An open letter to Jason Calacanis

http://blog.fluther.com/blog/2009/06/01/an-open-letter-to-jason-calacanis/

by jobenjo • 17 years ago

126 49 17 years ago

blog.fluther.com

gojomo5• 17 years ago

Fluther accuses Mahalo of stealing the questions asked by Flutter users, not any of Fluther's answers.

I'm not sure Fluther has a case under copyright law. Especially if short and to-the-point, questions are unlikely to be considered copyrightable.

If your company's 'righteous mission' is building the biggest question and answer database, scraping all public sources of questions allowable by law seems a legitimate tactic, even if it peeves some of the sources.

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe if you scraped all the Q&A sites to make a massive database of questions, that would in fact get you in a lot of trouble.

Honestly, I don't know if we have a case here, but I'm curious to hear what people think.

gojomo5• 17 years ago

All the Q&A sites want Google traffic. Google has scraped them all, and thus inside Google's index is a "massive database of questions". Excerpts from this massive database are used by Google to improve its products, and excerpts are often displayed as part of their cached pages or results-page snippets.

Is Google in "a lot of trouble" for their behavior? Should they be?

jerf• 17 years ago

You can have a copyright on a compilation of works that are themselves not copyrightable. For instance, a recipe is not copyrightable, but a collection of recipes is, even without additional commentary.

You can google "compilation copyright", or see http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/compilation.htm for example (second hit). Note that it gives you much more limited protection than a traditional copyright, in that you only have a copyright on the collection, it does not give you a copyright over the parts. However, it sounds like the potential infringement in question is for the entire collection.

Whether or not Fluther could claim a compilation copyright would probably be a matter for lawyers to work out in court, by which I mean, it's an awfully close call. The courts have interpreted the word "creative" fairly liberally, but I could see a court saying that simply passing through the posts of other people with no editorial oversight and collecting them together does not itself meet a standard for creativity. Who knows, though? The list of things courts have judged to not meet the creativity criterion is quite short.

gojomo5• 17 years ago

That might be Fluther's best claim. But it hardly seems Fluther is adding much originality (via "selection, coordination, or arrangement") in the raw log of questions. (Perhaps, in the editing and rating of answers -- but Mahalo isn't taking the answers.)

And Fluther's very complaint against Mahalo -- the removal of Fluther's full context -- suggests Mahalo isn't infringing the aspects showing originality at all.

staunch2• 17 years ago

Who and when is anyone agreeing to Fluther TOS? If the questions are being posted on Twitter, and Mahalo is taking them off there, the only TOS involved is Twitter's.

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

But Twitter does give you copyright to your tweets, so repurposing a tweet and removing attribution seems wrong.

edmccaffrey2• 17 years ago

Twitter doesn't do that--they don't have the legal authority to grant a copyright to someone who is not the owner of the material--they say that what is yours remains so. Fluther is given right to reuse questions submitted, as the submitter agrees when using the site; the original author owns the copyright, even when reposted to Twitter.

sjs3823• 17 years ago

Twitter doesn't give you copyright on anything. They just license content that you already own copyright to.

I disagree that repurposing tweets is wrong. Many twitter-based barnacle applications do just that and no one raises a stink.

And Mahalo Answers doesn't remove attribution. They link to the twitter account that posted the question (http://twitter.com/fluther) on the page. This might not be the attribution you desire (and you might be able to pursue legal action), but the attribution is there, nonetheless.

jasoncalacanis• 17 years ago

Very good point. You can't copyright a question asked on the public timeline on Twitter.... that's like trying to copyright something you say on the subway to your friend--you can't.

In this case a couple of questions (like five or six) were imported by a users looking to answer them... it's really such a minor issue.

We're going to delete them.... it really doesn't matter to us (i mean, six out of 100k+ questions isn't going to make a difference for either site).

rock on... jason

alain94040• 17 years ago

The beauty of 140 characters... When is short too short for copyright?

I'm pretty sure that Fluther's TOS doesn't apply here since Mahalo never used the site.

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

Good question. Can you copyright a haiku?

If you tweeted a haiku and if that haiku later appeared in a book of poetry without your attribution, would that be okay?

calvin2• 17 years ago

Technically, Twitter says you keep the right to your words.

