RE: [syndication] Copyright and Syndication

["David Galbraith" <david@moreover.com>]

Oh well you twisted my arm - I guess I'd better comment.

I guess the contract contains the usual over formal legalese that lawyers
have to put in. We don't for instance have any patents and like many I'm not
a big fan of them. At Moreover the principal aim is to be developer friendly
and we've seen some very cool uses of our feeds that are frankly much better
than anything we could have done. Much of this kind of cutting edge
development comes from people using open source software such as Zope. The
original aim of releasing all of our feeds as XML was to encourage ths sort
of use.

What we do is parse sites and create metadata about portions of sites where
the content changes frequently. We did this because search engines tended
not to pick up on the portion of the web that changes rapidly. Many sites
now output structured data, so increasingly our value-add is that we can
categorize the data into chunks. So for example you can get a webfeed that
just lists new viruses that are around. If you like, the aim is to be both a
search engine and a categorization engine (like DMOZ) for the dynamic web.
The next thing we wanted to do was allow people to take feeds and match the
layout of their site - when you put a search engine box on your site the
search returns do not match the look and feel of your site. With a new
product we will launch you will be able to create search returns that match
the look and feel of your own site as well a webfeeds based upon
pre-packaged categories.

The only issues that we are concerned about is that people don't take our
entire database and then pretend its theirs and sell it to someone else - we
want this stuff to be free.
The way we can keep this stuff free is by making our business come from the
publishers by driving them traffic - so the main thing we care about are the
redirects (which actually have some advantages - the links stay live longer
because we track items as they are moved around within a site for archiving
etc. - and they don't break in emails).

In short the search engines probably have some similar legal stuff to stop
you setting up your own search engine based entirely on someone elses.
Actually come to think of it - we don't mind you doing that - we just like
you to say its powered by Moreover or somesuch, rather like DMOZ.
Don't you just love lawyers!

Cheers

Dave


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
David Galbraith - Chief Architect, founder
Moreover.com - the webfeed company
david@moreover.com
415-577-8828 (US)
0777-565-8880 (UK)
favorite webfeed:
http://www.moreover.com/xml

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Swartz [mailto:aswartz@swartzfam.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 1:19 PM
> To: syndication@egroups.com
> Cc: david@moreover.com
> Subject: Re: [syndication] Copyright and Syndication
>
>
> stephen.downes@ualberta.ca <stephen.downes@ualberta.ca> wrote:
>
> > My reaction to Moreover's new "Headline Newslink Agreement"
> > http://www.newstrolls.com/news/dev/downes/column000809.htm
>
> I've emailed with David Galbraith of Moreover, and he's a nice
> guy. I doubt
> he really means to lay claim to the entire syndication industry,
> more likely
> it was just standard legal junk that his lawyers made him put in.
>
> I believe he's on this list (and if not, I've CC-ed him), so I'm
> interested
> in hearing his response.
>
> > And collections of links are not copyrightable - otherwise
> there would be only
> > one search engine on the internet.
>
> Actually, if I recall correctly, there's something like a "collection
> copyright" that allows you to copyright the collection of
> publicly available
> data. It's used to cover things like the phone book, where the individual
> information is not copyrighted (it's just names and phone
> numbers) but cost
> was put into the collection and organization of the information.
> Of course,
> I believe this only covers people from copying your collection and doesn't
> stop them from doing the collection themselves. That would be absurd.
>
> I think that's the answer to this. Moreover likely owns the copyright to
> their webfeeds -- and thus has the right to control their usage
> -- however,
> they can't prevent other people from creating the same or similar webfeeds
> themselves -- that's a more sweeping claim, more along the lines
> of a patent
> than a copyright.
>
> Of course, I'm interested in hearing David's thoughts, as well those of
> anyone else at Moreover.
>
> --
>         Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
> <http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy
> yourself."
>   <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan
>
>
> 
>
>
>
>