This week, we have a ruling in the Bratz trial, delays in The Pirate Bay one, the AAs descending upon the political conventions and much, much more.

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.

I am looking forward to attending the event this year and am very excited about this panel. Not only do I think it is a great topic needing more discussion, especially as social media becomes a bigger part of the Web, but I am also a planned speaker for it.

So, if you’re coming to SXSW and would like to see me speak or just want to see additional discussion on this issue, please take a moment to vote for the panel.

Click Here to Vote For This Panel

For those who are interested in this topic, I will be writing and posting a follow up on Knol sometime in the coming week. I am still following the service. If you wish, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and be notified when the article goes live, as well as get updates on other copyright and plagiarism matter.

My thanks goes out to the Guardian for thinking of me and I want to again welcome all of the new readers.

Like many bloggers, yesterday I received a letter from Feedblitz advertising their new Private Label Custom Domain Service. Also, like many bloggers, I deleted that email without as much as a second look.

However, a recent article on Mashable made me do a search for it and take a closer look. The article accused the service of assisting spammers, saying that:

“The general idea seems to be splogging as a service – that is they are offering as a service (a paid service, to be exact) the ability to register a subdomain of FeedBlitz in which you can syndicate your existing content to a customizable page, or pretty much the same thing you can do on any number of free webhosting solutions, but for $9.99 a month.”

The good news is that, after looking at the service and researching what it does, I can safely say that there are several problems with that statement, including that the service is actually $9.99 per year, not per month, and there is not all that much to worry about from this service, at least at this time.

However, the bad news is that, after looking deeper into Feedblitz itself, I’ve found that not only is it spamming the search engines, but has been doing so for a very long time and has thousands of junk results in Google already.

It is very important that you be aware of what Feedblitz is doing and how you can protect yourself from it.

Universally Hated

Feedblitz’s new “domain” service has been almost universally panned across the Web. Most commenters heavily criticize the sales tactic of the service, in which they reserve one more domains for you and encourage you to “protect your brand” by paying for the full service.

Says the email:

“We reserved these domains for you to help get you started. If you do nothing your reservations will simply expire and someone else will be able to use them instead of you. Or you can just activate the ones you want online before anyone else grabs them.”

This has lead many to accuse the site of “extortion” by reserving their customer’s name and then demanding payment before turning it over to the mob to do with as they please.

The other criticism is that, while the service is called “Private Label Domains” it is actually a subdomain off of Feedblitz, not an actual domain. Should you decide to purchase this service, your address will be yourname.feedblitz.com, not yourname.com.

However, it was the accusation of spam blogging that caught my eye the most. With the two articles above both mentioning the ability to syndicate your content to an outside domain, I decided to research that feature.

Fortunately, I did not find much of interest.

What It Actually Does

If you visit either the sample account promoted by Feedblitz or the test page they created for me (http://plagiarismtoday.feedblitz.com – I do not wish to link it since it will be down in a day or two) you’ll see that there is no syndicated content on the site.

Though Feedblitz says that the site can display “An online preview for a publication with a link to subscribe” it appears that it will not do so by default and I could find no subdomains that actually did it.

Instead, the main focus of the site is to allow users to subscribe to your feed via email, IM or Twitter. In this regard, it is meant to be both an extension of Feedblitz’s existing services and of the user’s Web site. Not a standalone spam blog.

Furthermore, as their FAQ points out, the fact they charge ten dollars per year will likely eliminate much of the true spammer threat.

All in all, the service seems to be mostly guilty of being almost completely useless, providing a service that is free with most hosting accounts, and poorly marketed.

However, as I was researching this issue, I discovered something about Feedblitz that was much worse than even the nightmares many had about the private label domain service. Namely, that they have been unwittingly creating spam blogs for quite some time.

30,000 Spam Entries in Google

If you do a site search for Feedblitz in Google, you’ll find that they have a very high number of results, especially for a site with very few unique pages.

When you look closer at the results, you find quickly that the bulk of them come from URLs that contain the string “?previewfeed=”. These point to previews of feeds that Feedblitz helps syndicate, such as this one.

The problem is that Feedblitz displays the full content of the feed they parse on these “preview” pages, including hotlinking the images. Then, to make matters worse, the pages are permanent, not temporary previews designed to show potential subscribers what it will look like and they are not blocked from the search engines via Meta tags or robots.txt. In fact, as of this writing, feedblitz.com has no robots.txt file at all and there is no attempt whatsoever to discourage search engines from indexing these duplicate pages.

