Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: CallTheShots.com
Author: Dan Lyke Posted: 11/18/1999; 11:28:23 AM Topic: CallTheShots.com Msg #: 13196 (In response to 13193) Prev/Next: 13195 / 13197
It's funny that I'm uncomfortable with CallTheShots.com but feel okay with developing quite a few little bots and spiders that implement things similar to what they're doing.I had been drawing the line at where the process was happening, but as I think more about it I'm less and less sure.
If I buy a book I'm welcome to take that book home and do whatever I want with it. If I incorporate it into a derivative work and share it with others the author has some say in what happens (in one forum I follow the legal wrangling over Kurt Vonnegut's letters was one example), but if I just build my own concordance or cut up the pages and rearrange them the author has been compensated and I'm within my rights.
But take the case of MyCNN. Since they changed from CNN Custom News to the new format their interface is intolerable, and the ads are presented with frames rather than inside the article.
So when I deep-link to their articles from my weblog the authors aren't getting compensated. This doesn't feel right to me. Worse, now that I'm starting to work around their abomination of an interface with assorted bots and scripts, I'm not even seeing their ads.
Similarly, I generally browse with image loading turned off. This has bothered me a bit, but worse now that I'm following a couple of comics, where it's awfully tempting to just load the specific image I'm interested in and none of the others.
There were a couple of quick apps posted to comp.lang.perl.misc recently to scavenge a month of Dilbert, displaying the comics without even the surrounding HTML. And of course this is the convenient way to do things, I'd much rather have everything downloaded and waiting on my computer when I go to read my morning news, readable with the image browser of my choice, but...
Once again, the author isn't getting compensated, and the long term effect of this is going to be to further blur the editorial lines, as in movies, where the advertisments for authorial compensation are being merged into the entertainment itself.
Before I make pronouncements on what others should be doing I like to be clear that I'm doing the right thing myself. I'm not sure I have my own house in order here.
Acknowledging that I'm cutting edge, how can I stay ethical as my computer does more and more of my browsing for me? Because if I don't answer those questions they may get answered in ways that make my experience of the web much less pleasant.
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:34 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.