August 3, 2000

12:04 PM

The flip side of the DejaNews linking fracas.Here's a story about YellowBrix (love that name) who supply a news feed with appropriate words pre-hotlinked to your products. This isn't exactly the same problem as the Deja thing for a couple reasons, but the original newswriters *still* didn't know their words would be linked. It's not as bad... but is it acceptable?
posted by baylink (4 comments total)

To clarify; this is a syndication news items feed, designed for inclusion on a home page; you select appropriate topics, and they give you the articles, with hotlinks to your catalog.

It's actually sorta neat... as long as their agreements with the news *creators* explicitly allow the behavior.

Of course, good, fresh content is important to a commercial site, to entice repeat traffic; one of my customers, SailNet, does a fairly good job of this, but they're using original content.

Let's just hope these people don't decide to patent the *idea*...
posted by baylink at 12:10 PM on August 3, 2000

It's probably not explicitly forbidden in the license agreement to the content to not link to things. Although that could be considered modifying the content, which could be considered creating a derivitive work, which probably is forbidden.

But what's the big deal? Flyswat has been doing this to the Web at large for a long time.
posted by endquote at 2:11 PM on August 3, 2000

For example, a news story about Michael Jordan playing golf at Pebble Beach might appear along with a link to buy Calloway golf clubs.

I think the important bit here is "along with".. They aren't necessarily modifying the text of the news feed, as much as they're "adding value" to the information.
posted by cCranium at 4:38 PM on August 3, 2000

You know, I'd missed the phrasing there. Good point.
posted by baylink at 2:56 PM on August 4, 2000