The result is that a good portion of Feedblitz’s feeds, though almost certainly not all, have found up in Google. With Feedblitz pulling a PageRank of seven, the domain is clearly very trusted in the search engines and is at least capable of outranking the original content, as is the case with the results to the left.

What makes this matter worse is that many of the Webmasters who have their feeds parsed by Feedblitz have not registered for the site nor given permission for their content to be republished in any way. It is possible that your site could be syndicated over the service, and scraped for a preview, without your knowledge or permission. This issue only relates to bloggers who registered for their newsletter service.

To put it mildly, this use of blogger content is irresponsible and it is important for bloggers to know that, if they have syndicated their feed through Feedblitz at any point, that their site could be duplicated on the service and present in the search engines.

Likely Unintentional

I want to make it clear that I do not think Feedblitz is doing this on purpose. The search results that this content will likely rank for does little to help them with their business. I don’t think Feedblitz is trying to be a spammer any more than Workfriendly was.

Feedblitz’s mistake is that they did not take proper precautions when using other people’s content and, as a result, are spamming out thousands of links filled with duplicate content.

One line of code either in the template or in the robots.txt file would fix this overnight, but they haven’t done so, likely because they didn’t think to.

Hopefully, this article will draw enough attention to the issue that they fix the oversight and stop accidentally spamming the search engines.

What You Can Do

If you find that your content is in Feedblitz and is being ranked without your permission, I would take the following steps (See Update):

2. Delete Your Account (if applicable): Disable Feedblitz’s services if they are not heavily used on your site. Consider alternatives such as FeedBurners email service, which works without creating duplicate content.
3. Contact Feedblitz: If you can not delete your account, don’t have one or doing so fails to remove your content, contact Feedblitz directly and ask them to remove your work or otherwise remedy this issue.
4. Contact Me: Should that fail, I have the information for filing a DMCA notice with their host. However, that would be an absolute last resort in this case. Only if Feedblitz proves uncooperative would I even consider placing this option on the table.

The reason for my hesitation is that, as I mentioned above, it seems likely that this was a mistake. I seriously doubt that the preview URLs were intended to be viewed publicly. Instead, I think this is a bug in their system and that the URLs were intended to be a part of the subscription process, nothing more.

Though this is very worrisome, it is worth taking a moment to let Feedblitz correct the problem itself.

Conclusions

So is Feedblitz spamming the search engines? Yes, just not in the way many people think they are.

Though their new service is a poorly-conceived and even worse in its marketing, it does not appear to be a natural spam tool. Given the number of sites and services that have been inundated with spam, Feedblitz’s domain service seems to be the least of our worries.

That being said, the site still has shown great irresponsibility when it comes to how it displays and uses blogger content and has unwittingly made a spam blogger of itself.

Hopefully they will fix these issues soon and get back to what they were supposed to be doing from the beginning, helping bloggers build their subscriber base by making it easy for non-RSS uses to receive updates in an RSS-based world.

Update (08/06/08 – 2:30 PM):

I have received some feedback from Feedblitz and I wanted to share everything that they’ve said.

First, according to the email, the preview feature is ONLY for sites that have signed up for their newsletter services. It is not for RSS feeds that were just subscribed. That is very good news.

Second, they have updated their site to add a “noindex” feature to their newsletter preview pages. If you want to use it, visit your “Newsletter Settings”, move to the second screen, tick the “NOINDEX” box and save your setting.

My thanks goes to Feedblitz for their swift response on this issue! I now agree, spam bloggers they are not and I was right in thinking that this was purely accidental.

Between large corporations filing DMCAs by the thousand, DMCA notices used to silence critics and other issues over the years, the safe harbor provisions have shown that, in the wrong hands, they can be a very dangerous tool.

Fortunately, most of the major cases where safe harbor was clearly being abused either have been or will likely be resolved by the courts in favor of those injured.

However, this has not stopped me from thinking of ways to improve and fix safe harbor, both to reduce the number of incidents where the system is abused and improve the overall efficiency of the process.

The Short List

Though, if I could get the ear of lawmakers, this list would actually be much longer, there are five improvements that I consider critical to making the safe harbor provisions work better and more fairly.