If you wanted to give up the rights to your words, you could use something like tweetCC (http://tweetcc.com/) to apply a Creative Commons license to your tweets.

edmccaffrey2• 17 years ago

Why does he keep prattling on about his site's TOS? When viewing something from Twitter, you're not bound to the TOS of a site that you're not even visiting.

Furthermore, I just posted a question there, and in no way had to agree to transfer copyright ownership to them--only rights to reuse the question. Their cease and desist threats are fraudulent.

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

Yeah, fair enough. This is really more about Twitter's TOS than ours.

We're not trying to start a legal battle, but this feels like infringement.

mbreese2• 17 years ago

Of course you're trying to start a legal battle. You're using the words 'cease and desist' and infringement.

At least that what is seems like to me from a quick read of the post and comments here.

If you're not trying to start a legal battle, what's the point? Are you trying to shame them into doing what you want?

semiotomatic3• 17 years ago

The point isn't that Fluther's TOS are being violated... it's merely that stripping out the attribution link makes it look like the question was asked by another user on another site.

sjs3823• 17 years ago

I think it's pretty clear that the question is asked by http://twitter.com/fluther.

calvin2• 17 years ago

To me, it makes good PR-sense for Mahalo to allow Twitter users to opt-out of their automatic question-scraping system.

jsz03• 17 years ago

I wonder though if any users actually care? Seems like it's entirely a business issue between two competitive sites. If I were to ask a question I would certainly welcome any and all answers and, personally, not care if I was credited for asking the original question. (especially if the responses were good and helpful)

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Fights are most bitter when the stakes are low. Let's face it, the value supposedly comes from the quality of the answers rather than the questions...although from the site owners perspective, the questions are time candy which keeps the users hanging around the website.

anonn• 17 years ago

Calacanis and Mahalo are growing more and more desperate. They raised a huge amount of money for a huge valuation but their traffic has stalled and been going down.

For a while, they've been spamming search results with their keyword-rich pages full of links to other sites (no different from what Adsense spammers have been doing for 5+ years http://www.seobook.com/official-mahalo-com-spam-according-go... ) and then they started paying websites to distribute their keyword spam widget ( http://www.seobook.com/mahalo-caught-pagerank-funneling-link... ).

Now they're even more brazen at stealing content from other websites and have not only started taking Fluther's content but also content from few other sites.

And all the while, Google has been giving Mahalo a free pass. If you tried any of this, Google would have slapped you down and put your site into a sandbox or supplementary index bucket. And Mahalo is still spamming the web and Google's doing nothing.

staunch2• 17 years ago

There are downsides to being a great salesman. Sometimes you get what you want. Raising tens of millions of dollars and starting a company has got to be fun. Facing the reality of building a boring ass SEO company? Not so much. Fortunately, he's got enough runway and personal wealth to procrastinate for the next couple years. Maybe a few cheap tricks and shortcuts will keep his traffic growing enough to keep his investors off his back. No? Shit.

nailer• 17 years ago

I still don't get Mahalo's what makes Mahalo's manually aggregated content business model in 2009 different from Yahoo's manually aggregated content business model in 1995.

js3309• 17 years ago

legal or not....its a bitch move by Mahalo to copy fluther Q&A....regardless where it is on twitter or fluther.com

sjs3823• 17 years ago

It may not have even been intentional; rather, its probably just a side-effect of their twitter-scraping. They likely didn't have the other site in mind when building their twitter-scraper.

JimmyL2• 17 years ago

Seems like somewhat of a jackass thing to do on Mahalo's part, but I don't think it's anything illegal - the copyright-ability of a tweet is pretty unclear (as in there's no precedent and disagreement amongst lawyers). Additionally, the Fluther TOS has nothing to do with this; Mahalo is simply pulling things off Twitter, without ever interacting directly with the Fluther site, and hence never hitting anything covered by their conditions.

It is, however, somewhat of a dick move - especially since the two companies are somewhat competitors. OTOH, Fluther is putting it out on Twitter, and hence seems like they're accepting the risk of possible misuse for the reward of greater distribution. If a tweet is indeed copyrightable, then it seems a whole lot of other services (including, for example, today's hit almost.at) would be screwed.

