
Snowfallgate and Startups - bantic
http://madhatted.com/2013/5/24/snowfallgate-and-startups
======
jeremymims
This analysis is tragically incorrect. The Times legal department in no way
represents the Times newsroom or the developers who made Snow Fall. Reporters
and developers love tools that let them tell stories like Snow Fall more
quickly and inexpensively. There is only one reason the NY Times hasn't made
another story like Snow Fall in the last 5 months: It's too damn expensive and
time-consuming to replicate in a one-off way.

I work with hundreds of newspapers and a dozen or so have contacted me to ask
how they could use Scroll Kit's technology in the past few days. In fact, one
of my larger top-100 newspaper clients signed up to use Scroll Kit this week.
They won't be the only ones.

In case you haven't noticed, newspapers need to find new ways of making money.
And they needed it yesterday. Folks trying to monetize newspapers aren't
worried about someone copying their article to demonstrate a use case (hell,
this event probably drove meaningful traffic to the original), they're worried
that they're not going to be able to stay in business. If you were like any
digital director around the country, you didn't give a shit about copyright
infringement. You only salivated over all the cool things you could be making
and monetizing. Since most newspapers have no way of creating a Snow Fall type
of article themselves, they'll use Scroll Kit, they'll use it at scale, and
they'll sell premium ad units to monetize these articles in a more effective
way than normal content. From my viewpoint, that's a real positive for those
of us trying to keep journalism alive. All the surrounding conversation about
copyright infringement is just so completely missing the point that it might
as well be arguing about the right way to polish the brass on the Titanic.

~~~
bowerbird
finally! someone in this mess says something of substance!

jeremymims said:

> I work with hundreds of newspapers and

> a dozen or so have contacted me to ask

> how they could use Scroll Kit's technology

> in the past few days. In fact,

> one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients

> signed up to use Scroll Kit this week.

> They won't be the only ones.

looks like scrollkit's gambit, as misguided as it was, actually _worked_ for
them. :+)

-bowerbird

p.s. and maybe _i've_ made a mistake calling it "misguided". in one sense,
sure, it was stupid to use copyrighted content from a protective source. but
can anyone honestly argue that the brouhaha didn't get extra juice because it
was "snow fall"? would an example based on "pride and prejudice" have garnered
so much attention? yeah, right... i mean, i thought cody was a bit crazy
because it seemed like he expected praise for scrollkit and he ended up with a
shitstorm instead. but maybe, just maybe, he was crazy like a fox, and knew
that a shitstorm was exactly what he needed right now.

~~~
jimray
So, the ends justify the means and it's all good because at least his startup
got some publicity? Even if the "publicity" turns out to be a net win, what a
terrible way to conduct yourself.

~~~
bowerbird
oh, puleeze. it's not as if they drowned orphan children.

they merely copied some text and pictures and stuff, and not for the purpose
of "stealing" it, but to do a demo...

it's entirely possible a jury -- if it'd come to that -- would have ruled that
what they did constituted fair use.

it hardly qualifies as "a terrible way to conduct yourself." indeed, in my
opinion, such a charge borders on ludicrous.

plus recall, in america, you're innocent until proven guilty.

-bowerbird

~~~
jimray
Ease off on the rhetoric. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I don't think
anyone did anything illegal and, for what it's worth, I thought the Times'
lawyering was dumb and hamfisted at best.

But there was a right way for scroll kit to handle this and there was the
wrong, easy way they chose. They could've said "Have you been blown away by
features like The New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories?
We'd like to show you Scroll Kit." And then put together their own demo video
with their own work without a smarmy "it took us an hour to do what the Times
did in months".

It's classless and low. But they got the publicity they wanted and seem to
have a fan in you. Hoo ray.

------
rjknight
I'm not quite sure how this earned a "gate" suffix. Linking to some NYT
content is hardly wrongdoing of Nixonian proportions :-)

Also, I'm not sure that this negatively affected Scrollkit at all. The main
effect of this story will have been to a) remind people about the Snowfall
story and b) remind people that Scrollkit provides tools for creating similar
content. Both are good outcomes for Scrollkit!

