The Googleplex Blog

Should Craigslist Be Treated Like a Newspaper?

Here in the Bay area we use Craigslist for everything: finding jobs, apartments, and caregivers for our kids, buying and selling furniture and cars, and meeting that special someone. Craigslist is essentially a community site for San Francisco (and other areas). An ad can be flagged by other users as offensive, and removed by the Craigslist powers-that-be for violating the terms of use that they’ve established, but for the most part you can post any advertisement you want.

In effect, this means that ads can be clearer about what is really on an advertiser’s mind (even if this offends some people). For example, if you want (or don’t want) a gay roommate or a roommate from Texas, you can say so plainly.

Now a Chicago fair housing group has sued Craigslist for allegedly publishing discriminatory advertisements in violation of Federal Fair Housing legislation.

It’s pretty clear that some of the backing for this lawsuit comes from newspapers, whose classified revenues have been decimated by Craigslist. With the legal system you never know, but for the most part websites have been treated as distributors rather than publishers, meaning Craigslist cannot be held responsible for the “community” content placed on its site (just as a newsstand owner, or library, is not responsible for the content of a newspaper). This view is supported by some of the provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. (Did Orwell name this statute?) These provisions so far have stood up in court.

This conflict cuts to the heart of the communal nature of the web. Obviously, Craiglist is not the only company pleading that it doesn’t have responsibility. To a great extent, eBay leaves policing up to its community. Even Google abjures most responsibility for AdWords content. (Just try complaining to Google that you clicked on a scam link in a Google ad.)

I believe that Craigslist, eBay, and even Google couldn’t exist if they had to take legal responsibility for the content they present in the same way as “brick and mortar” publications do. Since I want my Craigslist, eBay, and Google, I don’t want this to happen. And I don’t think it will anytime soon. The specific lawsuit against Craigslist is a vain attempt to hold back the tide. Even King Canute couldn’t do that!

Copyright in the Era of Flickr and Google

I need to make some preliminary explanations before I get to the heart of this story.

(1) This story is about digital photography -- but the general issues it raises apply equally well to almost any kind of intellectual property that can be represented digitally--meaning music, video, software programs, and more.

(2) I am an active and enthusiastic member of the flickr community. I use my flickr photostream to display my photographs to other flickr members, and to power the image management behind my Photoblog 2.0.

Within the flickr application, you can assign different access permissions to your photographs (essentially, available to the public, only to friends, or only to family). But in order for anyone to view your photos, and in order to use them in my own blog, access has to be set to public. This means that anyone can display my photos on the web, whether or not I've given them permission to do so.

(3) I've changed the name and identifying details of the person using photos from flickr without permission (which is what this story is about). For two reasons: it wouldn't be fair to identify the person (they didn't know I'd blog about it) and I'd also like to pursue my flickr addiction without personal acrimony.

(4) A flickr badge is a group of pictures from flickr that can be displayed on your own website. Flickr generates the code for you, using either HTML or Flash. The pictures must be marked for public access, and can be based around the work of everybody on flickr, a single flickr photographer's set, a Flickr group pool, or using tags (to name the most common way badges are generated). Photos can be set to be random or sequential. This page shows a Flash badge using my photos.

Got all that? OK. Here goes.

I am a member of a variety of group pools on flickr. In a group pool, photographers with interests in common all submit their photos, creating a kind of library.

Recently, I noticed on a fairly prominent blog a flickr badge consisting of random photos from one of the group pools I belong to. The blog author is the flickr administrator of this group pool. I will call him X (and the group in question Y).

I wrote X:

I'm writing to express a little concern about the flickr badge from the Y Group that is displayed on your blog. I assume that you are showing a random selection of photos from the group. While most people would be glad and flattered to have you display their photos (I certainly would), some of the photos in the Y Group are "all rights reserved" (mine, for example - which I accompany with a copyright notice).

So I think as a matter of form and respect, you need to ask permission. Perhaps this could be accomplished by starting a discussion thread on the group (and asking if anyone objects) so it wouldn't be a logistical nightmare. Or, as an opt-in mechansim, you could designate a unique tag for people to use if they want to be included in your display - and create your badge using the tag.

I really don't mean to be a pill here, but I think photo rights are quite important...

