Article Updated: See Below.

Fav.or.it, a content aggregation service, had earned a great deal of controversy among many bloggers. The site would collect content from various RSS feeds, at least in some cases including the full content, and display it on their site as well as offer visitors the chance to comment and discuss the news, away from the original site. This caused some to accuse Fav.or.it of using splogging as a business model and earned it several mentions on this site, including this one.

However, earlier this week, Fav.or.it went down. The initial message said that the site had been taken down for “maintenance”. However, after a few days, the message was changed to read the following:

“Recently we decided that we would not continue with the fav.or.it service on our site. For more details about this please take a look on our blog. As a result we are replacing the site with our company site!”

In short, the Fav.or.it service is no more. It is down never to return, and the site is being replaced by a home page for the company, also called Fav.or.it, which also runs products such as Tweetmeme, which I was unaware of until the site changed, and TweetTabs (Note: The link to TweetTabs on the Fav.or.it site currently is broken).

The sudden closure of the site seemed odd and I emailed Fav.or.it to ask what had happened. However, I am yet to receive a response.

(Note: I have a suspicion as to why the site might have gone down but do not wish to say anything more until I get confirmation.)

Fav.or.it Moves On

Though the closure of its flagship service may seem like a major blow, it could be a very good thing for the company in the long run. They have already moved on to other, more-popular and less copyright-questionable products the best-known of which is Tweetmeme, which is used on this site.

This may help Fav.or.it focus their time and resources on those projects, rather than a small, legally-dubious and much less popular content aggregator.

In the end, I don’t harbor any real ill feelings toward the company as they seem to have created new products that manage to be both useful and raise far fewer copyright issues. Abandoning Fav.or.it as a service was a good move for both themselves and Webmasters everywhere.

As such, I have no qualms about keeping the Tweetmeme feature on this site and don’t think others should either.

I just hope that this serves as a learning experience for Fav.or.it as a company and they are able to build and grow from this controversy.

Update: 08/10/09

Fav.or.it, the company, has posted a short blog entry about the closure of the site that talks about the various reasons for its closure including a shift in the commenting marketplace that made it difficult for them to compete, a lack of updates to the service and a series of implementation mistakes that caused it to lag behind other competitors, including Lazyfeed.

The post did address the content reuse issues and said the following:

The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

In short, Fav.or.it, the company, acknowledges they made mistakes with the way they used content within the system and seem to have learned from them with Tweetmeme. However, they did stop short of issuing a full apology. Though I don’t think that will satisfy the most disgusted at Fav.or.it, there still seemsto be much rejoicing that the site is done for, both due to its poor reuse of content, but that it also increases the focus on Tweetmeme. .

Digg has long been heralded as one of the best and most ethical ways to handle content aggregation. It’s practice of very limited content copying with direct, high-profile linking, has made it something of a standards-bearer on the Web for other sites wanting to get into the business.

However, that reputation took something of a hit last week. Digg announced its new DiggBar along with its new URL shortening service. The new bar, rather than linking directly to the page being Dugg, puts the page in an iframe below a small Digg-hosted pane. This keeps the URL, the visitor and the search engines on the Digg domain while loading the Dugg page.

This has proved to be a very divisive new feature. Power Digg uers like the ability to interact with Digg while reading the article and Twitter users love the new URL shortener. However, some casual Digg users are frustrated with the new URLs (it can make sharing articles more difficult) and content creators are upset that Digg is no longer linking directly to their site.

Some have gone so far as to hint that the DiggBar may be content theft and an attempt to boost their own traffic at the expense of the people they link to.

This begs the question, is Digg doing something unethical or even illegal? The answers are not simple.

Some History

(Note: This is a very simplistic description of framing for those who are unfamiliar with how it works). The technique that Digg uses to create its DiggBar is known as an iframe or inline frame. Iframes allow developers to create the effect of a “page within a page”.

