Let me kick this of by saying that I'm a big fan of The Verge, which has quickly become a top tech site for many. I don't always agree with what's written there (I don't always agree with what's written anywhere!), but it tends to regularly produce high quality work. The Verge is at its best with its long form pieces that combine well-written narrative with great design and layout. A recent example of this was with its excellent history of the American arcade. That story got passed around a bunch -- I know I had it sent to me at least half a dozen times. It's a wonderful story if you haven't read it.

It was then interesting to see The Verge's Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Topolsky, take to Twitter to demand that Huffington Post remove a snippet and link to that story.

Formal public request. @bbosker and @huffingtonpost, please remove the content you've scraped from us. huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/21/the… Seriously.

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

You can see the Huffington Post version here. I'm having a very hard time figuring out what Topolsky is complaining about. The HuffPo piece quotes the first paragraph and the first paragraph only and then has a prominent link to the full story at The Verge. The original Verge article is 47 paragraphs long -- plus amazing graphics, design and video. So... I'm sort of at a loss as to how anyone might think that the HuffPo snippet and link takes away from the original. HuffPo's Bianca Bosker shot back something along those lines, noting that it was just a short snippet and drove traffic to The Verge:

@joshuatopolsky that was a story we linked out to on huffpost to drive traffic/readers to The Verge, which it looks like it did 1/2

— Bianca Bosker (@bbosker) January 23, 2013

In response Topolsky explained more that his problem with it was that it hurt The Verge's SEO (search engine optimization) on such stories.

What's most egregious about this @huffingtonpost scrape is its theft of our SEO on title and text. Google "death of the american arcade"

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) January 23, 2013

But I'm at a complete loss as to how that's "egregious" on the part of the Huffington Post. It would appear that this is solely an issue with the way Google's ranking system works. I've long thought that this was a weakness of Google. We've had many sites that scrape our content in its entirety -- and, as we've noted countless times -- we're absolutely fine with that. But I am often surprised at how often we see other sources listed above ours in Google. But that's always struck us as a problem with Google (and with how Google views us), rather than anything worth pinning the blame on the sites that copied our content.

In the meantime, though, having discovered in the past just how much traffic a link from HuffPo can drive, we'd like to offer up Techdirt as a site that HuffPo can freely link to whenever they want. We won't complain to them. Though, if Google ranks them higher in search, we might complain to Google...

Rupert Murdoch and the top execs at News Corp. keep insisting that sites that aggregate content from elsewhere on the internet are "stealing." Of course, as we've noted, News Corp. has an awful lot of sites that rely on aggregating content from elsewhere -- so apparently it's only legit when Murdoch does it himself. Murdoch, of course, has also famously claimed that fair use is a doctrine that courts would "bar altogether" if challenged in the courts -- but at the same time, his own company regularly claims "fair use" to defend its own actions.

That's generally called hypocrisy.

And it keeps getting worse. The latest is that TorrentFreak has noticed that Fox News recently put together a photo gallery of the Icelandic volcano eruption, and used some photos from Flickr -- even though the photos were limited were covered by copyright and not free for others to use without permission and/or license. The photographer in question has tried contacting Fox News and has so far been totally ignored. And yet Murdoch just mentions in passing -- incorrectly -- that he thinks Google News "steals" his content by sending him traffic and its front page news...

Over at Eric Goldman's blog, Israeli lawyer Yoram Lichtenstein has written up a discussion of two Israeli rulings concerning copyright on advertisements (Lichtenstein was a lawyer in the second case, so he's not a neutral observer -- though his writeup appears to be quite neutral, much more so than I would have expected). The first case, from a few years ago, involved a website that collected job ads from various sources, including various local newspapers. The newspapers sued, but the court noted that it wasn't clear that the job ads were even covered by copyright -- and even if they were, the copyright wouldn't be held by the newspapers who were suing, but by the advertisers.

The more recent case delved deeper into that original question of whether or not ads are copyrightable. It involved a site, called Hug, that aggregated "a directory of leisure activities and courses" from a variety of different sources. Nine advertisers apparently sued the company for copyright infringement. Beyond wondering why advertisers would ever get pissed off at a site that would advertise them for free, and help drive more business to them, Hug also noted that it provided a lot more information than just what it pulled from elsewhere. But the key question was whether or not the information in the ads was covered by copyright at all.

Thankfully, the court said no (for the most part):

The court decided that the course listings lacked originality (or creativity); usually they include only "dry" data. The court emphasized that although previous decisions did not demand very much creativity, ads still need at least some creative value to become copyrightable. Thus, "the advertiser holds no rights in the content of the advertisement, in a manner that enables to prevent other billboards and index sites to publish the ad without her authorization" (my translation).

The court used, as an example to explain why the course descriptions were not copyrightable, a course description for sculpting sugar-figures for cakes. The text was (my translation, again): "Figure sculpturing workshop, consisting of two 5 hours encounters, each. The workshop emphasizes female and male proportions. First meeting shall include preparing the cake-base, and a winter male figure with proper clothes and accessories. On the second encounter we will prepare the female summer spouse, accessorized as well. At the conclusion of this fun activity each shall have the original couple s/he created."

This seems mostly in line with US copyright law that does require some level of creativity above basic facts to qualify for copyright. At the very least, it's good to see yet another smart copyright ruling in Israel.