An open letter to Jason Calacanis
blog.fluther.com
blog.fluther.com
For a while, they've been spamming search results with their keyword-rich pages full of links to other sites (no different from what Adsense spammers have been doing for 5+ years http://www.seobook.com/official-mahalo-com-spam-according-go... ) and then they started paying websites to distribute their keyword spam widget ( http://www.seobook.com/mahalo-caught-pagerank-funneling-link... ).
Now they're even more brazen at stealing content from other websites and have not only started taking Fluther's content but also content from few other sites.
And all the while, Google has been giving Mahalo a free pass. If you tried any of this, Google would have slapped you down and put your site into a sandbox or supplementary index bucket. And Mahalo is still spamming the web and Google's doing nothing.
You've got to be kidding me. The tone of the blog post makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping the web looking for questions to steal (which is itself kind of laughable), but what it sounds like they're actually doing is just allowing users to select questions from public Twitter and answer them, including a link to where it was found on Twitter. How the fuck is that a problem? If you don't want users doing that, don't post your shit to Twitter.
This now just strikes me as whining from people looking for attention. Well done, you got some free PR. And I now have zero interest in using your product.
From the same page: Did you ask this question via Twitter? We create a Mahalo account for everyone who asks a question via Twitter.
So yes, the tone of the blog makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping from the web, because Mahalo's pages make it sound like they're scraping from the web.
It's really not an issue about copyright as it is about plagiarism.
We’ll take down the account for you if it’s such a big deal. It’s like a half dozen questions that were imported by our user.
Just so you know we’re not importing every question from your site or anything we’re let our users import questions from the public timeline and answer them...
I'm not sure Fluther has a case under copyright law. Especially if short and to-the-point, questions are unlikely to be considered copyrightable.
If your company's 'righteous mission' is building the biggest question and answer database, scraping all public sources of questions allowable by law seems a legitimate tactic, even if it peeves some of the sources.
Honestly, I don't know if we have a case here, but I'm curious to hear what people think.
Is Google in "a lot of trouble" for their behavior? Should they be?
Are you angry they're making questions by your users seem like they were written by Fluther itself? That seems a legitimate concern, but your own Twitter stream similarly blurs question authorship.
Are you angry that they synthesized a 'fluther' account on Mahalo and thus made it look a little like you're endorsing Mahalo with your participation? That's what I would be most angry about, if my question-tweets were showing up, under my unique username, at a site I'd never opted into. But one remedy for that concern might then be to remove attribution -- making the questions from 'an unnamed Twitter user'.
You can google "compilation copyright", or see http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/compilation.htm for example (second hit). Note that it gives you much more limited protection than a traditional copyright, in that you only have a copyright on the collection, it does not give you a copyright over the parts. However, it sounds like the potential infringement in question is for the entire collection.
Whether or not Fluther could claim a compilation copyright would probably be a matter for lawyers to work out in court, by which I mean, it's an awfully close call. The courts have interpreted the word "creative" fairly liberally, but I could see a court saying that simply passing through the posts of other people with no editorial oversight and collecting them together does not itself meet a standard for creativity. Who knows, though? The list of things courts have judged to not meet the creativity criterion is quite short.
And Fluther's very complaint against Mahalo -- the removal of Fluther's full context -- suggests Mahalo isn't infringing the aspects showing originality at all.
Certainly lots of different people will ask the same questions all the time. But this wasn't different people. It was the same people's questions, copied.
And then following it up by publicly lambasting a figure rather than privately clearing it just seems like a desperate tactic to gain publicity.
And since they strip out the link, it's very hard to find attribution.
Most sites are essentially "stealing" content from their users -- the people who submit it and retain the copyright on it (or should, if they don't) -- so this forces me to ask the overriding question here: Who really cares?
I disagree that repurposing tweets is wrong. Many twitter-based barnacle applications do just that and no one raises a stink.
And Mahalo Answers doesn't remove attribution. They link to the twitter account that posted the question (http://twitter.com/fluther) on the page. This might not be the attribution you desire (and you might be able to pursue legal action), but the attribution is there, nonetheless.
If they maintained the integrity of the tweets -- complete with the links present in them, that's something else.
In this case a couple of questions (like five or six) were imported by a users looking to answer them... it's really such a minor issue.
We're going to delete them.... it really doesn't matter to us (i mean, six out of 100k+ questions isn't going to make a difference for either site).
rock on... jason
Furthermore, I just posted a question there, and in no way had to agree to transfer copyright ownership to them--only rights to reuse the question. Their cease and desist threats are fraudulent.
We're not trying to start a legal battle, but this feels like infringement.
At least that what is seems like to me from a quick read of the post and comments here.
If you're not trying to start a legal battle, what's the point? Are you trying to shame them into doing what you want?
It is, however, somewhat of a dick move - especially since the two companies are somewhat competitors. OTOH, Fluther is putting it out on Twitter, and hence seems like they're accepting the risk of possible misuse for the reward of greater distribution. If a tweet is indeed copyrightable, then it seems a whole lot of other services (including, for example, today's hit almost.at) would be screwed.
If this is so much of a thing, perhaps work out a licensing deal for the questions with Mahalo?
Later that day, it was magically turned into a Mahalo Q&A (I've never used Mahalo before this): http://bit.ly/15HX9T
Interestingly enough, Calcanis himself replied to the thread in Mahalo ...
I'm pretty sure that Fluther's TOS doesn't apply here since Mahalo never used the site.
If you tweeted a haiku and if that haiku later appeared in a book of poetry without your attribution, would that be okay?
If you wanted to give up the rights to your words, you could use something like tweetCC (http://tweetcc.com/) to apply a Creative Commons license to your tweets.
Jobenjo has a point about haiku -- but questions will seldom be recognized as poetry.
Indeed, as a question gets better as a question, more concise and precise, it becomes more like a pure idea, or a strictly functional communicative construct. You can't assert a copyright on those.
Whether you can copyright text as short as 140 characters is at least debatable-- it may be that nobody holds copyright over tweets.