In many ways, an iframe is similar to a YouTube embed. When a site embeds a YouTube clip, they are displaying the content, which is pulled from YouTube’s server and is under their control, as an element on their page. The difference is, rather than a line of JavaScript, iframe uses an HTML tag to tell the Web browser to pull the content from another page and fill a portion of the screen with it.

The result is that, when you look at the source code of DiggBar page, you’ll see the code for the content of the DiggBar itself and what amounts to a link to the source content. However, rather than creating a clickable link, the iframe opens the content below the bar.

The technique has been around since 1996 and was heavily frowned upon when it first became popular. Initially it was used both for creating sites, such as having navigation next to or on top of the main content, and for “framing” outgoing links, such as what Digg is doing.

As a site development technique, it lost its popularity largely due to its poor performance with the search engines (search engines, especially then, only seemed to read the frame page, not the pages within it). As a method of linking, it was largely shunned as being bad form or even greedy.

However, in recent years, framing has begun to make something of a comeback. Though About.com has used iframes on many of its external links for years, StumbleUpon reintroduced many to it by using it as part of its site, to help people vote up and down links without a browser add-on. Also, several URL shortening services, such as Owl.ly, have been using iframes to add features and keep track of stats.

For the most part, the response to framing has been fairly muted. However, Digg is the by far the largest site to make such a broad use of framing (save perhaps Facebook, which adds an iframe to some outbound links) and that, combined with the fact Digg’s primary function is to link to other sites, has made it a target.

But is framing illegal? It is a good question that hasn’t been wholly answered.

The Law on Framing

The case law on framing is surprisingly thin. Though the technique has been around for over a decade and several suits/disputes have come out of it, all of the cases seem to have been settled out of court.

However, the case of Washington Post v. TotalNews may provide some clues as to the potential legal risks. The case, which was settled in 1997, saw The Washington Post sue a news startup called TotalNews because the site was using frames to link to Washington Post content rather than plain hyperlinks.

In the case, there were three primary objections that seem potentially relevant to the DiggBar:

1. Trademark Infringement: Displaying one’s logo over another person’s content could be seen as implying a relationship between the two that does not exist and that, in turn could, be considered trademark infringement. For example, if the New York Times felt that the DiggBar was causing people to believe that Digg sponsored the newspaper or that the NYT endorsed Digg, they might have grounds for a trademark suit. Furthermore, if the NYT felt that the DiggBar caused confusion as to the origin of the reporting, they might have similar grounds.
2. Copyright Infringement: Though framing doesn’t make an actual copy of the page that is being framed, one could argue that framing both violates the distribution right under copyright law and that it creates a derivative work based upon the original. Either of these would be a violation of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights, if it could be shown.
3. Tortious interference with Business Relationships: By reducing the amount of visible area on the page and running their own advertisements (should they appear), the DiggBar could be accused of interfering with existing advertising partnerships on various sites.

None of these items are a perfect fit and all require a bit of stretching. However, it is easy to see how, in each case, an argument could be made and be successful. But since the TotalNews case was settled out of court, with TotalNews agreeing to stop using frames, there are no legal rulings on these issues.

The question is not just whether these approaches could work, but whether they could work in 2009, with more tech-savvy judges. It is very difficult to say and there are no clear answers.

Still, there are clearly many ways that a litigious-minded content creator could sue Digg for the DiggBar.

The Ethics of Framing

If the legalities of framing are muddled, then the ethics are divisive. Some people feel that framing is perfectly acceptable, others think of it as a form of content theft. It is often a matter of personal perspective.

