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Bloglines As Copyright Infringement
Monica at Buzzwords recently pointed me to an interesting article entitled Bloglines and the Perils of Syndication about the author of The Trademark Blog who asked Bloglines to remove his blog feed from its service because he didn't want Bloglines making money off of his content. I noted this briefly before, but as the Trademark Blog explained:(Note that this critic is more worried that his blog content will be surrounded by ads for legal services than he is about his content being surrounded by porn or online gambling. Interesting hierarchy of evils.) I generally don't like the idea that Bloglines (or other services) could soon do what the Trademark Blog describes, which is essentially making money from content you and I generate, without our permission and w/out giving us anything in return. I suppose if you use Bloglines, you might feel this is ok—you enjoy the service, so you get “paid” via the convenience it provides you. I'll be curious to see whether Bloglines runs into any significant resistance if it does start selling ads and making money in this way.Right now, among the million bloggers, there are bird watching blogs, and anti-Michael Moore blogs, and Linux blogs. Those bloggers do or do not view their blogs as part of a commercial pursuit, and do or do not wish to run advertising, and do or do not wish make use of information about their readership. As far as I can tell, based on its stated intentions, the leading web-based aggregator is reserving the right to, for example, place Windows-based software ads on Linux blogs, and Anne Coulter ads on pro-Michael Moore sites, and to sell everybody's subscription list to anyone. All without notification or authorization by the blogger.
Posted January 30, 2005 08:21 AM | meta-blogging
I recently had a similar conversation about this with a friend about Google. Should something as critical as search be entirely in the domain of the private sector? Should Google be able to capitalize on their knowledge of world search patterns (i.e., selling marketeers information on what phrases generate the most hits, etc) by virtue of the fact they provide a service?
I sometimes wonder if we're going to see Google like MS in a few years: omnipresent and scary.
Posted by: transmogriflaw at January 31, 2005 12:45 AM
omnipresent, maybe. scary? i sure hope not. and i'm kind of under the impression that they try to avoid scariness, too.
Posted by: monica at January 31, 2005 06:46 AM
But doesn't it scare you just a little that the fact that Google isn't like MS now in terms of scariness is just because they try to avoid it? Surely that's a fairly weak rationale to keep them from exploiting their power, especially now that they are beholden to the stockholders.
Personally, I'm quite happy that MS has come out with a competing search engine. I think it's kind of odd how Google is given a pass on their omnipresence because they have managed to market themselves as hip and young. If WalMart or MS or any other major corporation had Google's level of omnipresence in search, there would be a tremendous amount of discussion about it, right?
Posted by: transmogriflaw at February 1, 2005 12:46 PM
