The conference, which was held in Maastricht, Netherlands (which is in the southernmost part of the country) and I was fortunate enough to be one of the ones invited to speak. The event was packed with great thinkers in the copyright world including, David Nordfors, the founder of Innovation Journalism, Anthony Falzone, the director of the Stanford Fair Use Project, and Richard Allan Horning, a well-known copyright and technology attorney.

The focus of the event was on technology challenges to the existing copyright regime and how journalists can survive in the current age of sharing. There was a heavy focus on both Creative Commons and sharing strategies as well as putting the current copyright crisis in perspective, looking at how historical challenges have been overcome.

All in all, it was a very powerful conference and one that I think both raised some great issues and came up with some interesting answers. The EJC, on their site, has a great wrap up of all of the talks as well as video from the event. They did a far better job of summarizing the event than what I could hope to do here.

For those who are interested in my talk, I’ve embedded a copy of my presentation as well as a Flickr slideshow of my stay in Maastricht as well as the day trip I took to Aachen, Germany. It was truly a beautiful part of the world on both sides of the border. If you’re interested in the other talks, which you definitely should at least look at, you can find the slides and video above.

Personal Notes

I want to take a moment to thank everyone at the EJC, especially Kathlyn Clore and Arne Grauls, whom I have been working with for well over a year on a freelance basis, as well as Bianca Lemming, who was responsible for much of the organization of the event, and Anniek Reintjens, who handled much of the technology issues and ensured that the event went off without a hitch (perhaps the first completely glitch-free event I have ever been to!).

Thanks also goes to Wilfried Rütten and David Nordfors for organizing and putting on the event. It was a wonderful event and I truly enjoyed both the conference and my stay in Maastricht.

Clearly, the EJC and Innovation Journalism are two organizations that journalists around the world need to pay attention to as they are some of the brightest minds and hardest workers in the field right now.

Presentation

Photos

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I will be attending and speaking at the European Journalism Centre’s Innovation Journalism event entitled “Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons”. I’ll be giving a talk about plagiarism and how it ties in with the CC movement and Web journalism. The talk will be recorded and a video will be available after it is done.

I’ll be returning to the states on Sunday and should be back to normal next week for the most part, though there will not be an episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show on Monday.

In the meantime, I plan on posting updates, pictures and whatever else comes up on my Twitter account as wifi access, battery life, etc. allow. If you’re interested in the part of the country I’ll be in, the Wikipedia entry actually has some great pictures and information.

I look forward to heading out and I will resume normal posting next week! Thank you all for your patience.

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It is the first week for our new co-host Patrick O’Keefe. It’s a special show not only because he is on it, but because it will be the last show for at least one week as I’ll be in the Netherlands starting tomorrow.

All of that aside, it was a very big week for copyright news with a new business model for video, a potential assassination, more international news on “Three Strikes” and news from the wrestling world.

All in all, there were thirteen stories this week including news from all over the copyright world including our “Weird Story of the Week”.

This week’s stories include:

• Myspace and Viacom Seek to Profit from Pirated Videos
• Anti-Pirate Crusader Shot and Killed
• Three Strikes Wins and Loses
• iPhone Subway App Stripped for Copyright Violation
• John Cena Sued Over Theme Song
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

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Still, there was a lot of major copyright news this week including a new strategy from MTV and Viacom for profiting from online video, an MPAA offensive in South Africa and rumors that Obama is already being lobbied on copyright matters.

Also, there are a lot of other great humorous copyright stories including several candidates for “Weird Story of the Week”.

Remember, as usual, this week’s linkroll is a “raw” link list. Some stories are duplicated, some do not point to their original sources and some may not be accurate. A great deal of refining goes into producing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Because, even though there is a lot of similarity between the services, Pluck on Demand is the first Pluck service to provide content, as well as a profit opportunity, to bloggers and end users, rather than large media companies. Where BlogBurst takes content submitted by bloggers and pushes it to mainstream media sites, Pluck on Demand takes content from all over the Web, including both mainstream media and BlogBurst, and pushes it toward individual sites.

This isn’t to say that there hasn’t been some concern expressed over Pluck on Demand, but overall, the service appears to be an interesting, if somewhat limited, opportunity for both publishers and creators.

How it Works

The idea behind Pluck on Demand is surprisingly simple. When readers get done with an article on your site, they likely want to read more on the topic. However, if you don’t have any thing further to say, the person may leave your site, never to return.

