Subject to these Terms, Quora gives you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to re-post any of the Content on Quora anywhere on the rest of the web provided that the Content was added to the Service after April 22, 2010, and provided that the user who created the content has not explicitly marked the content as not for reproduction, and provided that you: (a) do not modify the Content; (b) attribute Quora with a human and machine-followable link (an A tag) linking back to the page displaying the original source of the content on quora.com (c) upon request, either by Quora or a user, remove the user's name from Content which the user has subsequently made anonymous; (d) upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable effort to update a particular piece of Content to the latest version on quora.com; and (e) upon request, either by Quora or by a user who contributed to the Content, make a reasonable attempt to delete Content that has been deleted on quora.com.
Copyright owner is the original poster at Quora. If (s)he chooses to delete the post, thus revoking Quora's licence to republish, will it become Quora's responsibility to remove Posterous post and all other copies?
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm curious if we will see the URL of the submission updated by a moderator.
http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-stupid/ans...
It actually is simply a violation of copyright. Anything over 15 lines cited iirc.
edit: fixed the link tx Alan!
The point of (nearly) any blog post should be to "continue the current conversation", whatever that means for your genre. It's very obvious to me that this post does not do that, or really anything else.
This should've linked to the source text, which would've included comments.
Determining fair use is much more complicated than that. There is no such quantitative standard.
That blog is just my interesting snippets blog. It just so happened that this snippet was so interesting that the entirety made sense. I usually try to break it down into the smallest most interesting bit.
Imagine my surprise as to the reaction to this article. The blog is mainly for myself and my friends / twitter followers. There was no malice here, and I've altered the post to more prominently link to the source content.
The nature of the Internet is such: My blog drives some amount of attention. I don't monetize it and have no intention to. If Quora can make more money by the traffic I direct to it, all the better.
I did not post this to Hacker News. I had no intention of it receiving the attention that it did. All in all, I'm happy that some people got value out of the story. Whoever linked to my post should have linked to the original quora post. That's that.
I am basing my criticism of “Posterous culture” solely on your post and the one I mentioned that copied my entire blog post. Do you think I’m on to something, or do you think Posterous users probably infringe just as much as users of any other blog service?
We do honor DMCA takedown requests -- they're fairly easy to do and we are very mindful of taking down infringing content.
In the age of the printing press, once a book or newspaper was printed and published, it was very rarely lost, despite the best efforts of book-burners — simply because there were many stable copies of it in existence, one for every two or three readers. I believe that this newfound resilience of knowledge has benefited humanity substantially. (Perhaps you disagree.)
In the age of the WWW, this is no longer the case. A web page can easily have hundreds of thousands, even millions of readers — more than all but the most popular of books — and still be lost to posterity through simple carelessness or lackadaisical attitudes about archival, because a single stable copy can be accessed by all of these readers concurrently. I have web pages from ten years ago (e.g. http://canonical.org/~kragen/x-pretty.html) and the links have nearly all rotted.
Consequently: if you find something on the web that has enduring value, by all means, make copies of it, and publish them so that other people can do the same. If nobody does, it will almost certainly be lost in a few short years.
Promulgating pseudo-moral injunctions against such copying could consign valuable information to the memory hole much more effectively than any Nazi book-burning parties ever could.
But if you find something valuable on the web, copy it and spread it around. I could go on for hours with a sob story about tens thousands of combined hours of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis that represented real philosophical progress evaporating in the into the ether because there was no redundancy and we took its existence for granted.
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-cred...
It could then suggest to the submitter that they submit the original source instead. Alternatively, it could keep the link to the submitted article but also add an (Original Source) link next to it.
Why would you take a piece of content off the web and re-publish it in its entirety on your own blog?
I see this happening to my articles, and I initially assumed it was just black hat SEO. But frequently it appears it's an actual human being who seems to think he's adding value to the world by reposting something he found somewhere else.
Can anybody explain the motivation behind this?
- Him posting the full text rather than a hyperlink saves me an extra click. - Maybe it also makes it easier to talk about the article with the rest of that blogs community. - It provides another copy in case the original goes down. - If he also has other posts it provides a consistent visual aesthetic across the body of information.
It's somewhat like creating a miniature library and discussion group.
I don't find any of these arguments convincing, but they're possibilities.
The web at large however, does not fully embrace this level of detail and focus in URLs. So users do not feel comfortable using URLs to link readers to discrete packets of information, they feel safer just copying the data.
This is just a theory.
Someone using any blogging platform (or any hosted website) could do this.
That said, I barely use Posterous, so a member of the "community" would be in a better position to comment (and maybe this has already occurred theough the upvoting of the parent), but I felt like the parent had some pretty harsh words which needed to be addressed due to their generality.
Are there some studies on short format content reproduction producing a net detriment (and no wisecracks about ehow)?
Granted, the duplicator in this case should have made the original author more visible.
This, to me, is a fundamental problem with the Posterous culture. Here we have a post on a Posterous blog made by a Posterous co-founder which copies, in its entirety and with no significant commentary, a work published elsewhere.
It’s attributed with a link to the source — barely, in lowercased, tiny font, at the bottom. The headline is a link to the Posterous page, not the source (unlike Daring Fireball “linked list” items, for example). How many people will actually follow the link? Why is this Posterous blog entry #1 on HN when a permalink to the original source on Quora is readily available?
Let’s be clear. This is not “fair use.” It’s not plagiarism, as Garry doesn’t claim he wrote the anecdote; but it’s a violation of copyright. It’s publishing without permission of the copyright holder.†
My first submission to Hacker News was an original item I posted to my own website. It got quite a few reads — but a lot of people were re-tweeting a link to a full copy of it hosted on someone else’s Posterous. That user didn’t add much (A sentence expressing “me, too”). I was conflicted: Glad people found my writing interesting enough to duplicate and share, but disappointed that they were reading it on someone else’s site for no good reason.
I see now that if the company’s own bloggers consider copyright a joke, if they believe posting other people’s articles verbatim is kosher, well, can we be surprised their users do, too?
(Postscript: This differs from Tumblr’s “re-blogging” in one important way: You only re-blog other Tumblr posts. “Re-blogging” is part of the Tumblr system. You expect it there if you post there. You don’t “lose” anything by it. I have no problem there.)
† I don’t know if Quora’s terms of service mean that consent is implied, but honestly, in this case and this case only (the case of a Posterous employee), it doesn’t matter, because it’s about setting precedent for the community.