You're not supposed to go to bed angry, so here I am.

I have this friend online, although I don't know how much of a friend he is online really since he generally serves to irritate and exasperate me. I've met him in person a couple times, and he's a nice enough guy. Takes himself a little too seriously sometimes, and he's quick to take offense at things (short guy syndrome), but he's not all bad or anything.

Anyway, he used to work for a newspaper putting their content online, and now he's moved to New York City to work for a particular web portal (one of the ones with only one type of content, and I'll say no more). You'd think he'd been in the web business (and the newspaper business before that) for long enough to understand how copyright works.

Anyway, I was on IRC, and he was on, talking about his job, and how he just found a really long page of links to content of the type his portal does. So he copied the whole thing, reformatted the page, and put it on his company's portal. He sees no problem with this.

The first words I typed were, "that's theft, you know." After he tried to dismiss that out of hand, I followed up with, "bad web karma, at least." His argument (and he thinks this is something you can argue, not something that's just wrong) is that if the guy put it out there on the web, it's free for anybody to take and use as they see fit. He also thinks since the author isn't actually providing the content he's linking to, just the links, that the author has no right to assert any sort of copyright on that collection of links.

I've argued with this guy on listservs before, and it's pretty much pointless. He sees the world one way, and if something is outside his worldview it doesn't exist. So I commented that it was useless to try to argue any sense into him, said I was going to get dinner (true) and quit IRC.

While I was eating my sandwich, pine beeped at me. I looked. He sent me an email, one paragraph of which I'm pasting here:

You show me someone who believes copying someone's *deliberately publically posted* information is "theft" or "bad karma", and I'll show you someone who's done the exact same thing but who rationalized it into being OK for them.

So I responded, reminding him of the time a mutual friend's content was stolen from her labor of love web site, and the comment that while reusing a link or two is fair use, taking the whole compilation of links is a violation of copyright law unless the author has explicitly stated that the compilation is in the public domain. That he sees nothing wrong with this is really disturbing.

Feh.

link (2000-06-29)