Soylent--
I haven't contacted anyone else. It would be too difficult to click through, locate addresses and so on. I have posted at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12056889/framebuster-with-exceptions . That is mostly a question about the coding of how to stop this-- because even if I get the current person to stop (and I will) that can't prevent someone else from doing a similar thing in the future. And I've blogged about the issue but blog isn't a blawg nor a blog about IT. So the audience isn't necessarily fascinated by this issue.
Oddly, posting the question at stackoverflow could possibly result in questions that cause a number if IT people to be more aware of what is happening. So, in addition to learning how to bust the frame, I might learn a range of opinions about the practice of "frame-busting-busting".
The fact is: Because the monetary value of what is being copied is low, and will be extremely low if businesses who might copy material in this way can sell subscriptions to readers to read it in another format. The analogy is this:
Suppose 800,000 5th graders write haikus that kids posted on their school web sites. None think their individual haikus are sufficiently valuable to register a copyright for the haiku. A book publisher thinks that collectively the haikus could be marketable and creates a collection of 800,000 haikus without contacting any of the 5th graders. Will any of the 5th graders (or their parents) want to get embroiled in a copyright suit? First: some might like their kids poem in the book. Some might dislike it intensely. Of the latter, most will not want to hire an attorney and so on.
You can start to tweak the example to have the book contain 790,000 haikus by 5th graders, one poem by a prominent individual, and 1,000 with popularity between that of your garden variety 5th graders haiku and the prominent individual. Which of these people will mind? Does the fact that the 790,000 don't mind affect the rights of the prominent individual? How about the 1,000? And of the 1,000, what threshold do they have to reach to make it worthwhile to copy?
I suspect very few content owners would think it was worth while to worry about this sort of thing when it is just taking off. Almost no one is going to want to sue-- even if they are bothered by the practice. It's not a matter many are going to wish to devote their lives too. (Moreover, in many cases the entity copying may well be judgement proof and will remain so unless their idea takes off and turns out to be something that results in large monetary gains.)
FWIW: On the "would someone win a copyright case", I've been reading various things including this:
http://www.linksandlaw.com/decisions-148-google-cache.htmWe've all read this: It's the story of the copyright troll who wanted to sue google for copying his short stories. He lost.
In some ways, newsblur's caching shares a similarity with googles. They copy the full html of a page.
and noting the important differences between newsblur caching and google caching. To my mind, there are many many differences between the two cases. (Example: Google's bot visits robots.txt. Google won't cache if you include 'noarchive'. Google searches return link to cache in a way that requires user to click several times-- so it's not set up as a substitute. Blah. Blah. Blah... Of course, it is also the case that I did not post my material with the intention of luring newsblur to my site knowing they would copy and so on. I didn't even know they existed until recently! )
Matt--
This isn't plagiarism because person creating the "feed reader" makes no claim he wrote the stuff. He claims to have a new innovation in "feed reader". As far as I can tell, the main innovations of the 'feed reader' consists of treating 'not-feed' content as feed, copying that non-feed material and display it and framing other content (possibly using a framebuster to make it difficult for someone to bust out of the frame.) Neither practice is plagiarism.
Mind you: I object to both practices. I think 'feed readers' should read
feeds. With respect to any copying, I think they should limit themselves to content in the
feeds. (This is not a statement of law. It's just that I think a "feed reader" should read
feeds. )
I have other issues too. I think 3rd party feedreader displays should require some access control. That is: if you use google's feedburner, you have to enter a password before reading the feed. This is not the case here:
http://newsblur.com/reader/page/1100897 which you can access by merely clicking.
But what the google precedent does mean is that a law suit could end up sucking ones life up. One would need to find lawyers to explain precisely why the google copying and the newsblur copying are different. (I suspect if one were willing to take this to higher courts, they would ultimately see it's different. But.... is it worth the risk? For what? Besides, as I said, I suspect that for now, the start up venture run by a guy who quit his job and appears to have a small bit of funding form an incubator is effectively "judgement proof". A judge might aware you attorney's feeds, but you can't get money out of a stone. )
It's unlikely very many people are going to wish to get involved in the time and energy sink. It's unlikely any contingency attorney is going to take the case. And so on.
FWIW: I am certain that in the end I will get the specific entity now displaying copies to copying to comply.
But because I am now aware that someone has coded this, I want to have my pages written in a way that interferes with it's operation. I do think many people who would not want to be involved in a legal battle would be happy to learn of a "framebuster-buster-buster" and code it. It's merely a matter of entering the code.
After that, I would leave it to legal eagles like Oscar or others to identify what laws are violated if a business copies and/or frames material and uses a "framebuster-buster-buster-buster-buster-buster" to ensure the material displays in a way the copyright owner does not wish it to display.
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