As for "relationships", I'm not sure what relationships Scrollkit can have
damaged given that they had no existing relationship with the NYT. Perhaps
some people affiliated with the NYT will see Scrollkit as an annoying upstart
and perhaps the NYT staff will feel annoyed that Scrollkit is commoditizing a
design concept that was pioneered by them, but that's a small part of the
market for Scrollkit (and, by definition, a market that doesn't need Scrollkit
because they already have in-house technology to do what Scrollkit does!).

I think it's a fairly healthy part of startup culture that a startup can
figure out how a larger company is doing something inefficiently, come up with
a faster, cheaper, better (?) alternative, and tell the world about it.
Startups shouldn't be bullied by bigger, established companies in these
situations, and we certainly shouldn't accept that the larger company had a
legitimate reason for doing so. The "relationship" that the NYT wants to have
with Scrollkit looks like a fairly abusive one to me.

~~~
albertsun
Well it's not true that there was no existing relationship. And I'm not sure
what anyone gains by your wild speculation.

------
giveitago
The thing that confuses me more than anything is that the original pitch is so
_strange_ \- "we made a replica in an hour!".

OK. If you showed me an advertising poster you really liked, I could fire up
Illustrator and give you a decent replica in a couple of hours. Does that mean
you should hire me as your new ad agency? Of course not. The actual act of
piecing together a creative is tiny compared to _planning_ it. Anyone who
works in the startup industry ought to get that- the coding is often the least
of your problems.

So, Scrollkit never claimed that they made a Snow Fall, they claimed that they
were able to throw together a copy of it in a short time. So what? Why would
that make me want to use it?

(also, fun to see that the founder of ScrollKit is no stranger to lifting UI
concepts other sites have pioneered: <http://codybrown.name/timeline/>)

~~~
rjknight
_OK. If you showed me an advertising poster you really liked, I could fire up
Illustrator and give you a decent replica in a couple of hours. Does that mean
you should hire me as your new ad agency?_

No, but if you just wrote Illustrator and there's nothing else like it on the
market, I might want to buy a copy.

~~~
giveitago
But then you've dramatically shifted from having advertising design done for
you to buying a highly technical tool that allows you to create illustrations.
If you are someone with no design or illustration experience, that isn't going
to work out so great for you.

------
rehashed
The story thats not being told is how those "hundreds of hours" spent building
"snow fall" included direction, videography, 3d and 2d modelling and
animation, photography, content-writing, design, coordination, and frontend
development.

Scrollkit took just one aspect of that (frontend development) and stated "The
NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an
hour."

Its outright dishonest, and devalues the great effort that others spent on it.
I can understand why they are pissed.

~~~
codybrown
This is Cody here from scroll kit.

You misunderstand how much time the Times spent making "Snow Fall." They spent
six months and of those tens of thousands of hours in those six months,
hundreds of it was spent hand coding the layout.

The experience involved in hand-coding the layout is painful and awkward and
can be improved dramatically. Getting those hundred hours down to an hour is
something we think everyone can get behind.

~~~
jacalata
What it sounds like is that many of those hours were spent editing, re-
arranging and designing the content, and you didn't account for any of that.
It feels like saying "it took Neal Stephenson hundreds of hours to arrange the
words for Reamde , and I've typed it out in six!"

------
jmduke
I'd argue that Scrollkit damaged their relationship with the NYT in order to
ameliorate their relationship with Silicon Valley.

It's hard to tell Scrollkit's business model from their splash page (like the
article says, the only copy is "we are looking for publishers with big stories
to tell."), but if I were to guess, the 'big fish' like NYT/WSJ/etc. are never
going to use scrollkit, at least in the short term: these are the publishers
with dedicated engineering teams.

------
codybrown
hello hn, this is cody from scroll kit. I want to respond to a few things.

1.) I had no plans to write a post about nytimes legal after their initial
email. I simply complied with their demand and wrote them that I had taken
down the video. Their next email, where they told me to remove all references
to the Times from our site was pretty absurd and thought they should be called
out for it. If you’re willing to take the risk, it’s a good idea for everyone
to call out a big company sending overreaching legal requests. I can only
imagine how many other startups don’t challenge their demands and are bullied
into complying.

2.) The biggest misunderstanding here seems to be that we're somehow
undervaluing the creative struggle, and the reporting/creation of assets, it
took to arrive at "Snow Fall." This doesn't make much sense to me, it's a
replica which by definition means the pieces are already there, we're just
coming to it with entirely different code.

A big point to make is that it didn't take the Times hundreds of hours to make
"Snow Fall", it took them _thousands of hours._ It's safe to say they spent,
at least, a hundred + hours on JUST the assemblage of their content onto the
page. It's that process that we have dedicated ourselves to improving. Which,
for a lot of news orgs who don't have the resources of the Times, makes it
possible for them to be able to experiment with these kinds of stories.

Another way of phrasing our tagline could have been something like:

We spent thousands of hours hand-coding scroll kit so you can make a replica
of “Snow Fall,” in one hour.

------
rossjudson
NY Times lawyer Samson's response _clearly_ indicates a complete lack of
understand of what scrollkit is/does. He thinks it's a toolkit for replicating
content, when it's a toolkit that _can be used_ to replicate _technique_.

Scrollkit used bad phrasing. What they should have said -- "NY Times spent
hundreds of hours building the groundbreaking Snow Fall article. With
Scrollkit they could have completed it in only a few hours. Here's proof! p.s.
NY Times Editors -- contact us and we'll be happy to get your next award-
winning article built faster and cheaper!"