If this is so much of a thing, perhaps work out a licensing deal for the questions with Mahalo?

callmeed• 17 years ago

I once posted a random startup idea on Twitter: http://twitter.com/callmeed/status/1422601143

Later that day, it was magically turned into a Mahalo Q&A (I've never used Mahalo before this): http://bit.ly/15HX9T

Interestingly enough, Calcanis himself replied to the thread in Mahalo ...

jsz03• 17 years ago

As much as I do not like Jason Calacanis I think he's 100% right. If I publicly ask the question "Why is the sky blue?" does that mean I basically own the intellectual property of that question? No one can ever ask it again without crediting me? If that's the case I'm just going to preemptively copyright "Why?" and "What?" right now suckers.

goodgoblin• 17 years ago

I also kind of agree with Jason - you shouldn't be able to copyright a question. If you ask a question in public, why can't someone else answer it elsewhere? The whole idea of 'copyrighted questions' seems made up, and really only benefits the site that is generating the question in the first place. How does the question asker lose out, if in fact they want the question answered, if their question is asked in more than one place?

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

We're not saying that other people can't ask or answer those questions elsewhere... we're saying that copying questions verbatim, and simply removing the attribution link, is not okay.

Certainly lots of different people will ask the same questions all the time. But this wasn't different people. It was the same people's questions, copied.

jsz03• 17 years ago

If they were to have someone monitor the feed, make minor changes, and post to their own site would that be acceptable?

mbreese2• 17 years ago

That's just silly. There are only so many ways to ask "Why is the sky blue?". In 140 characters it's a little difficult to get creative enough to make a question copyrightable. And once it's in the Twitter-verse, there is no controlling what is done with it.

joel_feather2• 17 years ago

If you do not want your information aggregated across the web then make it password protected and do not allow access to people who have not accepted your terms of service. You are actively publishing text written by someone else (not even by you), and placing it in public places. Trying to claim some type of ownership on that question is counter to the principles of the web and shows to me that your need for profit is more important than your principles.

And then following it up by publicly lambasting a figure rather than privately clearing it just seems like a desperate tactic to gain publicity.

chanux• 17 years ago

Forget TOS, legal stuff & all that crap. Still I believe Calacanis has a serious problem with ethics.

ryanwaggoner2• 17 years ago

Wait...so a Mahalo user manually selected a public Tweet and said they wanted to answer it, and therefore the question ended up Mahalo with a link to the Twitter profile that asked it? And Fluther has their knickers in a twist over this?

You've got to be kidding me. The tone of the blog post makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping the web looking for questions to steal (which is itself kind of laughable), but what it sounds like they're actually doing is just allowing users to select questions from public Twitter and answer them, including a link to where it was found on Twitter. How the fuck is that a problem? If you don't want users doing that, don't post your shit to Twitter.

This now just strikes me as whining from people looking for attention. Well done, you got some free PR. And I now have zero interest in using your product.

jobenjo7• 17 years ago

I think the mechanism is a bit different than what you described... if it's a user who wants to answer a question, why would http://www.mahalo.com/answers/education/does-anyone-have-any... have no answers?

From the same page: Did you ask this question via Twitter? We create a Mahalo account for everyone who asks a question via Twitter.

So yes, the tone of the blog makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping from the web, because Mahalo's pages make it sound like they're scraping from the web.

It's really not an issue about copyright as it is about plagiarism.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

They are scraping from the web and removing links in the scrape.

JimmyL2• 17 years ago

For the record, Calacanis has given in to Fluther's requests in a comment (http://is.gd/LXUp):

We’ll take down the account for you if it’s such a big deal. It’s like a half dozen questions that were imported by our user.

Just so you know we’re not importing every question from your site or anything we’re let our users import questions from the public timeline and answer them...

joel_feather2• 17 years ago

This is cheap linkbait by the fluther people. A question is a question, and if you make a question public, anyone can answer it if they want. Sending one email and then publicly accusing a person of copyright violation to gain some traffic is shoddy and dishonest.

dchest• 17 years ago

An article on copyrights and Twitter was posted a few days ago: http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/

An open letter to Jason Calacanis

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