Those who do object to framing typically do so on one of three grounds:

1. SEO Issues: Though there is some debate as to how framing affects search engine ranking, at least one blogger has seen lower PageRank posts get bumped from Google in favor of Digg URLs already (see comments). It is pretty clear that linking to a page with the content in a frame does less good in the search engines than just linking to it directly.
2. Advertising and Integrity: Though the DiggBar doesn’t display ads yet, it is foreseeable that it will at some point. Many sites don’t allow ads sites that link by framing are the only way that ads are displayed along side their content. Many people aren’t comfortable with other sites earning money directly off of their content, especially when they aren’t doing so themselves. Furthermore, other sites don’t like their pages to be altered in any way, including via framing.
3. Visitor Interference: Framing not only reduces the screen real estate that the visitor has to read the content, but it also impedes their ability to copy the source link. Though Digg is also billing itself as a URL shortening service, there are still many cases where one wants to copy the full, original URL (IE: Three Count columns). Framing makes that more difficult to do and encourages users to pass around links to other domains.

(Note: Do you have a particular objection I missed? Leave it in the comments and I may add it in.)

The end result is that even Webmasters who are not outraged by framing still, usually, prefer direct links for most things. The question is whether or no Webmasters will be outraged enough by the DiggBar to try and force them to change.

Breaking the DiggBar

Since framing is over a decade old, so are the techniques for breaking them. If you don’t want the DiggBar, or any such frame, to display over your site, all you have to do is add a few lines of JavaScript code to “break out” of the frame.

The technique does work on the DiggBar, as it will any iframe-based system. However, it will not fix the SEO issues mentioned above since search engines will still see the frame page and can not process the JavaScript on your page to know that you do not want the frame there.

In short, this technique only helps ensure that visitors do not see your site with the DiggBar, search engines and other spiders will still see Digg’s content with a reference to yours.

Personal Thoughts

I’ve always been of two minds when it comes to framing. Sometimes, as with StumbleUpon, there is a legitimate use to the framing and little harm done by it (StumbleUpon links don’t pass along any Google benefit that I know of and the framing is necessary for the site to work). Other times, as with About.com, it is a play to maintain advertising and a presence as the visitors leaves the site, all at the expense of the target URL.

The DiggBar falls somewhere between. It isn’t necessary for Digg to work, Digg got along just fine without it, and the features it creates are not that important. Digg could have just as easily made a URL shortening service without the DiggBar (perhaps linking to Digg’s permalink). However, the bar does make Digg easier to use and provides features power users will find compelling, including comments and related links.

However, do these features justify the treatment webmasters are getting at the hands of Digg? I don’t believe so. Digg is expanding its presence into the sites it links to and those sites, in turn, get a short URL and the traffic Digg provides (which can be quite a lot for items on home page items). Whether or not that is a good trade overall will depend on the webmaster, but it clearly isn’t as good of a trade as everyone got before.

I’m not so much outraged by Digg as I am disappointed. Digg has always been the poster child for how to run a business off of other people’s content in a way that was fair to content creators. They built a great community and supported the Webmasters they link to. The DiggBar tilts that relationship more in favor of Digg and without any real consultation with bloggers.

I’m not ready to liken Digg to RSS scrapers and spam bloggers, but they certainly have made a misstep here that hurts webmasters. My hope is that they will back away from this or find a way to reintroduce the features without the drawbacks to the external links, but they seem pretty set on it.

Digg may not be evil, but they are certainly more evil then they were two weeks ago.

Bottom Line

Framing isn’t going anywhere and the flagging economy, especially the advertising market, is only going to make things worse. As sites work to squeeze every advertising dollar they can out of their sites, more and more will turn to this technique to make a few bucks.

However, the legal issues of framing are far from settled and the ethical ones are about as divisive as you can get. Any site that uses this tactic does so at their own risk and it is only a matter of time before someone challenges the techniques both in and out of the courts.

If I were Digg, I would be seriously considering whether the risks associated with this move outweigh the benefits, especially over the long term.

In the meantime, if you don’t like the idea of Digg framing your site, using the frame breaking script will prevent it. I am not going to install it here (as I said, there are other sites with a legitimate use for framing) but it is there for those who need it.