1. Transparency: I’ve spoken on this before but a gaping hole in the DMCA process is that there is almost no transparency to the process. The person who had the notice filed against them rarely sees the actual letter, there is no public examination of filings and accurate statistics are impossible to glean. Though sites such as Chilling Effects attempted to create databases for this purpose, hosts have not participated reliably and only a small percentage of notices are available for viewing. Greater transparency, both with the subject of the notice and the public, is needed both to discourage false notices and to better understand how the law is used.
2. Centralized Reporting: Currently, in most cases, the greatest challenge in filing a DMCA notice is not legal, but technical. Locating a host and finding their DMCA agent is complicated process that few are able to perform. The U.S. Copyright Office keeps a database of DMCA agents, but the information is both dated and difficult to access. A central means of reporting infringements to U.S. based hosts, if done with proper protections, would fix much of the problem. As it sits now, it is mostly large corporations, who can afford the research and legal expenses, that enjoy the benefits of the DMCA. Simplifying the process would allow more small copyright holders to protect their work.
3. Stronger Punishments for False Notices: Currently, the law states that anyone who misrepresents an infringement, either in a notice or counter-notice, is “liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation.” In most cases, this would be a very small amount and provide little motivation to sue. Though other laws may apply, the DMCA needs to bulk up the damages for filing a knowingly false notice or counter-notice.
4. Update For Modern Technology: The DMCA was written in 1998. Though it is a baby in terms of copyright laws it is already very far behind in terms of technology. Ten years ago, the term “online service provider” was much easier to define. Today, with sites such as Youtube and services such as Second Life, there is much less clarity and that has impacted the usability of the law as well. Hosts are now more than mere repositories for data and the law needs to reflect that.
5. Addition of Link Requests: The DMCA safe harbor system is a true one-trick pony, the removal of the allegedly infringing material. However, many copyright holders are happy to share their work, so long as they receive proper attribution. Give copyright holders the option of requesting a link request or other attribution instead of merely removing the work. Hosts win because they don’t have to disable user accounts, “infringers” win because their sites remain up and copyright holders win because they get links back to their original content.

Though most of these changes would be fairly simple to implement in terms of the law itself, they create technical and other challenges that will likely keep them from happening.

In the end, I am forced to admit that we are likely stuck with this outdated and easily-abused system that not only favors large copyright holders, but also ensures that the applicability of the law is almost always in doubt.

Conclusions

No matter what you may think of the safe harbor provisions, the truth is that, without the protections it provides hosts and other online service provides, much of the Internet we have today would not be possible. Without the legal security the law provides, many sites we enjoy would be too risky to be feasible.

Still, as laws go, it is a flawed one. However, it is not beyond all repair. Considering the other copyright legislation to have been cooked up by our Federal government, as well as other elements in the DMCA itself, the safe harbor provisions are easily some of the better rules.

Hopefully though, they can be improved and honed to eliminate many of the problems with the law and help copyright holders, hosts, search engines and users alike enjoy the rights and protections the law provides.

Images: Some of the images for this article were captured from YouTomb

As usual, there are many great stories this week including Scrabulous being reborn, two Oink users going free, Comcast takes a beating from the FCC, Yahoo! Music changes course and The Black Crowes feud with Gretchen Wilson over accusations of plagiarism

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.

If you have not seen the video, here it is:

If you want to take action, you can do so by contacting Photobucket and contacting Qoop to let them know about the video and express your displeasure at the feature.

Also, consider signing the original petition and making your voice heard that way.

Thank you for your continued support on this issue and, with luck, cooler heads will prevail in this matter.

But while the service has a great deal to love about it, including no fees (even for payments), ease of contact for reaching the author and clear attribution requirements when using a work, one of the more interesting features has been largely ignored, including in my original article: The ability to create custom licenses including the ability to edit the description and the full terms.

This is a great opportunity for those who like Creative Commons-style licensing but have not found the exact terms to suit them to easily make their content available for limited reuse.

Fortunately, using it is fairly simple, even if the feature itself is a bit hard to find.

How to Change Your License

Changing your iCopyright license is a simple process that requires only a few steps. However, you have to know where to look for the links and how to use the tools.

Step 1: Login

Visit iCopyright Creator’s Console home page and log in as you normally do. If you do not have an account, you can create one by first visiting the iCopyright for Creators Home page.

Step 2: Go to the Permissions & Services Link

Click the link at the top labeled “Permissions & Services, that will take you to your list of license features and options that you can enable and disable.

Step 3: Set Your Descriptions

Click the “setting” link beside your various licensing elements and it will take you to a page where you can enable the licensing option, change its URL (if applicable) and edit its description.

Please note that changing the description will NOT change it on the Permissions page (this is a possible bug). The change will only be visible on your actual iCopyright tag.

For example, this:

Will cause the tag to look like this:

Step 4: Visit Your “Terms of Use” page

Click the link that reads “Your Terms of Use” in the box at the upper-left hand portion of the screen, it will take you to a page that displays your full license. You can do this on any page in the Permissions section as there is one TOU for all licensing options.