X responded as follows:

It took me a while to figure out how I was going to respond to your comments. As a professional photographer and designer I make a living selling my work ... [and] I share your concern over proper use and photographers rights. Having been a long time member of Flickr ... (not to mention many personal sites showing my work) I've seen my work stolen and passed off by others as their own work many times. So many times, in fact, that I do not put the majority of my photos ... on the web. If you value your work, and it sounds like you do, then I don't believe Flickr is the place for you to showcase it properly.

Flickr holds no discretion in who is able to view and use photos posted to groups. This is evident through the site flickrlicio.us which routinely republishes copyrighted material on their site without permission. The Flickr Badge which I (and countless others) use allows you to sample photos from a group or from everyone regardless of copyright status.

Out of respect for your wishes I have changed it to show only my photos I have posted on Flickr. I have, on file, permission from all but a few of the members of the Y Group allowing me to use their photos. For this reason I did not perceive there being a problem. For that I apologize. It was not my intent to offend you.

If the situation with the Flickr Badge continues to be a problem for you I urge you, in my official capacity as admin of the Y Group, to pursue this matter with Flickr (Yahoo!). You also might consider marking your photos as "private only available to family and friends" and setting your download permissions similarly so they are not abused.

Have a nice evening.

I wrote back:

Thank you for your email. I, too, have given your email quite a bit of thought. Where I come out is that I think you missed the point of my original email.

I was not asking you to remove the Y group badge from your site. In fact, I think the variety of photos from the group enhances your site, and that group members would be pleased to have their pictures shown in a badge on your site.

I was asking you to get appropriate permissions, which should not be a hard thing to do (you say that you already have these for most members). For one, I would be happy to extend permission for my photos.

My further suggestion was that you add a discussion thread to the group so that members (and potential members) would know the use you were making of the photos.

I also noted that you could use a special tag to generate a badge, which would allow people to opt-in to your badge display. (A private group by invitation would be yet another possibility.)

The fact that others make use of copyrighted materials without getting permission that you mention doesn't seem very relevant to me. As a general principle, if someone else does something wrong, this doesn't make it right for us to do it. The fact that you are a professional photographer (which I did not realize) should make you even more careful about rights issues.

Regarding your more general comments about flickr and the use I make of it, I am a very enthusiastic member of the flickr community, although I understand some of the drawbacks of widespread image dissemination that you mention. I'd be happy to discuss my uses of flickr, why I do so, and my strategies for dealing with these matters in another email if you'd like.

It's important to me that our discussion not turn acrimonious. As I indicated, I am a reader and fan of your Y blog (and have sent traffic to it via links on my sites). I also like the Y group on flickr. So I think you took my comments the wrong way -- I was suggesting a minor procedural fix to what you were doing, not scrapping the whole thing.

All this raises alot of interesting issues--and they don't have very much to do with flickr. The truth is that it is easy to find images on the web, for example using Google Images.

One way or the other anything you can find and view on the web, you can also copy and use for your own purposes. The only real limitation is that photos displayed on the web are not suitable for high quality reproduction.

Of course, having the ability to do something neither confers the legal right to do so nor makes it OK to do it. I own the rights to my photos, and nobody should be displaying them without my permission (which, by the way, I'm usually pretty happy to give).

Ultimately, there is an inherent conflict between intellectual property lockdown--which means no one gets to see your work--and the desire for dissemination that all intellectual property owners have for practical and emotional reasons. Your intellectal property is only safe if no one sees it, but photos that no one sees do not get appreciated in the marketplace (or otherwise).

By the way, the flickrlicio.us site that X mentions features the "Babes of Flickr"--and is a great deal of fun if you are into this kind of thing.

Anywhere Computing with Laptops

I'm very pleased to note that after a bit of delay Anywhere Computing with Laptops: Making Mobile Easier has been published by Que.

My collaborators Phyllis Davis and Chris Hopper deserve much of the credit for its virtues.

To some degree, seeing this book with real pleasure - and forgetting the work that went into it - is the inspiration for my entry The Emotional Cycle of Writing a Book.

I think Anywhere Computing will be genuinely useful to anyone who is getting started with a wireless laptop, wants to improve their wireless security, or needs to configure or administer a SOHO Wi-Fi network. Check it out on Amazon!

