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Bad Web Experience: This Article Removed Because Of Copyright?
from the wake-up,-get-with-the-times dept
I've really never understood news sites that "remove" old articles. Talk about breaking the way the web works. At Techdirt, we receive a good bit of traffic to our archives, and that's valuable traffic. Not only do such visitors actually tend to be more likely to click on advertisements (regular readers have ad blindness), but they're like fresh "leads" to get regular new readers. And yet, so many publications ruin all that traffic by sending them nowhere. The Associated Press is particularly bad about this, forcing partners who pay the AP for content to remove it after a month. In those cases, visitors are just given an error page. But here's a bizarre one. Jake points us to a story at The Guardian's website, where the headline and the little blurb, along with an image are left in place, but in place of the actual article is just a message saying, This article has been removed as our copyright has expired. How annoying is that? Why do publications even agree to post stories that they will then be forced to pull down in the future? It completely kills the web experience. It breaks any links to the article. It kills off any discussion about the article. It's exactly how not to do things on the web, and it shows, yet again, what the traditional newspapers -- even one that seems to "get it" as much as The Guardian does -- still has a long way to go in adapting to the online world.
21 Comments | Leave a Comment..
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Also, I don't understand. How could The Guardian's copyright expire on its own content? Or is that part just rubbish?
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I think I read this somewhere...
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Re: I think I read this somewhere...
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Hmmm
Maybe the guardian is just preparing for 1984.
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Intentional Irony?
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Copyright reverted to author?
I know this can happen in the book world if a project doesn't go ahead or goes out of print (I've seen that from the author's side in getting the copyright back for the manuscript on a project that was never published), so it doesn't surprise to hear it happens in other forms of publishing as well.
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years ago, after tiring of dead links in my bookmark list, I started just copying and saving the entire article so that I would be sure it would still be there when i came back to it months later. Text takes up almost no space at all, so an archive of hundreds, or even thousands of articles takes up about as much space as a single image or song.
Think of how people used to respond to the news: an interesting article meant you would pull out the scissors, fold it up and put it in your pocket, so you would have it ready to pull out when the topic came up in conversation. And that was fine.
The digital analogue to that would be copying and pasting the article into a forum or message board to open up the discussion. But you can't do that now; that's infringement!
I thought news was supposed to be shared with others...
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Number of sites that delete old articels, of which I have become a regular or casual reader: 0
Number of sites that don't delete old articels, of which I have become a regular or casual reader: Too many to count.
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I was not surprised to find:
http://www.cdwow.com/books/Katharine-Hibbert-Free/dp/pc/10768947
Which means that what was in the Guardian was potentially a sample of the book or something similar, with a limited use license. The photo was taken by David Levene, who appears to be a paper staff photographer, thus explains why the image is still there (they own the rights to it).
I would say the best answer to the question could be found by contact Ms Hibbert.
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If Ms Hibbert doesn't want the free publicity, fine, let her drown in obscurity. I certainly have no reason to ever learn about her now (not that I didn't before, none of my friends have suggested anything by her to me).
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Re: Intentional Irony?
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This is what my mother used to call, "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
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Good
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