Chris Lanier's Blog

Thats crazy but I could kind of see it comming. I have been using the diblert RSS feed for a while but I can see that being closed soon.
It bypasses the sites adds and just pulls out the content and I can see that upsetting some one.
RSS could come under pressure from content providers, but if you using a feed directly from the providers site I can't see any problems.

RSS will keep getting more popular and companys like United Media will jump on the bandwagon in time.
Its very fustrating to see invoative software being shut down.

So for now I will keep reading Dilbert on my MCE box via my RSS reader

Ian

Oh man.. this whole IP thing is just getting out of hand.

Talking about stupid things around IP. Did you see the thing with the copyrighted PUBLIC artwork in Chicago? Apperantly it is not allowed to take any picture of a public artwork. Jeez.. so now we have to be afraid of getting sued when taking a couple of pics in the park. Is this really the kind of society we want!?

http://newurbanist.blogspot.com/2005/01/copyrighting-of-public-space.html

"Comics for Media Center" is a plugin for Microsoft's Media Center PC that pulls the RSS feed of United Syndicate's comics (Dilbert, etc) and displays them in the version of Internet Explorer that comes with a Media Center PC. In a moment of mindboggling, unreasonable blinkered pig-ignorance, United Syndicate has decided that this somehow constitutes an infringement of its copyright -- that's right, reading their RSS feed, using Internet Explorer, violates their copyright. They've nastygrammed the creator of Comics for Media Center and he's shut his project down. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)...

Apparently the collective IQ of the nice folks at United Media is hovering somewhere around room temperature. Sheesh.

Life in Kjell

RSS is shallow-linking by definition. If this story is accurate, then the publisher has a misunderstanding of the intended and conventional use of RSS.

Unfortunately, it seems like they're compounding this ignorance by attempting to leverage a tricky IP claim. Ah well, the Web is a big place.. I guess you see it all if you're here long enough :)

Sounds like United Media should be going after whomever is offering the RSS feed, not those that are using the feed (although the end effect would be the same).

United Media (and others) are going to have to find a better business model - screen scraping is just too easy. Playboy supposedly has a service that for $12/year you get a new Playmate image every day; I'm sure United Media could sell a "unlimited personal use" license for a similar amount.

It does appear that United Media is making some of it's IP available electronically for a fee: https://members.comics.com/members/registration/showEvaluateEmail.do. For $11.95/year you get "Comics by E-mail" and "Your own Comics Area".

I'm not sure how either of these work with MCE as-is, but assuming the answer is "poorly" a MCE "enabler" for either of these services might not encounter as much resistence.

It seems to me that the service was violating United Media's copyright. The RSS feed upon which it was based clearly was. While I think United Media just made people angry, they have a right to require to view their website for the content they own. They can only make a profit of making the comics available on-line if they sell ads, which you don't see if you don't look at the website.

As mentioned elsewhere (http://pintday.org/kjell/archive/2005/02/15/53), Cory should understand copyright law better than that.

Had it been United Syndicates’ RSS feed, he would have a point. As it is, it’s a third-party, scraped feed, that extracts the URLs from the relevant website. The RSS itself is then a derived work. Both the scrape-er, and the user of the scaped feed are in violation of the cartoonist’s (or Syndicate's) copyright.

Now, the question is: Who should of United Media gone after? The person/site/group hosting the feed that would violate the terms, or a third party developer who is making a free application using that feed?

Nothing new under the sun.

This is basically the exact same deal as back in 1996 when Dan Wallach set up his Dilbert hack.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/dilbert/

Now it's RSS, but it is fundamentally the exact same thing: these images all have a Unique Resource Locator, meaning you can request (and be served) them directly, yet somehow the media syndicates claim you can't do that.

They won the first round. "RSS" is so nice and buzz-wordy, maybe the next round will be more of a fight?

United Media should use this as an opportunity to be on the "cutting edge": add a RSS feed to their existing $11.95/year service (noted above).

Some time ago as a way to learn some .NET stuff, I set up my own personal use RSS feed for a few of these comics by screen scrapping. Every since I got my new laptop, I just haven't taken the time to set this back up again. If United Media offered an RSS feed, I'd probably buy a subscription.

Heck, I wonder what their response would be to someone to created an RSS feed by scrapping "Your own Comics Area" for each individual user. I.e., this RSS feed wouldn't work w/o supplying the United Media login credentials. I suspect they still want you to see the advertising, and claim that $11.95/yr subscription only covers a portion of the total costs.

Somewhat of the same situation with United Media and Livejournal.com last year. Several LJ'rs had RSS feeds through LJ's friend list feature that each user has, and United Media told them to stop allowing the feeds. We found our comic feeds through LJ shut down one day without notice. I would still like to see where it was discussed in one of the LJ news communities with mods or with Brad Fitz himself (pretty much everything is talked about openly on LJ). Though, several people figured out how to get around it, and we're seeing our comics from "other" feeds.

I already pay for the daily newspaper, why should I have to pay to see their comics a second time?

One argument for why you must "pay again" is that the on-line image is a "derivative work" (see http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html). The on-line GIF probably isn't the same used in the newspaper production (for example, the resolution might be lower). And in any case, a printed page of newsprint is clearly different from pixels on a monitor.

Note that some magazines sites have "subscriber only" sections where you can do things like search digital archieves once you've provided a code off your mailing label.

I read dilbert (and other) cartoons from Bloglines (free) service. In their "recommendations" section Bloglines suggested rss feeds of comics that come from "Tapestry" project (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/).

Userfriendly, another comic that Tapestry was providing a feed to, discovered this and did a hack that replaced the daily strip with an image saying something like "please go and read the FREE comic on our website, it's the only way you can support us". However several weeks later Userfriendly started providing a RSS feed of their own, containing their news and links (no images) to daily strips.

People want the RSS!

Recent events (Michael Bates vs. The Tulsa World, The Daily Kos vs. Roll Call) have brought Fair Use to the attention of bloggers everywhere. As...

why doesn't see United Media sees this as a CHANCE to get more customers viewing their comics? now they have the idea; i would not wonder if there is a "Comics for MCE" directly from United Media...
they could have worked together with Danee (who made a good job on this plugin!) and included ads and logos in the plugin rather than just permitting everything.

perhaps this will get better hen mce has more users all over the world.

scendix