Current Cites cites

The April issue of Current Cites has a write-up of Building Research Tools with Google for Dummies. This is a publication with short reviews of information technology resources primarily aimed at reference librarians. The review, by Shirl Kennedy (a/k/a Uncaged Librarian), digresses into a discussion of whether readers of "Sex for Dummies" also need "Parenting for Dummies," but otherwise seems fair enough. Here it is:

Davis, Harold. Building Research Tools With Google for Dummies Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2005.(http://www.braintique.com/research/). - A review copy of this book showed up in the mail, and when I opened the package, I mentally rolled my eyes. "Dummies" books...hmmm... My customers love them, some of them really are excellent, but others...well, take "Sex for Dummies," for example. It's by "Dr. Ruth" and the title alone is kind of scary. What's even more frightening is the subsequent volume you may need, "Parenting for Dummies." But I digress. This particular book, Building Research Tools With Google for Dummies, is badly misnamed. Yeah, it does cover using the Google APIs to build your own applications -- something that most definitely is not for dummies -- but there is ever so much more information in here, a fair amount of which has nothing to do with Google. For example. there's an entire chapter on competitive intelligence. Another chapter, entitled "Researching Like a Pro," pays homage to the reference interview and actually explains "Why Google Is Not the Web." (This is something I try to explain to at least a couple of my customers every week.) Yet another chapter tells you how to package and deliver your research results. The author -- a technology consultant and programmer with a law degree (?!) -- does a good job of delving into the nuts and bolts of Google; while most information professionals know their way around Google's advanced features, this provides a refresher on some useful things you or I may have overlooked. The book also touches on my own two biggest web research caveats -- the need to use more than one search engine and the need to verify the information you find on the web. Google APIs -- I don't go there myself, but I will happily try clever things constructed by other people -- like some of the Ten Tools That Use the Google APIs included in this book. I kinda like this book and will keep it on the shelf next to my copy of Google Hacks, by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest.

Regan Moves to California

No, not President Reagan (he's gone to a far, far better place!). Judith Regan, the publisher, is moving her company to Los Angeles.

Judith Regan's ReganBooks is an imprint of HarperCollins. HarperCollins is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire.

In his Fresh Books blog, agent Matt Wagner bemoans the dearth of publishers in California. Well, as of now, Judith Regan is helping redress this issue. Regan is wildly successful, highbrow and lowbrow (sometimes both at the same time) and not afraid of controversy. What you may not realize is that she also peddles sex books. Her sex books use the same formula as her books that don't concern sex: a cocktail of vulgar and highbrow, heavy on the celebrity, with just a dash of controversy thrown in. Shaken, not stirred.

Case in point: Many of the books featured in the Hot Reads section of Hot Feeds are published by ReganBooks, such as the Jenna Jameson bio, Toni Bentley's Surrendur, and so on.

Press Release: Building Research Tools with Google

Building Research Tools with Google for Dummies by Harold Davis is now available from Wiley Publishing and your favorite bookseller. Here's the full press release.

A Review a Day Keeps the Book Blahs Away!

I've added a neat feed to Feedly.com and the Syndication Viewer. It's from Powell's Book Store, and it features a book review a day from sources such as Salon.com, The New Republic, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Science Monitor, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The Times Are Changing in Computer Book Publishing

Everyone in the computer book industry knows that the times they are a changing, and not for the best. Sales are down, advances are down, and it's increasingly hard for authors to make a living. With a few exceptions, publishers are contracting: cutting back on their advances, taking longer and longer to pay, cutting their lists, and (in some cases) going out of business. In investing terms, these are secular, not cyclical, changes. They are probably here to stay.

In a previous entry, I wrote about how Microsoft lost the legions of Mom and Pop developers by killing VB6 without offering a viable (non-enterprise) replacement. PHP is the closest language to filling this bill, because the price is right (open source), it runs on Linux/Apache, and targets the Web.

This kind of thing is taking place across technologies. As Matt Wagner put it eloquently recently: "There's a very natural sort of ecology here where the increasingly complex challenge of trying to control a platform is balanced against the almost organic evolution of software made possible by open source technologies and the legions of programmers who contribute to them." So the net impact for computer book publishers, authors, and agents is less readers at the general level (although specialized, high-priced low-print-run books aimed at the enterprise may be a viable niche).

