I just thought I'd post an update since it's been a week.

My feed is still being reposted in its entirety. I replied to the above email from Nooz/Rojo earlier this week but have gotten no response.

I got the following reply to my DMCA notification:

"Thank you for your notification. We will require the account holder to remove the material in question; it may take several days for the process to be complete.

Please note that if the account holder has a good faith belief that he or she is being asked to remove or disable this material as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material, the account holder is
entitled to ask that the material be restored by sending Six Apart a counter notification as described in Section 512(g) of the Copyright Act. If this happens, we will contact you with further information.

Sincerely,
Rojo Customer Support"

I'm not quite sure what they mean by account holder and if I'm entitled to know who this person is who might be petitioning Rojo/Nooz to have my content reposted.

At this moment both Rojo & Nooz are down. I'm guessing they're doing some stuff.

Hooray for small victories, the DMCA notification email didn't bounce!

Thank you Jonathan. There is no way that I could have fixed this on my own after seeing what you had to go through to get it done and I don't think SixApart would have figured it out in any timely fashion.

Well, I may be speaking too soon, we'll see if my content is actually removed and if there are any other remedies for the fact that they've been reposting my blog and thousands of others for a year.

Good news, I just got an email saying the new copyright policy pages, with working email links, are now live on Rojo ( http://www.rojo.com/corporate/policies/rojos-co... )
and NooZ ( http://www.nooz.com/about/policies/copyright-po... )


So you’re saying because I’m the only one with a problem, it’s not really a problem that deserves notice, or you couldn’t imagine that someone would want to opt out of a scraping service you didn’t even know you had?

Nope, I was just trying to explain how it broke and I wasn't aware of it. Hope that helps.

"Aside from the bug in requesting content takedowns,"

Anil - How could the fact that the copyright email address for both Rojo.com and Nooz.com nor the Abuse@ email address not work be considered a bug? And by the way, they still don't work and no revised information has been placed on the Nooz site. I can see programming taking a while ... how hard is it to update the text with an email address or form that works?

Besides that, I've faxed (twice) and sent my DMCA take down via snailmail. How many bugs do you have?

"For what it’s worth, we didn’t notice the problem right away because almost nobody every emails any requests in, despite millions of people using our various services."

So you're saying because I'm the only one with a problem, it's not really a problem that deserves notice, or you couldn't imagine that someone would want to opt out of a scraping service you didn't even know you had?

As far as I can tell, you didn't "notice" the problem at all. Jonathan had to bring it to your attention.

On a brighter note, I noticed there is a change in the programming of Nooz at the moment. Clicking on the title of the post will now take you to the actual blog (via a redirect from the feed address) but clicking on the "attribution" (which is not the way I attribute my blog, thankyouverymuch) takes you to the Nooz page of all posts from that blog ... not to the owner of the content.

Sounds good. I'm also going to be back in New Orleans (can't wait!) for the Word of Mouth conference in about a week and a half, and if schedules work out, we could meet in person, too.

Ani,

First off, thank you very much for taking the time to comment. I'm glad to see that we agree on the vast majority of subjects and I'd like to respond to a few of your comments.

I'm glad that you're gedding the opt out and feedback emails working. I'll be sure to write them some time next week as I know several people who read this site have been frustrated by that. On that front, if anyone else tests them, please let me know.

I am also very glad to hear that you're taking these, and other copyright matters seriously. I would encourage you to listen to the TWiL podcast I linked to in the first episode as it deals almost exclusively with these issues. These are complicated areas, especially for a smaller company and I will happily point you in the way to or provide any guidance that I can.

Here's the podcast again if you are interested: http://www.twit.tv/twil3

I wholly understand the desire to create a shared reading experience and do some very neat things with RSS, but doing those things without permission is flat out illegal. Copyright is still very much opt-in, especially when it comes to posting work wholesale on another site, doubly so when you do it in a matter that could easily replace the original version and for commercial use.

The legal implications here are very simple. If someone decided not to mess with a take down notice and file suit, they would be in their right. This type of use does not qualify for safe harbor protectiona nd almost certainly doesn't qualify as fair use or as an exempt caching service. It only takes one person out of millions of bloggers.

As far as the assertation about MT, I do seem to eat a little bit of crow there. I was merely echoing the sentiment among bloggers and I should have checked my facts better on that one. It seems I really underestimated Typepad. I was also surprised to read that, as recently as a few years ago, your most popular blogging product was LJ. Still, it looks like all of the above are trumped by Google Blogger, but I call in to quesiton how many of those are legitimate blogs...