Pluck on Demand attempts to resolve this by tapping the vast amount of content they have the rights to display but they do it in a somewhat different way. Rather than having Webmasters sort through the library of articles and hand-select appropriate content, as publishers do with BlogBurst, Pluck on Demand provides a series of widgets that, much like contextual ads, scans the content of the page and selects relevant articles.

Links to those articles are then displayed next to the article, wherever the Webmaster put them, and users can then click on them to gain access to content that Pluck’s algorithm feels is related.

But what makes Pluck on Demand different is that the links do not go directly to the author’s Web site, but rather, to new pages on the blog or site that the visitor is still on. In short, the visitor never leaves the site to read the full article, meaning that the Webmaster that used the widgets gets to keep the pageviews for themselves.

The link back to the original author is instead provided at the footer of the full article, serving as something of a byline.

What is perhaps most interesting of all is the advertising arrangement of the service. Since all of the widgets display ads next to the full articles, Pluck divides up the revenue stream giving 50% of the money to the publisher, 30% to the author of the content and 20% to Pluck itself. (Note: This has only been stated for BlogBurst members and may or may not apply to publishers with other contracts)

But while BlogBurst members do have the chance to profit from this use of their content, they need to log into their accounts and enable “extended syndication opportunities” for their content to be considered for use in Pluck on Demand.

All in all, the system itself is fairly straightforward, especially for anyone that already uses Adsense or some other contextual advertising program, but it does raise some difficult questions.

JavaScript, Spam and Duplicate Content

The obvious, and intended, outcome of this service is that entries and articles written by BlogBurst members and other content partners will now appear, automatically, on sites all across the Web in full text format. Almost immediately, questions were asked about the implications of this.

• Could spammers use this to create junk sites automatically?
• Will duplicate content be an issue?
• What, if any, effect will this have on the SEO of both the creator and the publisher?

The answer turned out to be buried with the FAQs about Pluck on Demand. It turns out that Pluck on Demand displays all of its content within JavaScript, meaning that search engines can not index it. In short, pages that display the full articles will, to Google, appear to be almost completely blank.

This means that, while spammers could theoretically build sites around Pluck on Demand, possibly for advertising purposes, they would not do well with the search engines unless they still had large amounts of content from other sources. Also, it is unlikely that articles being picked up via Pluck on Demand would create duplicate content issues or hurt the SEO of the persons writing the article.

While this is good news, it also means that the link back to the original article will not be visible to the search engines and that the author will not get any “link love” for their efforts either. This makes so that the Pluck on Demand article does not exist from Google’s perspective.

The end result is that the main benefit for the publisher is additional pageviews, advertising and added content to their site for human visitors and, for the creators, the chance to get a few clicks on the byline link and 30% of the revenue share. Whether this sounds like a good deal will be a judgment call for each blogger to decide.

Conclusions

Right now, there seems to be a slew of new “content-based” services that are remixing and republishing the works of bloggers with little or no thought given to the people who toil for hours to create the works they use. Pluck on Demand is clearly not one of those services.

Between the extreme opt-in requirements (You must first sign up and be accepted for BlogBurst and then specifically request to be included), the use of JavaScript to avoid SEO penalties and the proper attribution of the articles, Pluck on Demand seems to do a good job thinking about all parties involved.

However, this doesn’t automatically make it a good deal for bloggers. Thirty percent of the revenue share and a non-SEO-friendly link back might not be enough to motivate some to share their content through it. That will be a personal choice.

Still, I am very happy and excited to see companies coming up with business models that remix and reuse content from high-quality sources without violating copyright law or otherwise harming content creators. It is an attempt at a symbiotic relationship between publisher, creator and middle man. It is an imperfect one to be certain, but a solid attempt.

It is especially refreshing to see how far BlogBurst and Pluck have come after their previous licensing issues.

Personally, I am going to be re-submitting Plagiarism Today for inclusion in both BlogBurst and Pluck on Demand, if nothing else than as an experiment. It seems that the service does not do any real harm and I don’t see any reason to not give it a try, especially with content I already make available so publicly.

Others, however, I am sure will disagree.

Video

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However, in the age of the Internet, photographers have also become more reliant on photo sharing services for hosting their work and their online portfolios. It has been an easy way to get their works online and find an audience.

Unfortunately, at least some of those services seem to be working against artists in keeping their works clearly marked. Though many routinely insert EXIF metadata into their images, at least two of the most popular image hosts, Flickr and Facebook, are routinely stripping that information out before posting the information online.

This could, should the orphan works bill passed, cause many photographers, including those that used due diligence in marking their work, to have their works become orphaned and used legally without their permission.

The worst part is that it is a simple fix on the host’s part, but also one that Flickr has been aware of for at least six months.

