fitzroyalty

I received an email yesterday from someone called Jason from a commercial local news aggregator site called Fwix, which is based in San Francisco. This alerted me to the fact that content from Fitzroyalty was about to be exploited by Fwix in breach of my non-commercial creative commons copyright license.

The email said:

Hi Editor at Fitz Royalty,

You might have received an email from us in the past, but if you haven’t, we’d like to welcome you to the Fwix community. We hope that by now you are seeing us send your site more traffic and we applaud you for the engaging articles you have been writing over the past year.

WTF? I’ve never heard of this site or this person. Don’t talk nonsense like telling me your site sends me traffic. It doesn’t. Communications failure number one – don’t subscribe me to anything without my express permission. And don’t talk to me like I am a member of your community when I am not, or talk to me like I am a friend when I am not. I’m not your friend.

At the bottom of the email it said ‘To unsubscribe to this mailing, please reply to this email with the word “unsubscribe”.’ Communications failure number two – NEVER make me waste time unsubscribing from something I didn’t ask for and don’t want.

Communications failure number three – if you’re trying to connect with me, get the name of my site right. It’s Fitzroyalty. One word. It’s written like that everywhere.

So I emailed a reply with the only content being the word ‘unsubscribe’. Instead of the expected automated response, or a polite personal response, I received this:

Hi Brian,

I can unsubscribe you if you like, but I’m really interested in what your local pages. My name is Jason and I am in San Francisco.

Let me know if you want to talk.

What can ‘unsubscribe’ mean other than ‘unsubscribe’? Does it mean ‘I’ll ignore your direct instructions and continue talking to you like we’re friends’? NO, it doesn’t. I don’t want to talk to you. Fuck off and unsubscribe me.

I reply by stating ‘Unsubscribe means unsubscribe. I am not interested in you.’ The response was:

Hey Brian,

Didn’t mean to offend you. You are unsubscribed.

Jason

The only interesting thing about Fwix is that it may be the first US commercial aggregator to show any interest in Australia. The Australian aggregator site Wotnews has been around for some time, but it has a more specific business focus, so it’s not really comparable.

Fwix employs what appears to be the standard commercial aggregator business model. The site aggregates feeds of local news from multiple sources. It then syndicates this content out via an API, a widget and an iPhone app. It inserts advertisements in between the stories in these channels, though you don’t see advertising in its main site.

Their site has the usual vague corporate spin about how this works without explaining it properly or providing transparent numbers about how much contributors and republishers earn from contributing or participating.

When Fwix aggregates content on its site it acts in the standard link hiding, Google search rank parasite mode by hiding the genuine URLs of the contributing posts and masking them with its own URLs using an iframe or similar coding.

This is unethical because it effectively reduces the value of such links back to a contributing site in determining a site’s search rank in Google. It basically steals the only value a contributor gets from participating in aggregator sites. That’s why the 10 local news sites I publish for Melbourne use no link hiding or rewriting tools. I want all the contributors to receive the search rank from Google they earn from contributing.

To counter this, I strongly recommend publishers using a self-hosted Wordpress install to use a plugin like No more frames. It works by making a post break of the iframe that sites like Fwix wrap around it. It works against all the popular sites using such framing tools, like Facebook.

The reason why I am drawing attention to this is the blatant hypocrisy with which Fwix operates. It uses frames to help itself to others’ content, but explicitly bans others from using the same framing tools to capture its content. Its terms of use state:

you may not use, frame or utilize framing techniques to enclose any Fwix trademark, logo or other proprietary information, including the images found at the Site, the content of any text or the layout/design of any page or form contained on a page on the Site without Fwix’ express written consent.

What utter contempt these people have for their contributors. These terms basically say ‘we are free to exploit you but no one is allowed to exploit us’. But the world does not work like that.

Update 13 January 2010: Fwix has become more exploitative by removing the ‘close frame’ button in the frame. This is unacceptable.

Update 18 January 2010: Fwix has replaced the ‘close frame’ button in the iframe. I wonder whose lawyers forced this to be done?

Fwix is already aggregating the Leader newspapers and the ABC, and a few hours after receiving Jason’s emails it started adding some Melbourne blogs. Fwix is now aggregating my content without my permission in breach of my creative commons license. I emailed them demanding that they remove my content. They responded by saying they would deactivate the aggregation of my feed immediately and remove my posts within a few days.

Communications failure number four – Fwix’s failure to read my copyright statement and act accordingly. I had the same problem with Wotnews in 2009. Back when I still published a full RSS feed, Wotnews was aggregating my full feed and republishing it using the usual link hiding frames and URL rewriting techniques these parasites use.

Far from driving traffic to my site, Wotnews was stealing my content and republishing so people could read it there without being referred back to the source to read it. I demanded that Wotnews remove all my content, and gave them permission to use my excerpt feed only if they removed the link hiding and URL rewriting. Obviously they did not want to do this for just one contributor so they had no other choice but to remove my content entirely.

The Wotnews experience forced me to abandon my preference to publish a full feed and to instead publish only a partial or summary feed to protect my content from such unethical exploitation.

If you are contacted by Jason at Fwix, I suggest you tell him to fuck off back to San Francisco and to take his flaccid corporate spin with him.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 12:06 pm and is filed under business, hyperlocal, information technology, intellectual property, media, misanthropy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.