The House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act aim to curb online piracy, but in reality will end up censoring the Internet in ways that would devastate sites with user posted content (like Fluther), and change the very nature of the Internet itself. Trying to get a handle on piracy is a legitimate concern. This is not a legitimate way to do it.

These bills shift the burden of copyright protection from the holder of the copyright (where it currently rests and rightly belongs) to sites like ours. If these measures come to pass, it would require us to be certain that none of our members ever post anything that infringes on a copyright. Not only that, but posting a link to any other site would require that we first be certain that there is not one instance of copyright infringement anywhere on that site as well! Should we miss something, Fluther could be immediately shut down, our finances frozen, and our domain name confiscated. A few rogue links could result in the swift demise of an honorable site.

It’s not all about us, though. It’s about you, too. Websites you frequent may be blocked in the US. Your email provider may be forced to censor links you send or receive. Anything you post on social networking sites will be closely monitored, and subject to censorship. Want to post a video of your toddler singing a pop song? Your distant family will probably never see the adorableness, and you might even be sued. Trying to get the word out about human rights violations by reposting videos and news articles? The world will likely never know.

There is a little bit of good news: The bills are on hold at the moment. But the corporate interests behind them won’t give up. We can’t give up, either. Take action now!

For more information, and other ways  you can help, click here.

Lisa A. Noll

1/16/2012

]]> http://blog.fluther.com/fluther-is-in-danger-along-with-the-rest-of-the-internet/feed/ 18 http://blog.fluther.com/fluther-issues/ http://blog.fluther.com/fluther-issues/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:34:32 +0000 Andrew http://blog.fluther.com/blog/?p=254 Sorry all, we had some issues with one of our servers that took a while to diagnose. It should be fixed now.

In the interim, though, avatars have been disabled. We’ll be looking to get those back up this weekend. Thanks for your patience.

Stop stealing our users’ content. Your Q&A website, Mahalo Answers, is hijacking content from our Q&A site, Fluther.

We get it. You need to create doppelganger Twitter accounts to bolster your user base and create content. Perhaps some Twitter users are fine with the fact that their tweets are being co-opted by you to drive traffic. But we won’t allow you to strip out the attribution to our users simply to pad your own corpus of questions.

UPDATE 6.2.09:

Thank you for all for your responses.

As we continue to hone in on the issue, there has been a lot of discussion about “can you copyright a tweet” — albeit partly because we framed part of our argument that way.

For us though, that’s not the interesting issue — this issue is more about attribution.

Ultimately, we don’t care if questions on Fluther are reposted other places (we’re quite happy with the quality of responses here compared to other places). The central issue for us, though, is the fact that the attribution was stripped out to make it seem as if the content was being generated somewhere else. It’s less about copyright infringement and more about proper citation and plagiarism.

We know that content on Fluther is going to turn up other places — and we welcome that. But the only difference between plagiarism and sampling in a read/write culture is attribution — and that’s what was missing: a tiny twitter link does not attribution make.

We’re happy that Jason has responded to us (thank you). We look forward to Mahalo either attributing or removing the questions.

Meanwhile, we think we can do a better job with attribution in the tweetfeed and rss as well. We’ll be looking to change that in the coming days.

Andrew & Ben

—————–
Here’s one example (of quite a few):

Our question, asked by rexpresso, http://www.fluther.com/disc/45600/where-can-i-buy-mp3-that-can-be-used-for-commercial/ generated this tweet to our Twitter account. Our twitterfeed posts a tweet for every single question, including a link back to our site (just like RSS), as is required by our Terms of Service.

Now, look at: http://www.mahalo.com/answers/music/where-can-i-buy-mp3-that-can-be-used-for-commercial-purposes. You are making an exact copy of this question, categorizing it in your system, stripping out the attribution link (as required by our terms) and hosting in on Mahalo Answers.

In your response to our cease and desist email, you say “our users can answer questions from the public timeline on Twitter…” [1]

That’s fine. Your users can answer our questions. But that’s entirely different than you repurposing our tweet on your site and stripping out the links to the original question in order to make it seem like one of your users asked it.

You also say “we don’t feel you can copyright a publicly asked question.” [1] To this, we respond with the Twitter Terms of Service:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

That means that all those tweets posted by us are, in fact, copyrighted by us and may not be repackaged and hosted by you against our will. Why not just scrape Fluther.com directly for question titles and ask them on your site under an assumed name? (Hint: don’t do that, either)

We know many Web 2.0 companies wrestle with murky legal waters, and we’re all doing our best by using good judgment, intuition and honor.

Except you.

This is not a murky case. This is not like hosting a link to an illegal bittorrent, which may require some legal nuance. This is one company publicly infringing upon the rights of another company and their users, and we find it appalling that you’re standing behind this deplorable practice.

So please, put an end to this.

Ben Finkel & Andrew McClain
Fluther.com Co-Founders

For a full list of lifted content, see http://www.mahalo.com/member/fluther

[1] Letter from Jason Calacanis
From: Jason McCabe Calacanis
Date: Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: Stop hijacking our content
To: Ben Finkel

http://www.fluther.com