Background

Back in April, photographer James Duncan Davidson posted a blog entry detailing an error with Flickr that caused copyright and other metadata to be stripped from uploaded and resized images. He also posted his observations to Flickr’s feature request forums, where it became a popular suggestion.

However, even after over six months of activity, the post has not gotten a single response from the Flickr admins nor has the feature been implemented. So, I decided to conduct an experiment to see if Flickr had quietly instituted the fix and also see if a few other popular image hosts had similar problems.

The results were very surprising.

An Experiment

To conduct an experiment, I took one of my snapshots from my trip to Newcastle, UK and added some very basic copyright metadata to it. To do this, I used the open source application Reveal for the Mac.

After I added the metadata, this is what was shown in the photo information.

I then uploaded the image to some of the popular photo sharing sites and re-downloaded the image to see if the metadata remained intact. I started with Flickr.

After uploading and re-downloading the displayed copy of the image, I noticed that the file size was significantly bigger but, once I opened up the metadata in Reveal, this is what I saw.

The new photo had completely stripped out the pertinent copyright information, along with all of the other metadata that I could see.

After that, I decided to try Facebook. With over 10 billion photos hosted, Facebook is the largest image host in the world currently. I did the same process with Facebook and, when I re-opened the metadata in Reveal, I saw that, again the information had been stripped out.

It was immediately clear that both sites strip out all image metadata. Though Flickr does make a point of reading and parsing much of it, especially information pertaining to the camera, before posting it, none of it is displayed on the versions that are public-facing.

Two that Preserve it

After being disappointed with Flickr and Facebook, I decided to try two other image hosts to see how they handled the metatadata. First, I tried a host that I have used in the past on this site, Imageshack.

With Imageshack, I did two checks, first I uploaded the image without resizing and then with a reduction to a “Web-friendly” size. I downloaded both versions. In both cases, the metadata was preserved.

I then decided to try Photobucket, an image sharing service I continue to have many sharp disagreements with, taking a similar set of steps that I did with Imageshack. However, once again, both the raw and the version resized with their online software preserved the metadata perfectly.

While I have many other copyright-related concerns regarding Photobucket, it is nice to see that their system does handle this one issue correctly.

Still, for photographers, these results leave a lot of uneasy questions to be answered.

What Can Be Done

The problem with the results above is that neither Photobucket nor Imageshack are widely used by professional or even amateur artists. They are much more common as image hosts for blogs or social networking sites and host a lot of personal photos as well as more than a decent amount of copyrighted work.

However, there are a lot of photographers and artists putting their work on Flickr to share it or using Facebook as something of a personal resume. In those cases though, any metadata that they are adding is being stripped out before at least most of the images go online.

The onus, right now, is on these services to fix this problem but there seems to be very little push to do so. As such, the only way to ensure that your copyright information is carried with the works you submit through these services is to make it part of the image itself, most likely through some form of visual watermarking.

Until these issues are fixed, artists have to assume that any image posted on Flickr or Facebook will be passed around the Web with no identifying information, greatly increasing the probability that they could become orphan works should the bill pass.

Conclusions

Sadly, these aren’t the types of issues most image hosts think about when designing their product. They worry about providing a good user experience, giving enough space, having enough features and building a good business plan. Whether the metadata is preserved, is not a major issue from their standpoint.

However, to me, these are the types of small details that can have a big impact on artists and separate the great image hosts from the good.

Though Flickr has made a great reputation as a place for artists and photographers, it has shown a lot of disregard for their rights. From snafus with the API to confusing licensing terms, Flickr has been anything but an oasis for artists concerned about how their work is being used.

If the orphan works bill passes, these issues will go from being minor inconveniences to major concerns and all image services are going to have to address these problems, one way or another.

However, the time to start thinking about these things is now, before the law passes and a potential crisis is at hand. Waiting until the law does pass could be too late.

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Copyscape, which finished third in the previous testing, had its premium service rated first this year with its free service taking the third slot. Both version handily beat out popular academic plagiarism checkers such as Turnitin and SafeAssign.

Though the results may come as a shock to many in the academic community, especially those that pay for accounts at services targeted at universities, those that have followed Dr. Weber-Wulff’s work will likely not be surprised at all. Many will remember her work on exposing iPlagiarismCheck following the previous rounds of testing.

Nonetheless, her study offers a great deal for those interested in plagiarism to think about.

Methodology

To conduct the tests, Dr. Weber-Wulff, along with her team, compiled 31 papers with known amounts of plagiarism and ran them through each of the applications and then rated their effectiveness on a scale of 0-3. They then rated their usability against a set of criteria, including Website of the company and cost transparency, the page layout and captions, workflow and navigation, on a similar scale. The points were then totaled up and ranked on the following scale.