I’m going to have to rethink my relationship with Digg. Having been the subject of two front page stories over the years, I know well how much traffic it can bring. But with the new DiggBar, I have to analyze both what good that traffic will do and also what the long term benefits of being on Digg are.

Lijit is a popular and well-respected search application for bloggers. Many sites, including this one, use it because it not only drastically improves upon the default WordPress search, but also because it allows searchers to pull content from sites within the blogger’s network, including social network sites and other blogs.

However, a new service of Lijit has been causing some controversy. It’s new content networks service has already been accused of being similar to scraper and spam blogs.

So I decided to take a look and see for myself. However, what I found very worrisome and gave me a great deal of reason to caution bloggers to pause and think before they made the jump to join or create a network on Lijit.

The Big Idea

The idea behind the content networks service is one that should be familiar to bloggers and Webmasters. In these networks, a group of bloggers in a similar subject come together and pool their content into a single site (or as Lijit calls it, “publication”) and, in exchange, content providers get their sites linked in the blogroll of the hub site and have the articles linked back to their source.

In short, content networks are not “networks” so much as “aggregators”. These sites act as a hub for all of the content on the member blogs, in some cases republishing the full content from the RSS feeds.

The theory is that, if member sites link to this hub, visitors will explore the network site, find new content to follow and this will increase readership for all of the blogs involved. It is very similar, in that regard, to other networks and traffic-generating schemes that have been tried over the years, usually without success.

However, the question remains, is this service a spam blog and should bloggers consider signing up?

The Spam Question

Determining whether or not these content networks push the boundaries of spam blogs or scraper blogs is pretty difficult as the definition itself itself is hard to nail down. What we can do is look at how the sites operate, the good and the bad, and make a determination. For this purpose, we will be looking at the network blog for their new Security Blog Network.

The first thing that most will notice is that the network site is scraping the whole content of the RSS feeds, including any footers, such as Feed Flares, that are added. Though other network sites, such as the Cycling Bloggers Network, use truncated feeds it is clear that the service is both capable of and often does use the full content.

The good news is that, once you look past the full content reuse, it is clear that the site does follow many of the content reuse best practices. On the site in question, clicking the headline of any given story will take you to the original story and the “Comments” link also goes to the original page as well. I was unable to find a “permalink” that did not reference back to the original source. Furthermore, all of the links to the original content are “dofollow” links, ensuring that the search engines will pick up the original sites.

On the flip side, images are hotlinked from the original source and the entire site can, and is, easily indexed by the search engines. Currently, the robots.txt file does not ban any search engines from any on the site (though only tag pages seem to be indexed right now as the permalinks point to the original content).

Though it is clear that these network sites could do more to minimize the negative impact they could have on the bloggers that join them, it is also clear that they are not trying to outright rip off the content of hapless Webmasters who sign up.

The end result is that, while I don’t think Lijit is doing something that is outright spammy, I also can’t advise anyone to consider joining one of these networks. Between duplicate content issues, network imbalance and oversaturation of content, it seems likely that many will find more drawbacks than benefits.

Conclusions

I recognize that many will disagree with me when I say that Lijit’s content networks aren’t outright spam. As the Mashable article pointed out, the appearance, presence of unwanted RSS content (such as Feed Flares) and bold advertising blocks seem to further that notion.

Indeed, if I found that one of these sites were scraping my content I would likely assume it was a spam blog and react accordingly. These sites look like spam blogs, scrape content like a spam blogs and will likely rank better than most spam blogs due to the large number of legitimate sites linking to them.

To some, they might not be spam, they are something worse.

However, it is important to remember that these networks are purely opt-in. Sites have to register and agree to let their content be used in this manner. If a blogger doesn’t want their material to appear on one of these sites, all they have to do is not register.

If bloggers want to allow their content to be used by a site that shares many features with a spam blog and provides what would seem to be little hope of an equitable return, this becoming more true the larger the original blog grows, then it is not my place to say no.