Step 5: Edit Your Terms

After reading your terms of use, scroll down to the bottom and click the link that reads “Edit Terms of Use”, it will bring up a WYSIWYG editor that will allow you to edit the terms of use.

In this case, the changes WILL show up in the Terms of Use page, making it easy to preview your changes. Also, if you are not happy with your changes, you can click the “Revert to Default” link that appears after you have made changes to your license.

Sample Uses

Since license writing is a difficult art that even lawyers often wrestle with, it would not be wise to make any drastic changes to your license terms. Furthermore, since there is no way currently to edit the titles of the licenses, you cannot create a license that goes against the spirit of the original.

However, there are several minor adjustments that you could make that could have a drastic impact on some people’s willingness to license their work.

1. Restrict Licensing: If you are fine with most non-commercial use but don’t want certain groups to use your content, for it to be used in a few ways you do not approve of (ex: in videos) or have some other use you are not comfortable with, you can carve out a small exception. (Note: The license already restricts many unwanted uses)


2. Broaden Licensing: Even if you want to demand that most commercial users pay, you can carve out exceptions such as political organizations that may use your content for fundraising or sites that simply have advertising but earn less than a certain amount.


3. Clarifications: If you get repeated questions about the nature of how your content can be used, you can spell out any clarifications that are necessary.

Though these might be limited exceptions that can be carved out, it opens the door of blanket licensing to a new group of individuals and organizations that may not have been reached by the previous efforts.

Important Note

Editing a license is a difficult process and doing it incorrectly can result in you surrendering rights that you did not intend to give up. Ideally, you should always consult with an attorney before making any changes to your license to ensure that it is valid and will hold up in court if needed.

Conclusions

Though Creative Commons provides a wide range of licenses for content creators to choose from, there will always be some who are not satisfied with the the choices they have and want more control.

For those, iCopyright may be a compelling option.

Though the system needs updates and changes before it can be truly customizable for copyright holders, it is already a huge step forward.

While this doesn’t prevent me from keeying a wish-list of new features, including editable titles, customizable attribution and more, it is clear to me that iCopyright is, for the most part, well on the right track.

However, Flickr, as I pointed out in my previous article, manages to confuse and befuddle with its licensing terms to the point that mistakes seem inevitable. Looking through Flickr’s dizzying array of poorly-worded options, it is easy to see how photographers and artists make simple mistakes and end up losing rights to their work.

So what exactly is wrong and how can it be fixed? That is what we’re taking a look at today.

The Options

When you pull up your privacy settings, you get a list that looks a great deal like the one to the right, it contains a series of questions about the rights you want to reserve in your work and the options you have set for them.

To save time, we’re going to take a look at them one at a time.

1. Who can download your stuff: Allows users to download larger sizes of your image. Users can still download smaller ones though Flickr uses a transparent overlay to try and make that more difficult. Does not disable all downloading via the API.
2. Who can share your photos or videos: Turns off and on the “Share This” button in the upper right hand corner of the image page. The button allows users to email, link, embed or blog the photo. However, all of those options can be done either directly or by turning on other options.
3. Who can print your photos: Does not actually disable printing of photos, just the ability for users to order prints via the Flickr partnership with Qoop. Users can still print the images themselves, especially if they can download the full-sized images. On the other hand, it is still much better than Photobucket.
4. Who can blog your stuff: Turns off the “blog this” button at the top of your image. Bloggers can still link to the image and, in some cases, embed it directly.
5. Hide your EXIF Data: Hides metadata embedded into the image automatically upon creation and saving. (Not a licensing option)
6. Hide your stuff from public searches: Displays two options, see more information below.
7. Hide your profile from public searches: Same as above.
8. What license will your content have: Allows you to choose either all rights reserved or a Creative Commons License for your image. Only functions as the default and can be changed on a per-image basis later. (Not pictured)

However, there are still more options to look at, when you click either the “Hide your stuff” or “Hide your profile” links, you are presented with still more licensing and rights options.

That page, which is the same no matter which link you click, offers you three options:

1. Hide your photostream from site-wide searches on flickr.com: Removes your images from local Flickr searches, making your photos private. See comments below for correction on this issue.
2. Hide your photostream from searches on 3rd party sites that use the API: Removes your images from the API so that sites using it can not locate your images or use them.
3. Hide me from searches: Removes your actual profile from Flickr searches so you can not be found by name or email address.

The end result is ten different options that control how and when users of Flickr can access your images. However, as we’ll see in just a minute, many of those options are completely useless or hopelessly redundant.