• Very good: 72-80
• Good: 60-71
• Satisfactory: 48-59
• Sufficient: 40-47
• Poor: 0-39

Also listed in the results were cancelled tests, meaning tests that could not be completed for some reason, and products that could not be easily compared against other plagiarism checkers, such as those designed to check medical databases.

Results

In the end, none of the tests came away with a “Very Good” rating. However, Copyscape Premium did come very close, earning 70 out of a needed 72 points. Copyscape Premium earned the maximum number of points in a total of 23 out of the 31 tests.

Plagiarism Detector, another relative unknown, came in second, sandwiched between the two versions of Copyscape. Ephorus, last year’s top application, came in seventh this year, at the very bottom of the “Good” systems.

SafeAssign was number 8, coming in at the top of the “Satisfactory” systems and Turnitin was at the top of the “Adequate” list at 13.

However, several systems were not tested this year. Article Checker and CheckforPlagiarism were aborted, the first not fitting the criteria for a plagiarism checker and the latter not allowing free access for testing purposes.

Also, several commercial services were not slated for testing at all, including Attributor and iCopyright.

Caveats

Though the results of the test certainly should give Copyscape’s developers a reason to cheer, there are several caveats, in addition to the services that were tested, that are worth mentioning.

First, since the test papers were in German, it remains to be seen how well the results would translate to English and other languages. Though I wouldn’t anticipate too much difference since the languages are similar, it could have a bearing on the results, especially with some of the more complex tools that may be language-specific.

Second, the usability tests were geared more toward teachers than they were Webmasters. The test is designed for the academic arena so this makes sense, but as Webmaster, it means that the usability results need to looked at in a slightly different light as our workflow needs are different.

Third, once again, it is important for Webmasters to realize that the results are geared for academic plagiarism, where it is important to trace one plagiarized work to its source, not one source to its many plagiarized copies. Though the search techniques are largely the same, many of the apps best geared at finding academic plagiarism don’t always detect all of the potential sources.

Finally, it is important to remember that the study itself is not an endorsement of any one plagiarism checking system nor is it a recommendation, it is only an analysis of how the various systems did on these specific tests, nothing more.

Conclusions

Though the results are interesting, what I glean most from this comparison is that, even though the standards were lowered for this round of tests, none of the services were able to achieve “Very Good”. This means that even the best plagiarism detection tools have flaws and need improvement.

Personally, I’ve never relied on just one means of detecting plagiarism, instead pulling my information from multiple sources. This study seems to reinforce that idea and further encourages me to back up any system I choose with alternates.

The simple fact is that no plagiarism system is going to be 100% effective and, as such, it makes sense to double up your net, especially since so many of the services are both free and easy to use.

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This is something of a bittersweet episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show as Chris Matthieu, the usual co-host of the show, will be taking an extended leave of absense following this episode. In his place will be Patrick O’Keefe of the iFroggy Network.

Goodbye’s aside, it was still a very busy week for copyright news with a a lot of major stories including a conclusion to the Google Book lawsuit, one that literally dates back to the beginnings of this site, and tons of other stories.

All in all, there were seventeen stories this week including news from all over the copyright world including our “Weird Story of the Week”.

This week’s stories include:

• Google Settles Book Search Case
• Redbox Accuses Universal of Foul Play
• More DMCA Notices on Private Videos
• Conflicting Views of “Making Available”
• Unnecessary Censorship Strikes Weird Al
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

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Still, there was a lot of major copyrigth news this week including a settlement in the Google Book Lawsuit, a new LimeWire media deal and information about FaceBook pulling down videos set to private.

Also, there are a lot of other great humorous copyright stories including several candidates for “Weird Story of the Week”.

Remember, as usual, this week’s linkroll is a “raw” link list. Some stories are duplicated, some do not point to their original sources and some may not be accurate. A great deal of refining goes into producing the show notes for the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

It was another wild week for copyright news with some major updates to ongoing dramas and a strange college theme for some reason. We also have news from all over the world, including Sweden and Denmark, as well as some interesting copyright viewpoints.

All in all, there were fifteen stories this week including news from all over the copyright world including our “Weird Story of the Week”.

This week’s stories include:

• Search Engine Cache Ruled Legal
• Psystar Case Takes a Detour
• Sweden Introduces New Copyright Legislation
• Colleges Spend Big Bucks to Fight Piracy
• Musician Has Own Work Taken Down
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

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