~~~
danso
I think the NYT is overboard in saying that scrollkit can't make any
claims...but the takedown of the video seems legally justifiable.

Before you say "Fair use!" and "it's educational!"...consider this example:
What if I were to release a "How-to-Draw-Awesome-Cartoons" which was composed
completely of examples of me redrawing the most famous Calvin and Hobbes
strips? I'm not even physically copying Bill Watterson's assets, I'm redrawing
them and telling people, "Hey, this is how you do it!"

Would you argue that Bill Watterson (who, for a time, was pretty vigilant
about protecting the C&H brand from _any_ kind of merchandise, a la Garfield)
has no claim? I would argue that he _does_ , because the reason why my How-to-
Draw book is remotely interesting is because it exploits the appeal that
Watterson worked to create.

If I were to make this How-to_draw book using only characters I've conceived
myself, I might still be successful...but only if those characters have the
same appeal as Calvin and Hobbes...and, as you can agree, _that_ would be far
harder than the actual how-to-draw content.

So I can see why the NYT is peeved that scrollkit is showing off their service
by exploiting the goodwill and excellence that the NYT poured its resources
into. However, I don't think NYT legal has a right to say "Don't use our name
or compare yourself to us in any way". Scrollkit can make its own false claims
(but then, they may be sued by a different stakeholder)

------
danso
I'll start out and say that the NYT's legal department was off the mark
here...but they've been off-the-mark (i.e. heavy handed) in a lot of
incidents...as far as I've seen, the journalists and developers who were part
of Snow Fall didn't seem to give a shit, so maybe someone at NYT was like,
"Well, someone _do_ something".

So while NYT legal may be a bunch of blowhards, it's hard to say that they're
quixotic takedown effort has any actual effect on journalistic innovation.

There is something highly off-putting about how scrollkit has carried itself
in this. It's already been well pointed out that the "hundreds of hours" in
making Snow Fall did not involve hand-coding, and that the barrier for
storytellers to create "Snow Fall" like productions is _not_ putting together
the HTML/CSS, but actually making the content and doing the design work. And I
say that as someone who has made a living building HTML and CSS.

Because if the substantial work of building a Pulitzer Prize level feature
takes just an hour...then logic would seem to dictate that in about 5-10
hours, any given scrollkit user could create something quite epic (if not
Pulitzer worthy), and yet, browsing through scrollkit's few exsmples in their
Twitter feed, I don't see anything that comes close to delivering on the
impressive design or content that Snow Fall had. And I'm not belittling
them...that's not _their_ fault. "Snow Fall" productions are _hard_ , and the
HTML/CSS editor used to create them is almost entirely tangential to their
quality.

Do we really need to discuss the merits of scrollkit's purported claim, that
"templates" are holding content creators back? Templates exist because in
serious publishing businesses, there are not the resources to re-invent the
HTML wheel, and templates as defined by CMSes do very important things, like
represent content in a manageable, portable format. Anyone here who has
happily moved their blog to Jekyll/Octopress, I believe, would agree with me.
In any case, if we take scrollkit's philosophy to its logical conclusion, then
the days of Flash and bespoke UI/UX were the glory days of content. And I'm
being sincere here, some Flash apps/portfolio pages were _amazing_ and have
not yet been replicated at the HTML5 or even iOS level. And yet, Flash as a
canvas didn't quite work out...

