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

Aren't headlines authored text?

Author:Arnold V. Lesikar
Posted:9/3/1999; 6:31:17 AM
Topic:Automated deep linking
Msg #:10498 (In response to 10491)
Prev/Next:10497 / 10499

I have to confess that I had thought of writing a scraper myself. I didn't precisely because of the question of permission. It seemed too much like stealing material.

The argument in favor of scrapers seems to be that there is no significant difference from deep-linking. But there is! A scraper steals text, namely the text of the headlines that it scrapes.

My wife used to be a journalist. She had told me that it takes talent and creativity to do headlines properly. For newspaper editors headlines are a vehicle of self-expression.

Headlines used to seem trivial to me, until I began to write them for my weblog, the Dome News. (Shameless plug: http://einstein.stcloudstate.edu/Dome/) It takes real thought to create a headline that is zingy and creates interest in a story and represents the content accurately as well. And it needs to be short, generally the shorter the better. This is far less trivial than I had thought.

Headlines represent just a few words each, but repeated scraping adds up. Kilobytes of headlines represent kilobytes of authored text that the scraper is using without permission.

Weblogs often quote a headline or pieces of content when pointing at a story on another site. I do that. Dave does that. I think that's fair use. What's not fair use, is going to a site and shoveling out masses of their content with a robot for your own use.

Headlines are content.

arn

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