Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Copyright Vigilante Righthaven Will Fight On After Ruling

First off today, following their legal setback yesterday, Righthaven has vowed to fight on and has said it has already addressed many of the concerns raised. Yesterday a judge ruled that Righthaven did not have standing to sue in their case against Democratic Underground ans Stephens Media, the owners of the Las Vegas Review-Journal had only assigned them the right to sue and not an exclusive right under the law. However, according to Righthaven, they amended their agreement in May so that Righthaven has exclusive rights and gives Stephens Media a non-exclusive license to use the content. The judge also threatened sanctions against Righthaven for not disclosing that Stephens Media has a financial interest in the case, something Righthaven has said they will address.

2: Torrent Site Throws In The Towel Fearing Arrests

Next up today, Sweden’s largest private Bittorrent tracker, Piratetorrents.nu, closed abruptly after its owners feared that police may be moving in to arrest them. The move comes after a police raid shuttered another popular tracker in the country, XNT.nu. The abrupt closures are a further sign that Sweden, despite being the home of The Pirate Bay, is cracking down on Bittorrent sites within its borders.

3: Hero Orang-utan Sparks Copyright Row

Finally today, a video of an orangutan saving the life of a drowning chick has started something of a copyright battle. Michael McGrane filmed the footage at the Dublin Zoo in 2007 only to recently have a news agency News Team International license the video without his permission to several sites, including The Daily Mail. The agency has said that they are willing to share the revenue earned with McGrane but are under no obligation to do so as “the clip was available online”. Most of the uses of the video failed to credit McGrane for the video and, in fact, said it was a recent clip taken by a zookeeper.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

In late October, while I was on hiatus for my haunted house, the Fair Syndication Consortium unveiled a 0.9 version of its guidelines (PDF).

The Consortium (previous coverage) hopes to turn unauthorized usage into a profit center for content creators. The idea is that, by working with advertising networks, they can redirect some of the ad revenue from sites that use content without permission to the original creators. This would be done using content matching technology provided by Attributor, which is a charter member of the group.

The group has already announced an agreement to work with AdBrite and is reported to have over 1000 members, including, according to a recent article, The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast.

The new guidelines, which are a “beta” attempt at establishing the rules the members of the consortium would follow, is not meant to be a final set by any stretch, but to serve as more of a “conversation starter”.

So what’s in the draft guidelines? Read on to find out.

The Basics

The guidelines first define three different kinds of “value” that content reusers can add to a company from their site. The are as follow:

1. Link Value: The value added by linking to a source, including both direct traffic and SEO benefits.
2. Brand Value: The name recognition value from being mentioned as a source.
3. Monetary Value: Direct monetary benefit, including licensing or, in the case of the consortium, revenue sharing.

From there, the consortium attempts to define three different content usage scenarios to describe what is being syndicated.

1. Headline: The headline of up to 40 words is used, a good example being my 3 Count column.
2. Excerpt: Any amount of the original work that is used, but is not a “full copy”
3. Fully Copy: Cases where more than 125 words are used AND more than 80% of the original article are copied.

In cases where the reuse is welcome and the publisher is participating in the Fair Syndication Consortium’s revenue sharing model, both headlines and excerpts would be used solely to build link and brand value, through proper attribution, and “full copy” cases would be used to earn monetary value.

In cases where the reuse was not desired or the creator is not participating in revenue sharing, action would be limited to full copy cases, save a letter direct to the person doing the copying in hopes of bringing them into compliance, which is used in all cases. The action, when taken, would first consist of a takedown notice sent to the search engines and the site’s advertising network, if applicable. If that fails to bring about compliance, then a takedown notice is issued to the host. In all cases, legal action is only considered if the problem is “systematic”.

This creates a climate where only fully copy uses of ones content are pursued actively, either for monetization or removal. Other cases are used solely to build link and brand value, but even in cases where that is not applied, pursuit is never more aggressive than a letter to the person reusing the content.

The question is whether or not this is the way to go and, on that front, I have mixed feelings.

My Thoughts

I think the big ideas in the guidelines are pretty good. There is a lot of positive content reuse going on and this system does seem to try and reward/encourage it. It’s focus on attribution, both with links and names, is a solid start and I’m hopeful that newspapers and other mainstream media outlets will get behind this.

Also, I agree with the proposal of focusing all resolution efforts on full copy cases. Not only is doing otherwise impractical, both in terms of the law and available resources, but it is the right thing to do ethically. Finally, I also agree that the first method of resolution should be to contact the infringer directly, something I’ve been saying since I opened this site.

That being said, there are a few qualms and concerns I do have with the guidelines.

1. The Definition of “Full Copy”: I don’t think I’ll ever find a mathematical definition that separates excerpt from full copy that I am happy with, but this one does seem to go a bit too far. First off, almost no works under 150 words can ever be copied in full, meeting both the 80% and 125 word criteria, and having used the Attributor system for many years I know the text matching is very good, but imperfect, making even full matches hover in the high 80% range. Though I agree it should be kept high to avoid false positives, it would be nice if A) it looked at the copy as well and B) was somewhat lower.
2. The Favoring of Ad Networks and Search Engines: The system makes ad networks and search engines the front lines of copyright enforcement and I disagree with this. First, I’m uneasy about making them the policemen of the Web but ad networks, in particular, don’t have an explicit role in the DMCA. Most have takedown procedures, but as neither hosts nor information location tools, it is unclear if the safe harbor provisions even apply to them. However, even though it is supposed to be the most “gentle” way to handle such disputes, it actually can play out much worse for the person reusing the content. A traditional takedown removes a few works or temporarily closes a site, an ad network takedown can, and often does, cut off a major source of revenue.
3. Only for Individual Cases: Finally, the guidelines really don’t deal with syndication in the sense that we normally think of it. The guidelines are for cases of limited use, an occasional article for example, not for actual syndication of content. Those matters are left open to the content creator and can even result in legal action. In short, the guidelines seem to punt when it comes to recurring use of content, instead focusing on isolated incidents.

Still, I think the guidelines are overall pretty solid and they definitely achieve the goal of being a starting point for a conversation. That is something I am trying to do here and encourage others to do as well. My hope is that the 1.0 guidelines will come out with some significant changes, but much of the tone and sense of cooperation that is in the existing ones.

Bottom Line

Now it is your turn. Either leave a comment below or, better yet, send an email to guidelines at fairsyndication dot org to offer your thoughts. I’m eager to hear what you think about the guidelines and if you would be comfortable with your content being used under them.

There is no “deadline” for comments, at least none that I have found, but due to my hiatus I am behind the curve on this one so it would probably be best to send in those thoughts sooner rather than later.

Thank you very much for your input and I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Disclosure: I have consulted for Attributor in the past and Attributor is a technology provider for my current employer, CopyByte.com

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.

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