Though I would feel better if Lijit would add extra protections to ensure that search engines are not confused, such as mandating partial feeds or blocking the search engines from indexing the site, the end decision is the blogger’s.

Personally, I find that these sites border a little too closely to spam blog behavior for me to seriously consider joining. Unlike other content networks, such as BlogBurst, which add editorial value and a human element to the reuse, Lijit’s service is more about straight scraping and republishing.

However, the service, at this time, doesn’t sour me enough on the Lijit name and product to drop their search tool. I don’t think that Lijit is “evil” or “bad”, but that their new service, while well-intended, has some potentially ugly side effects.

The vast majority of hosts seem to take these issues seriously and pull down any spammy or infringing content quickly. Others seem to ignore any such requests and others reply with polite, but clearly stock, letters saying that they can’t help.

And then there is Joyent.

Joyent takes things to a new level. Not only does the site not help when someone is misusing your content, but they actually support scrapers and defend them in email responses.

Though many hosts have a policy of inaction against infringement, something that is legally dangerous and ethically dubious, none that I have seen have spent the time and energy Joyent’s representative did to protect them and defend them.

What Happened

Sunday, during some of my testing of FairShare, a system officially launched yesterday, I was notified about a site on a .info domain that had used nearly 100% of my recent article about U.S. Copyright Law.

I looked at the site in question and it appeared to either be a spam blog or a misguided aggregator. It was displaying the full content of dozens of entries on one page, using hotlinked images and the only original content was a pair of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons with each article that seemed to do nothing.

Though it linked to Plagiarism Today in the headline, it was not linking to or referencing my CC license nor was it referencing the “Share Alike” attribute. When combined with the hotlinked images, I decided to take action, filing a DMCA notice with their host, Joyent.

However, that was no simple process. Never having encountered this host, I searched their site for information about their DMCA agent. However, all I found was a postal address (Note: Link is to a privacy safe harbor, not copyright safe harbor). I checked for a registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, but found nothing. Since all other abuse requests seemed to be routed through their “Support” account, I emailed it and, since it was a weekend and they had limited support hours listed, I did not expect to hear back.

However, I heard back relatively quickly (within an hour), especially amazing considering it was also Super Bowl Sunday. The letter was from Linda Derezinski, who identified herself as the “Director of Support”. Her letter was short and said in part that:

“That is just a RSS feed aggregation site which is properly identifying as such, it is not taking your work and showing it as theirs…. If you do not wish them to show your RSS feed you of course are able to block them from reading it.”

In short, Derezinski was telling me that it was my responsibility as the provider of the RSS to “block” this site from republishing my feed wholesale on their site. Even though that is impossible with FeedBurner and impractical without knowing more about how the site is obtaining the feed.

I’m used to working with and educating hosts about copyright issues, but never have I had such a strong defense for a spam blogger. I responded back with some basic information about the DMCA and links to information on the law, including the Chilling Effects FAQ.

There was a slightly greater delay in this response but, after about an hour, Derezinski wrote back a second time saying the following:

“You have your site identified as creative commons…. They properly identify that the article is from your site. This is not DMCA issue.”

I wrote back a second time, this go around linking to my article about using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping, which includes a discussion with then-VP Mike Linksvayer. I pointed out that the site did not complete the license, neither linking to the license or mentioning the share-alike element.

That was the last I heard of the matter. As of this writing, the article in question is still up on the page in question (though it may cycle off any time now, after being up for a week) and dozens of other articles from different sources are still up, all with full text and hyperlinked images.

To recap what happened. I filed a DMCA notice in what seemed to be a straightforward scraping case, Joyent first defended the scraper saying that it was my responsibility to block them and then, after I showed that was not the case, then tried to tell me there wasn’t a copyright issue since I had a CC license. Once I showed that the site was in violation of my license, there was nothing but silence.

Needless to say this has me frustrated, but not defeated.

