Aggregating and sharing content is a wonderful benefit of the web2.0 (whatever that means) era. However, the feed aggregation and sharing protocols used by the Human Capital Institute appear to cross a not so fine line between sharing and stealing. As Harold Jarche writes in his blog today, the Human Capital Institute includes his blog in their website's blog roll. When visitors click on his name in the blog roll, they are given this message:
"Free HCI Membership – You are attempting to access an HCI resource that is reserved for Members. If you are already a member, please enter your email address and password below to login. If you aren't a member yet please press the Become A Member button below to start the quick and easy process of becoming a member. You will be brought back to your desired destination when the process is complete."
At best, this practice is an unprofessional misuse of a new fangled feed sharing technology that misrepresents another person's work as their "resource". At worst, it is old fashioned stealing. I feel that by referring to Harold's work as an "HCI resource", they don't just teeter on a fine line between sharing and stealing – they stomp all over it before dashing well into the dark side.
Had I stumbled upon this message, I would have assumed that Harold is a knowing contributor to the site. However, based on the title and contents of Harold's "RSS Feed Stealing?" post, he clearly is not.
Technorati Tags: aggregation, RSS
I had a conversation with our company's copyright and intellectual property attorney a few weeks ago about a similar question. Granted, our company takes the paranoid conservative approach to copyright (although I don't blame them–we're much better off playing it safe than relying on gray area in the law as a for-profit company).
His argument was that any link to an outside resource in our courses needs to meet two conditions to be absolutely in the clear for copyright:
1. It needs to be clearly labeled as an outside link and not something our company owns.
2. It needs to open in a new window (rather than remaining within our Blackboard frame, which makes it look like it's ours).
Generally, I would say a blogroll is clearly external links since that's common practice. They list their own blogs separately from the "More Blogs" list where Harold Jarche's is included, so I think that's fine.
Opening in a new window should only be required in cases where there is a frame or something else that disguises the fact that it's an external resource. I think their membership request pretty clearly violates that.
Looks like stealing to me.
Seem like good guidelines …
I don't know that I would call it stealing, but it is an underhanded way to gather membership. Is there anyway to shun (to steal an Amish term) such sites?
… true … too bad by talking about it, I sent them traffic 🙂