Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: I Require Permission

Author:Bruce Wyman
Posted:9/2/1999; 12:59:19 PM
Topic:Automated deep linking
Msg #:10472 (In response to 10452)
Prev/Next:10471 / 10473

My own point of view, as the issue develops, as it's sure to, I want to be very clearly on the "I require permission" side.

Well, I have to turn around and ask, how is this so different than Inforworld's original, "please ask permission to link directly to our stories", that seemed so absurd.

What's the distinction here between deep linking and automatically harvesting what those deep links are? How it's being done? Is it that the process is automated part of the objection? Is it quantity?

It seems that if you create an RSS file, that there is implied permission to use that material. The RSS file's author has gone through the trouble of making it easy for another person to grab, and use, that kind of information.

I keep trying to think of a real world analogy and the best that I can come up with is a conventional news clipping organization. We use one here at work and every week or so, they send us actual cut-out news articles with source credit. I suspect that copyright violations don't come into play because we're never under the assumption that the actual content is coming from the clipping organization and the parent publication is still making revenue because the clipping organization had to purchase a copy of the newspaper in the first place. The clipping organization is providing us with a hugely valuable service.

Is this really so different from what a scraper is doing? What a search engine is doing? I'm presuming that when a scraper would send me an email of headlines from a set of websites, that I'm never under the presumption the actual content is coming from the scraper. They're simply telling me to look at a particular place because they think I'd be interested in this set of stories. I still have to go to the actual content website to view the material - if the content provider is ad based, I'm still seeing their ads so it doesn't feel like they're losing potential revenue.

I go back to one of my earlier postings. If the scrapers are simply making my content more widely known and increasing audience share, that seems like a good thing. If they're simply providing headlines and maybe a one sentence summarization or keywords, that doesn't feel like any sort of intellectual property theft. It's not different than Dave telling me that I might be interested in some set of news stories at CNN *unless* the key distinction is that Dave did it by hand vs. some agent doing it automatically.

So, again, what's the distinction here between deep linking and automatically harvesting what those deep links are?

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