Offering a Defense

In the interest of fairness, I’m going to offer some potential defenses here.

1. Splitting Hairs: I’ll admit openly that the representative was correct that I do have a CC license and the site in question did link back to PT. Though the use was a violation of the license, something I feel very comfortable saying, it is understandable why someone unfamiliar with the details of CC might think that the use was compliant.
2. Questionable Spam Blog: There is room for debate if this site was a spam blog or an aggregator. Though it clearly violates the best practices for aggregation, it does seem to attempt to add some value. This doesn’t make it less of an infringement, for a host that specializes in applications, it might have been seen as a defense.
3. Incorrect Person: Though it was the only email address provided, it is clear that Derezinski is neither familiar with nor accustomed to DMCA complaints. I could have sent the complaint via postal mail (I find it stunning that they don’t even offer a fax) but it is likely that the article would have scrolled off or changed URLs in that time.

I have no doubt in my mind that this is not an appropriate way to handle a copyright complaint (as I said in the title, the worst that I had seen) and that this company violates many of the best practices of the DMCA (Not registering their agent with the USCO, not having an email address, not having a direct copyright policy, etc.) but I do want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I hope that this was a misunderstanding and nothing more.

Conclusions

One of the jobs that I do in my consulting practice is work with hosts on these kinds of issues. I’m often recruited to check for any flaws in their DMCA system and even do test runs of their takedown process. I have a lot of experience in this area.

This is the worst response that I have seen in seven plus years of handling DMCA issues. Though I applaud hosts for looking at DMCA notices and considering copyright issues, this was not a case where the notice was clearly false, the use raised fair use questions or had other common issues that arise with erroneous DMCA notices.

What makes it worse is that the host came down clearly on the side of wholesale RSS scraping and republishing. Meaning that, if you are a spam blogger reading this that engages in RSS scraping, Joyent is likely a natural choice for you as their staff, at least judging from this correspondence, feels that you are doing nothing wrong or illegal.

My hope is that this was just a miscommunication but it has been over 48 hours since my last correspondence with them and no action has been taken on my ticket. If I do not hear more within the next 24 hours, I will look at calling them or filing the notices with Google, provided that the work hasn’t scrolled off or naturally disappeared.

Update

At about 5 PM central time the day this story was posted, I was contacted by Peter Watridge, who said that Derezinski has “escalated” the ticket it to him and he had not been able to get it in a timely matter. He is going to work with the owner of the domain to get the work removed.

Though this is great news and certainly puts Joyent in a better light. The initial response was still not what I would characterize as appropriate. I will update again when/if the content is removed.

photo credit: rindsey

A recent comment by Cybele reminded me of an article I wrote in 2006 entitled “Cease and Desist: A Dying Art“.

The article lamented the cease and desist letter was using its usefulness when dealing with copyright infringement issues, giving way to DMCA and other forms of host contact. At that time, less than a quarter of all my plagiarism cases were handled by direct contact with the alleged infringer.

However, it seems that the trend has continued to work against the cease and desist. Social networking, blogging and spamming have combined to make such direct contact almost impossible. Though I remain a big proponent of direct contact, it has become such a rarity that I can almost not remember the last time I successful worked directly with an infringer directly.

This has me both saddened and deeply worried.

There are ways to fix these issues, but it will take a shift in the Internet itself, something that isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Cause of Death

In the eight years or so since I have started dealing with plagiarism issues, the Web has changed in drastic ways, many of which make personal contact very difficult to achieve. Specifically, there have been three issues that caused the cease and desist letter to gain dust in most people’s anti-plagiarism arsenal.

