So I find a blog on which the blogger is not only taking the full version of Creek Running North’s RSS feed and publishing it
“Site copyrighted � 2004-2006 by [said blogger] except where otherwise marked, and may be used under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
I provide a feed of the full articles for the convenience of those of you who read CRN in an RSS aggregator. A savvy webmaster can, if she wishes, incorporate the feed into her blog within the guidelines of fair use by using one of the many RSS-to-HTML scripts out there, and setting it to display an excerpt of each post. Twenty-five or forty words is a usual amount. Still, I’m not particularly surprised to see the occasional repost in full. I usually ask the person to adjust the settings to display only an excerpt. I have, on occasion, done the work for them.
But this use pisses me off. Unless I were to insert a copyright notice in each post, my stuff would not be “otherwise marked.” Which means that this [said blogger] guy is, in effect, giving carte blanche to the world to republish my work as often as they like as long as no one makes any money from it. Including me. [Got that much wrong. Sorry. — C.] Now, obviously I don’t mind writing for free, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I would like for that to be my decision, and now that I’m aware of [said blogger]’s blog, I lose much of my legal ability to retain my copyright if I don’t take immediate measures to defend that copyright.
So I send [said blogger] a piece of email this morning. I’m phrasing from memory here, as the email is at home, and I’ll append the actual text later should it differ markedly. My emailreads:
You are republishing my work in full, without permission, with misleading and false copyright information. Please either correct the copyright information or remove my feed.
I add the URL of my feed on his site. That’s all I say, as I’ve gotten schooled in such things by attorneys correcting my past mistakes in being too familiar or nice or helpful. I was going for terse and not unduly hostile.
He replies:
I thought it was pretty obvious that the site copyright on my data didn’t apply to something clearly labeled as an aggregator source, but if it makes you happier, I’ve clarified it. It was past time to update it anyway.
Now perhaps I’m in a worse mood than I need to be, but the “I thought it was pretty obvious” and “if it makes you happier” piss me off. Here I was offering him more than he had any legal right to expect, and he acts as if my demands are irrational. So I respond.
I would have been utterly satisfied with the change, were it not for the snarky attitude. You are republishing in full copyrighted material without permission. Remove my feed from your site.
I walk the dog, and then head in to work. I have an excruciating meeting. an hour and a half later, I leave the meeting to find this email from [said blogger]:
Snarky attitude? You brought the hostility, friend, when it was fairly clear that I wasn’t trying to claim copyright on your work, and now I think you’re reading much more of it back than exists. I think you should check on that chip on your shoulder; if anything, what I wrote was more polite than what you wrote. I find it a little doubtful at this point that you would have been satisfied with anything but groveling, though, since it appears clear to me now that you were looking for a fight.
Congratulations. You managed to dump on a complete stranger. Feeling happier now?
You are republishing in full copyrighted material without permission.
You may want to clarify your feed, then, because it states:
“A message from this feed’s publisher: This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site.”
This seems like pretty blanket permission to me. That said however…
Remove my feed from your site.
If you don’t want me to be reading what you write, I’m certainly not going to waste time disagreeing. You’ve been removed from my aggregator.
I sincerely hope your day goes better.
I’m a little surprised, because I never put that message in my feed. So I do a little investigation and find that Feed Burner appends that message to feeds it distributes, and I have as yet not found a way to remove it.
And so I’m figuring out when I’ll have the time to re-structure the feed so that it only includes an excerpt of each post, which will be a significant and I sadly guess unavoidable hassle for some of my friends who read this by way of LiveJournal or other aggregators, and I get an email from Amazon. They’re transferring nineteen dollars to me, from purchases of the e-book over the last two weeks. (and thank you! I hope you like the book!) So I decide to distract myself by checking the download stats for the document.
Five hundred separate IP numbers have downloaded the book in the last two weeks.
Now I need to decide whether password-protection of the book is something I ought to consider — along with making a couple sample chapters available for free download — or whether it’s all just too much hassle.
I should say two things:
1) I’m sure that most of those 500 downloads were by people who aren’t regular fixtures of the CRN community, so alla youse regulars, don’t worry about apologizing if you’ve downloaded it and forgotten to — or decided not to — pay. I know how that kinda thing works. But a .4 percent sell rate is just depressing.
2) If you’ve read this far into the post on a blog — as opposed to an aggregator like Net News Wire or a Firefox sidebar or somesuch — and the URL in your browser address bar doesn’t say either “faultline.org” or “livejournal” somewhere in it, the person who runs the blog is using it without my consent. It’s almost certainly an innocent mistake on the blogger’s part. Still, you might consider sending them a link to this summary of Fair Use.
I hate having to deal with stuff like this.
