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.
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.