrowing/copying/etc
It's incredibly easier/quicker to code something when you're just copying someone else's end result.
I am mostly wondering where he got that number from, was it a guess, did they quote it at some point?
"Mobile Safari often just zooms the page when changing from portrait to landscape, instead of laying out the page as it would if originally loaded in landscape. If web developers want their scale settings to remain consistent when switching orientations on the iPhone, they must add a maximum-scale value to prevent this zooming, which has the sometimes-unwanted side effect of preventing users from zooming in." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Mobile/View...
Whatever the reason, it's pretty annoying.