1. Social Networking: Though social networking doesn’t create a walled garden of content, meaning that it is possible to detect plagiarism or copyright infringement that takes place on most such sites (Facebook being an exception), they do create a walled garden of contact, making it so that you have to sign up for an account, friend the user and then use their custom messenger to reach out to them. On the most basic level, this is time consuming but it is also very legally dangerous as you have an uncertain paper trail in the event of a dispute.
2. Spam Blogging: Spammers have become some of the most common and most dangerous infringers but they also go to great lengths to keep their identities and contact information hidden. Furthermore, if you do manage to reach them, odds are they will not respond as they have little to gain by complying.
3. Fear of Email Spam: As email spam has taken off, Webmasters have become more cautious about putting their addresses on their sites. Bloggers are routinely advised not to put their email address on their site, obfuscated or not, and most seem to focus on driving people to other means of contact that carry other rewards. Whether it is about adding followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook or buddies on IM, email has fallen out of favor. This is compounded by domain privacy services, which this site does use, false whois information and people opting for hosted blogs instead of their own domain.

As such, a surprisingly small number of sites I approach actually have contact information for Webmaster and, those that do, the information routinely turns out to be incorrect. The few times I have made an earnest effort in recent months have all been thwarted by outdated information or stoic silence.

Why This is Bad

At first glance, the DMCA might seem to be preferable in every way. It is faster, standardized, easy to use and takes only a few moments. Best of all, it is amazingly reliable on most sites.

However, cease and desist letters provide some potentially powerful opportunities. First, they provide the chance to educate users about copyright and encourages infringers to handle the problem themselves. Many times infringement is a mistake, not an act of malice and this helps to provide new information and ensure that the person will not repeat the error.

More importantly though, where a DMCA is nothing but a takedown, a cease and desist provides an opportunity to keep the work up, but with proper licensing. If you use a Creative Commons license, for example, this lets the infringer fix the problems with their use and bring it up to code. This encourages not only good content use, but also linking in general, creating a symbiotic relationship.

It is to everyone’s advantage if copyright holders and infringers can work out their differences face to face, but only if it can be done quickly enough to make it worthwhile. Too much effort, and it becomes easier to file the DMCA and move on.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are a few exceptions to this rule, one of the main ones being Web 2.0 companies that may misuse content as part of their service. Sites such as Shyftr were blasted for their content reuse policies but, in at least some of the cases, have been able to resolve their differences with content creators and rebuild their service to everyone’s benefit.

However, this only works for legitimate companies with a real interest in working with copyright holders. Sites that have no such interest and are just seeking to make money in the gray area between aggregation and spamming will not cooperate.

Those sites, sadly, do demand a DMCA notice or other such action to stop the misuse.

Solutions

Fixing this problem is going to be tricky to say the least. There are two possible ways in which the Web could change to make cease and desist letter more practical again.

First, email could make a comeback as a means of communication. Though we are sending more email than ever, it is clear browsing around the Web that many, if not most, people prefer other means of contact. Though services such as Gmail have gone a long way to making email more fun and usable, many still can not wait until the service falls into obsolescence.

The second possibility is that another service, much like email, will rise to make such communication easy again. With social networks trying to open up their doors more and even interact with one another there could come a time when one sends a private message to another user from their native account, even if they are on two different services. Though the result would be extremely email-like in nature, it would fit more comfortably with the social networking scheme that is developing.

However, neither of these things are likely soon and neither would help deal with spammers or others that don’t wish to be found, but it could help with bloggers and others that have a sincere interest in doing the right thing.

Conclusions

It is strange to think that, in this age of near-instant communication with anyone, anywhere, that we are finding it harder and harder to reach out privately to strangers we have an issue with. However, this is exactly the case.

The implications of this problem go far beyond just copyright and plagiarism issues. It is something of a great social experiment where we seem to resolve almost all of our disagreements in the most public of the public spheres and the results have not been that impressive.

If there is one thing that I would change about the Internet, it would be this rush to air grievances out in publicly, to attack others publicly while hiding behind a veil of anonymity and forget that there are people at the other end of every communication we send out.

It’s a tall order, but I do think it would make the Web a better place.