The reason why I'm going off on a rant here is that, unmentioned in the OP, is
that scrollkit got $200,000 from the Knight Foundation in an initiative to
promote journalistic innovation in the long battle to making online journalism
viable and vibrant. (DocumentCloud, which most HNers might recognize as the
progenitor of Backbone.js, Underscore.js, and several other useful Jeremy-
Ashkenas-inventions, was also a Knight-funded initiative.) So there's
something a little galling about how scrollkit, which was given 6 figures to
aid journalism, is instead raising publicity for itself by dumbing down the
already muddled discussion on content management.

And also, its exploitation of the emotions and confusion in the continuing
debate over intellectual copyright is also a little annoying.

~~~
rjknight
I disagree. There is a set of great storytellers, and a set of great
developers, but these rarely overlap; an individual who embodies both
attributes is vanishingly rare, and only elite organisations (e.g. the NYT)
can afford to employ teams containing a critical mass of both talents. As a
result, there are going to be lots of great storytellers out there who are
"technologically constrained"; the one thing preventing them from creating the
next Snow Fall _is_ the fact that they simply don't know how to work with the
technology necessary to do so, and nor does anyone they work with.

You might argue that these great storytellers could tell their stories
_without_ recourse to new technology, and you'd be right. But the same would
apply to any new technology at any point in time. What Scrollkit is doing is
what software developers have _always_ done: made it possible for non-
developers to do stuff that, previously, only those with direct access to
talented developers could do.

~~~
danso
I don't want to get in to a discussion of scrollkit's technical merits, so
I'll concede for their sake that their current product is a technical marvel
beyond what I could ever conceive.

That said, here is the key problem that scrollkit runs into: Content
management. I never saw the Snow-Fall-reproduction video, but I'm assuming it
involved cutting-pasting wide swaths of the _final_ product into its editor.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend that scrollkit's replica was pixel
perfect.

OK, but here's the part that scrollkit does not solve at all: how does their
tool manage the actual story-creation-editing process? Most writers do their
writing in a text editor (Microsoft Word), then paste it into their CMS
(Wordpress for example). Multimedia developers, ultimately, do kind of the
same thing...build their thing (video, JS graphic, whatever) in their dev
environment, and place its representation into the CMS.

OK, that's easy enough...until the writer decides that they want to remove a
paragraph, switch others around, etc. etc...In a system like scrollkit's,
which as far as I can tell, is a single page template editor...the writer
cannot simply just select-all-delete-copy-paste because, well, that would
delete the multimedia artist's work.

That's just one logistical hurdle, and probably the most minor one. But when
you try to edit this piece with several people, you are going to run into
major, show-stopping, hair pulling issues. This is hard to explain to
developers, because we have such things as Git, automated testing, IDE's
etc....imagine working on a codebase without any of those things. That is the
world of virtually most content producers...which is why we have CMS and
templates in the first place.

This is all descending into pedantics...but that's precisely the issue.
Content producers, if you give them a bespoke tool to create something
"beautiful", will happily work 24/7 doing such things as manually kerning
text, fixing paragraph widows, hand inserting links over and over, etc.
etc....because they don't know of any better way to do things. They don't
realize how much time of their time they're wasting into reinventing the
wheel. And when a production involves multiple people with varying objectives,
you will have a serious clusterfuck.

And we haven't even gotten to the part of how these bespoke feature creations
are linked (not just hyperlinked) into the creator's site.

So that's my issue. scrollkit solves (if it works completely as advertised)
one of the least important problems in the online publishing workflow. Which
is not to say that it's useless, but the problem is that it, IMHO, is doing a
massive disservice by telling people that _this_ , the problem they focus on,
is the real barrier to creating compelling journalistic features.

------
onemorepassword
On the one hand, I agree with the notion that "working with the established
market" is a better business strategy.

On the other hand, kissing up to reactionary incumbent market forces and even
compromising your product to appease them leaves me feeling really, really
dirty.

It's a pragmatic choice. If you can afford to and still come out on top, I
would prefer kicking their asses over kissing them.

------
mishaz
nice post