Looking back on that comment, I realize "beauracracy" was not the right word. I was trying to echo what you were saying that not all members of the team are familiar with all of the products. However, in a strange way it is correct but not in terms of people, but of sites. You have a definite hierarchy in sites, Sixapart->Rojo->Nooz. It's very unusual to have a structure like that.

Still, I am unsure exactly how to convey that, I'm glad that you did that for me.

I will definitely be in touch with you soon. I've added yout o my Yahoo and I also attempted to add you to my Skype at the same address. I'm plagiarismtoday on both.

I'll defifnitely be in touch soon. I'll be sure to text message you before I call.

It will probably be sometime later this weekend if that's acceptable.

Hey JB, thanks for being patient with us -- you caught a few folks in transit or on the road. We've just got a chance to sit down and figure out all the issues, and when I get back from PodCamp, I'm hoping to comment with more details.

Here's what I *do* know: We definitely messed up by having the opt-out/takedown emails get messed up. We're working on fixing them (they may be fixed as I type this) and I apologize on behalf of all of us for those being broken. For what it's worth, we didn't notice the problem right away because almost nobody every emails any requests in, despite millions of people using our various services.

Second, we definitely take copyright and IP law seriously. We're a company started by, for, and of bloggers, and our senior management is chock full of people who've worked in publishing, founded magazines and websites like Red Herring and HotWired, and a lot of us have earned our keep as writers along the way, too. I only want to point that out to highlight that our intention, any mistakes aside, is to do the right thing and be as open as possible.

On a personal level, I think the reason the LiveJournal syndication works the way it does was a simple technical limitation at the time Brad and his team implemented RSS reading years ago. Put simply, it was easier to duplicate a feed in that context in order to display on people's Friends pages. (That's LJ's equivalent of an aggregator.)

Part of the delay on getting a reply on Rojo, and especially on Nooz, is that honestly not all of us who were on the 6A team first were as familiar with those apps. As much as we've welcomed the new team members, they've been so busy at their new jobs that we've maybe been a bit behind in checking in on the apps they'd built before they joined us. :)

What I do know is the intent of the Rojo and Nooz applications, which is to offer a feed-reading and content discovery service for people that makes it convenient for readers, but also adds value to the reading and sharing experience. Basically, something similar to Technorati's tag discovery pages or even the RSS reading features of a My Yahoo or Google Reader. Aside from the bug in requesting content takedowns, which is absolutely our fault and we're working to fix, the overall intent is simply to be another great way to read and discover interesting writers, and the consensus we hear from most users and bloggers is that this is the case.

I'll check back in with more info, but I hope that helps clear up the initial questions, and I'll be following the conversation if you've got suggestions or feedback about what we should be doing.

Oh, there was one part of your assertions that *was* factually incorrect... "Though Movable Type has largely been replaced by newer blogging applications, including Wordpress". Despite the perceptions in some parts of the blogosphere, that just ain't true. They've got a successful product, and that's great, and we're innovating in a lot of areas (like enterprise blogging) where nobody else even comes close to what we've achieved. MT hasn't been replaced by anything, and is still the most powerful blogging tool around. :)

And one minor point. You say, "I sense that there is a bureaucracy problem taking place here though." And I think it may actually be the opposite -- despite the perceptions, we're still a relatively small company, and the Rojo team is an even smaller subset of our company. If one or two people are traveling, out sick, or just have pre-scheduled meetings that keep them busy, it can be hard to be as responsive as we ought to be. I would guess the big giant companies have entire departments to deal with this kind of bureaucracy, but for the most part, it's just us trying to catch up with following the entire blogosphere.

Anyway, thanks for the passionate and detailed feedback on all of this -- you're helping us get closer to what we want to be doing. It's heartening to see you assume that we're *trying* to do the right thing, because that's definitely our goal, and I'm looking forward to checking back in to see how we're doing. If you need to get in touch, feel free to email, IM me at anildash, or you can text/call me on my mobile at 646-541-5843. I'll post more info as I know it.

Cybele,

I understand your frustrations. I'm upset about a lot of it too. I sense that there is a bureaucracy problem taking place here though. When I first mentioned Nooz to Six Apart, they hadn't even heard of it. I'm getting the feeling that this might be something that was going on at the lower levels and the top level wasn't fully aware.

I'm going to give them a few days and see what they come up with. Hopefully they'll surprise both of us.

Okay, so they'll talk to you, but not respond to my requests to take down my content?

Thank goodness you're working for us, because I don't know how else this would get addressed.

I don't understand why it's so hard to just remove my feed from their Nooz site. (I've refaxed my DMCA request, as I know that goes through. Perhaps you have another email address that also works.)