Is Shyftr Shifting Or Shafting The Blogosphere?
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What happens is Shyftr. Louis Gray, who writes the Silicon Valley Blog, has this to say about Shyftr and like services, "As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog."
The Deep Jive blog puts the harshest light on Shyftr type services. "I'm no copyright guru, and I don't pretend to know all the details of what that entails, but what I do know is this: unless and until there is a general consensus about what the rights around RSS feeds are (because my bias is that there is absolutely no implied rights to reproduce carte blanche), I think there is a moral and ethical obligation to obtain content from the content owners about reproducing feeds in their entirety, particularly if its going to be used as part of public service which a) has or will generate profits from a service which is based on those feeds and therefore is a b) service which cannot exist without reproducing (i.e. "copying") those feeds."
Like I said, all this reminds me of the newspapers arguing about bloggers stealing their content and the music industry complaining about pirate file sharing services stealing their music. Now it is the bloggers turn. |
When Robert Scoble declares 
Comments (4)
It might be really tempting to spin this into a "bloggers are getting their come-upance" angle, but here is why its different.
Whereas bloggers might be using the content in newspapers to launch their own posts, very few, if any, republish newspapers posts verbatim and "in toto".
And that's where I take exception to things. I don't care if conversations happen outside of my blog; I do care if the content of the blog is lifted in its entirety and fuels someone else's business plan. Shyftr isn't using the first few hundred characters of each post -- which they could do. Rather, they lift the entire post, suggesting people never have to visit the original source.
Whatever bloggers have done with respect to newspapers and their content, it has never gone to that extreme, and to suggest it is as such, I think, is a bit disingenuous, don't you?
Cheers
Tony
Posted by Tony Hung | April 12, 2008 11:13 PM
Thanks Tony. Sorry, but I disagree. Anyone who has been in the news business has seen their articles cut and pasted many,many times into blogs. Sometimes the whole article, sometimes pieces. Sometimes with attribution and sometimes not. This has been a core issue for lots of publishers and still remains unresolved. I think you have raised some great issues as it relates to bloggers and the ability of bloggers, including you, to find a resolution between wide, user driven content access and aggregation and the need for bloggers to have an income could lead the way for the rest of the publishing industry. Best, Eric
Posted by Eric Lundquist | April 13, 2008 6:55 AM
You're right -- we will have to agree to disagree.
To my knowledge there are few, if any blogs that are worth worrying about (because no newspaper should be worried about sploggers) that has any significant audience has not fallen to any of the practices that you mention, particularly copying and pasting the *entire* articles into a post as a regular feature.
Personally, I think this is an important difference, as I don't think any blogger would have a problem with portions copied out of their own content as long as appropriate attribution was made (which, I think, is the standard these days).
Cheers
tony.
Posted by Tony Hung | April 13, 2008 7:50 PM
One of the key elements I was trying to get across in this weekend's discussion is that instead of fighting this trend (which is much bigger than Shyftr) is that for us bloggers to succeed, we need to be aware of the other venues where the conversation is taking place and be active there. If we instead hold on to the belief that we should force the conversations to be centralized, with us as the center of the universe, we will undoubtedly fail.
The Shyftr team, who I have engaged with for months, is well-intended, innovative and listening to this weekend's discussion. They've already made changes in how they present feeds with comments, and reduced the heartburn some bloggers had. In a blogosphere full of shady people and practices, the Shyftr team ranks extremely trustworthy in my book.
Posted by Louis Gray | April 14, 2008 3:06 AM