

A Business Insider retrospective - jakewalker
http://www.marco.org/2011/09/23/business-insider

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brianwillis
Have any of you seen any benefit from using a Creative Commons license for
your writing? Has anyone seen anything positive come out of it?

The licenses seem to appeal to our more idealistic side, valuing openness,
transparency, and all that great free-as-in-speech stuff that so many hackers
love. But if the end result is just a bunch of books and websites where the
publisher doesn't have to pay the author then Creative Commons licensing is a
pointless exercise.

~~~
markmccraw
Given the permissiveness of fair use laws and the low probability that random
bloggers will engage in costly and lengthy lawsuits, I imagine that CC license
or not, Marco's stuff would get scraped.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
Bzzzzz. Wrong.

7 words, problem solved.

Copyright (c) 2011 Marco Arment. All Rights Reserved.

If that doesn't do it, a simple lawyer letter and public shaming certainly
will. At least for sites with significant reach and assets/reputation worth
losing.

~~~
markmccraw
If you go through the posts in the google link from marco's post, many of the
scraped summaries are <2 paragraphs, (such as
[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-02/strategy/3001...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-02/strategy/30017428_1_programming-
language-marco)) and that would continue to happen regardless of licensure.

The HuffPo which has both significant reach and assets, takes/quotes liberally
from other writers and has had mixed responses to public shamings. See
<http://gawker.com/5820099> . I'm sure other aggregators do similar stuff,
Newser comes to mind, although they tend to rewrite and condense, which may be
better or worse, depending on the original writer's objectives.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
If they write a story that says 'RockyMcNuts says' and a couple of paragraphs
of fair use, I'm cool with it.

If they put a whole blog post up on their site with my byline and a linkbait
headline, they're getting a lawyer letter, and a lawsuit after about 72 hours.

If you have a license that says "you may reproduce, reblog, and modify my
content, but you must provide proper attribution," then that's what people are
going to do.

And if you have a license that says they can't, then you can take the steps to
stop them. Maybe it's a pain to have to ask people to respect your rights, but
with some people that's what you have to do.

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yannick
I'm glad Marco wrote this piece. I've been a reader of BI but had no idea they
employed these kinds of practices.

It's incredibly misleading, frankly unethical, to post content like that and
pretend like they're publishing with the author's consent. How disappointing.

~~~
antr
I feel the same way. That is why after reading Marco's piece I (tried)
unsubscribed from BI's daily Newsletter. "Shockingly" enough, when you click
on Business Insider's unsubscribe link they send you to an inexistent
website/404. Shameful

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zeedotme
oh the irony: [http://www.businessinsider.com/a-business-insider-
retrospect...](http://www.businessinsider.com/a-business-insider-
retrospective-marco-armentmarcoorg-2011-9)

~~~
j_col
Oh wow, that's hilarious!

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stevenp
Don't miss the tiny footnote at the bottom that mentions that they repeatedly
spelled his name "Macro" and his website "Macro.org" in correspondence. These
BI guys are truly a class act.

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resnamen
I really resent the degree to which companies like AOL, Gawker, and BI punch
up their headlines for maximum effect. It's exhausting to skim these headlines
in my Google Reader feed, because the emotions they invoke diminish my mental
signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.

~~~
ethank
A tip: unsub from BI's twitter feed and RSS. You'll still get the news, and
you'll feel better about it.

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MatthewPhillips
It seems that Marco's problem isn't that people are profiting off of his
content; if that were the case he'd be using a more restrictive CC license.
Rather his problem is that he doesn't like BI's design (nor do I, all of his
complaints are spot-on). I wonder how he feels about all of the iPad apps that
profit on Wikipedia content. Many of those are well designed; I bet he doesn't
have a problem with those.

I think Marco just needs to choose a different CC license. Personally I
wouldn't allow BI or HuffPo to do this type of thing to my content.

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kenjackson
Anyone else shocked to see HN providing 6x the hits over TechMeme?

~~~
nextparadigms
No. Techmeme has become very biased lately in what kind of stories they put at
the top, and sometimes their top stories stay there even for 24 hours, which
gives little reason to come back to the site too often. It feels much slower
than HN in the news they bring in.

~~~
kenjackson
I have to admit I haven't noticed the bias. What is it?

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nigham
Looks like there's not enough news these days, so tech journalists dissing
other tech journalists (Arrington-Swisher or Marco-BI) is what keeps the news
sites going.