The Problem

The problem with Flickr licensing becomes clear almost immediately. Of the eight initial options above, only four do what they say they do. Of the four that do what they say, three require you to select further options on a second page.

This leaves only one option that works “out of the box”, the EXIF data feature, which is not even a licensing tool.

Worse still, the first four options overlap one another in many places. For example, the feature to disable blogging clearly overlaps with the feature to “share” images since sharing allows blogging. However, even if both are disabled, users can still blog images in many cases, especially if the API is still turned on.

Likewise, turning off the ability to print an image does not actually disable printing, to do that you also have to disable high resolution image, otherwise users can just save and print clear images, but that involves the “download your stuff” option.

Quickly, compare this to how Creative Commons handles licensing. You’ll see how beautiful and simple content licensing can be. Though Flickr has more options to worry about than CC, it is clear that licensing can be a beautiful thing, if done correctly.

However, looking at CC also reminds you of exactly how out of order Flickr’s current system is.

Fixing the Issue

Since Flickr has integrated CC so deeply into the site and CC has such a great handle on these issues, it seems to be a good place to start when looking to fix the problem.

Currently, when you set up a new account, all of your photos default to all rights reserved, the API is turned on, as is all public searching, and downloads/sharing are both enabled.

This makes almost no sense. A photo that is all right reserved would have very little usefulness in the API, at least legally, and would be limited in its usefulness for embedding.

Rather than assuming what the user wants, new users should be walked through a short licensing questionnaire, one that would closely resemble the one CC uses, and would only ask basic questions. From there, Flickr could suggest a default licensing scheme tailored to what the user selected.

For example, a photo that is all rights reserved could be removed from the API, or only included in thumbnail format, and have downloading disabled with blogging and embedding only available to the owner. A CC-licensed work available for commercial use could have the API turned on, embedding and downloading fully available and commercial printing turned on.

These options could be set by the user him or herself, but the defaults would be based upon the user licensing.

Speaking of those options, I would recommend that the Flickr licensing be reduced to the following options:

1. Allow embedding of your images: Since there is no way to actually prevent emailing or linking to an image (without turning on privacy), it makes sense to focus only on embedding.
2. Allow image downloads: Turns on the “All sizes” feature and removes the psuedo-DRM Flickr uses when this is disabled.
3. Enable Privacy: Would have sub-options to hide your profile, your images or both. Would prevent linking or emailing any images if images are private.
4. Enable 3rd Party Access: This option needs to be front and center, not buried. This would disable the API access to the photo. Also, ideally would have granular choices to allow third party access to certain types of images, such as thumbnails only or certain sets, but not others.
5. Select License: Same as today, the option to choose a CC license.

The option that was eliminated was the one to allow “printing” of an image. This is a confusing option and it makes more sense to base printing upon the license the photo is under than whether this is ticked.

In the end, I was able to condense Flickr’s option list just five with sub-options. This prevents option overlap and confusion about how to convert option settings into real-life results.

Conclusions

Licensing is hard. I know that well. I also know that my system is far from perfect and does not actually reduce that many options, just organizes them in a manner that is less confusing. I also know that there is much room for improvement and, most likely, some technical challenges associated with simplifying the licensing.

However, it is clear reading Flickr’s licensing system that they have literally built it piece by piece over the years. As they added new features, they added new licensing options with little thought to how they interacted with previous ones.

It is past time for Flickr to do some spring cleaning on its licensing and help both its current users and its new ones understand the wide array of features Flickr supports.

Fortunately, through their heavy use of Creative Commons, they have something of a head start in helping to explain licensing. Now it is just a matter of taking what they’ve done well and meshing it with the other features they provide.

It is easier said than done, but far from impossible.

The site currently is just a “parked” domain page running ads for the domain’s registrar, GoDaddy. According to the whois information for the site, the domain was “updated” on the eighth, indicating that it possibly expired and was transferred to another owner.

Workfriendly attempted to disguise Web surfing as a Microsoft Word document by formatting Web pages to appear as text in a Word file while bordering the site content with a fake border designed to look like the application. This was supposed to make it “safer” to surf at work as it would raise less suspicion should anyone see your monitor.

The site created problems, however, when it allowed search engines to index its modified pages, injecting many thousands of of pages worth of duplicate content into Google. It also created headaches by not obeying certain meta tags, causing links to break on some sites and for Google to report those errors as broken links on the original domain.

It is unclear at this time if the outage is temporary or permanent, however, the site has been down for at least two days, making a temporary outage increasingly unlikely.

Hat tip: Special thanks to David Bradley of Sciencebase (stupid typos, thanks for the catch!) for letting me know that Workfriendly is not working