The next factor hitting this business is, of course, the Web, and the ease of searching it with tools like Google. Most reference information can easily be found on the Internet with no cost, so why should someone buy a book to find it? Back in the mid 1990s, I figured that if I got one useful fact, or one programming technique out of a book, it was worth the purchase price. That kind of logic just does not fly today.

Moving onward, a great big problem are the (to a great extent) dumb and dumber me-too publishers in this industry. (Dear Publishers: If you are reading this, and have published a book of mine, or are thinking about publishing a book of mine, or might sometime publish a book of mine, or you know me personally, I don't mean you. :-))

These publishers have got to get it through their heads (or they will perish like the dinosaurs, to use my seven-year-old's favorite metaphor) that:

- A CD-ROM packaged with a book is so yesterday! Information should be delivered via the Web. Adding a CD simply to boost the price-point is a trick that consumers see through in an instant. They will vote with their dollars and stay away.

- People don't need books anymore about how to use applications like Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word.

- The wide audience for information about a proprietary, closed programming system (like Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net) is gone forever.

- More and more, people will look to the Web as the best place to get technically-oriented information. Publishers (and authors) need to formulate a strategy for success in an environment where you cannot sell content, and typically expect to monetize traffic via advertising. This trend is not going away, in fact it is still in its infancy.

- Publishers need to get it through their heads that their series really do not constitute a long-term viable consumer brand. I know this is a controversial statement, which most publishers will take issue with. But publishers have mistaken the marketing clout that a bit of a budget and a relationship with Barnes and Nobles and Borders have given them for true branding. With a few exceptions, nobody I know cares about the series a book is in. They care if the book has quality, integrity, is written to hold a conversation with them, and if the author has a distinct viewpoint. (Remember: For straight reference information, people just go to the Web.) When publishers wake up and smell the red ink and get out of the series marketing miasma, they will realize that the only branding that makes any sense is to brand the author -- and they will start pursuing this strategy like in other parts of publishing.

Related links: See the rather loud discussion about whether computer book agents earn their commission on Joseph Wikert's blog (he is a publisher at Wiley). If you are looking for an agent, I recommend Matt Wagner.

Hasty Ents and Branding Publishers

I was going to write about ents from the Lord of the Rings. For those of you who do not know the LTR, ents are tree shepherds who inveigh against other species for being "too hasty" -- and then proceed to hastily demolish the neighboring wizard and send hords of "huorns" (moving trees) out to ravish the ravishing orcs, thereby turning the tide in the direction of good (rather than evil). My point here was to be the difference between text and subtext. In fact, despite their rhetoric, the ents act hastily (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In fact, despite Google's rhetoric about returning the best search results, Google may not mind having lots of results pages (even if the results are spam) so that they have a lot of pages for ad display. You get my drift.

But something caught my eye in today's Sunday NYT that really irritates me. It's a front page of the business section article about HarperCollins attempting to brand its publishing logos rather than its authors. Branding a publisher rather than the author is a lousy idea, and one that is ultimately doomed to failure. A publisher's brand can support an author, but the attempt to replace it will work in the long run no more than the wizard's foul plots could, when he forgot that he lived next door to the ents.

The article rightly point to technology books as one area where publisher-branded has worked (or at least gone farthest). The Dummies series is pointed to as an example of success. (O'Reilly might also have been used as an example, most purchasers of technology books know that an ORA book will have some degree of integrity.)

A problem with the Dummies series is that the quality of the individual titles varies tremendously. (I'm biased of course, but I think this mostly has to do with the authors of the individual titles in the series. Soem authors are good, and others are just not as good.) Purchasers of books in the series may buy their first one or two based on the series branding, but consumers are not really "dummies" and quickly come to perceive this unevenness.

An author of a book is the bottom line, buck-stops-here person responsible for the integrity and quality of his or her book. While some authors forget this, or let the realities of the marketplace help them forget it, no development editor aided and abetted by publisher branding will ever take the place of the author.

Publishers would be smart to bite the bullet and focus on finding the right books (in technology this means thinking creatively ahead of the curve rather than trailing the curve) and putting their branding efforts into the authors who make the books, rather than out of some foolish arrogance and vain hope chasing the will-o-wisp of series branding.

Where are the ents and huorns to knock a bit of sense into those publishers?