Comments on: Clipmarks and Copyright

By: Marc Eastman

Marc Eastman — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:35:54 +0000

Hi there,

I’m pretty new to blogging itself, though I’ve been writing online at one place or another for quite a while. I recently found clipmarks, and wonder what the more current discussion/opinion on it might be.

Of course, it can be abused. I don’t know that it’s a reason to hate the thing itself. As people have said, if someone wants to steal your work they don’t need a special tool like this. Sure, it makes it easier, but it isn’t actually real hard.

At any rate, my thought was to use it… I think… the way a public version of using was intended.

If I see a good blog post or article, I can just use clipmarks and get a bit of teaser, add my own two cents, and post it right to my blog.

Is this frowned upon by and large?

I’m just not sure what is actually different if I were to post a small blurb about a topic recommending another article with a small quote without using clipmarks.

Is that frowned upon too?

By: JP Shaw

JP Shaw — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:41:31 +0000

I’ve been reading what everyone has written commenting on clipmarks, and it’s silly for everyone in my opinion to get bent out of shape out of a site offering a clip and store program to showcase good content on their own site. If clipmarks are used correctly a link is put on the site redirecting the user back to where the material was originally copied, therefore it’s not copyright infringement if you aren’t claiming props for the work or other artistic value created. Many times I’ve referenced other people’s work, giving a link back to them, showing a snippet of their article, redirecting viewers to their own page. And really the bottom line for those of you who have seen your work published in full on another site, without a link sent back giving you credit as the author and they are stealing your work. Then enforce copyright yourself. We as a society are baring our souls on the internet, we are putting our work out there because we want others to read it. So we are taking chances, that we bloody well know we shouldn’t be taking when it comes to copyright protecting our work.

I’m a writer. If I feel that strongly about my work, about a novel I’m doing, I do not, at all, post it to the web. Aside from clipmarks, there are other ways to steal, copy and paste, programs like microsoft one note which I use to save clips privately on my own computer, and my favorite the good ole (right click save as) to your hard drive. So many of you want to hold Clipmarks responsible for creating another portal for copyright infrigement. The entire internet is copyright infrigement, as there is no real way of knowing who printed what, where it came from, or how that person obtained it. I think the responsibility of preserving copyright should fall on the onus of the owner of such publications to be aware they are taking a chance at having their work either stolen or showcased on another site if they decide to publish it to the web. Clipmarks is just doing what many other sites have already been doing for years, trying to keep up with the competition.

By the way I’m not saying it’s right, to clip and save something and show it on your site. I’m simply saying we as artists, designers, web builders, authors and so forth, need to protect our own work, and if we post to the web it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that isn’t the best way. It’s like saying here I’m leaving this cookie here, filled with yummy chocolate chips, and I’ll be back later to check on it, but don’t you dare eat it… give me a break!!!

By: Rose

Rose — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:38:16 +0000

I too joined Clipmarks and I was surprised to see full pages of content being clipped. Is this not a violation of copyright?

By: kap

kap — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:27:09 +0000

Since clipmarks.com is legal, I have a great idea!

I’m going to do tvmarks.com, musicmarks.com, bookmarks.com, and imagemarks.com, podcastmarks.com.

Anyone can upload or direct me to “clips” of related content which I will host and distribute freely. This includes music, movies, tv shows, published books, photos and artworks.

I will link to the owner of the content (if I host a song by Switchfoot then I will link to their website). The link will be all that I provide and they should be grateful for the traffic I send them.

Now I will not be responsible if users post full “clips” or “illegal” content. I will happily remove any “illegal” content after proof of ownership and copyright is provided. I can’t control what others do on my sites.

I will “clip” clipmarks.com functionality and format and features. I might change the site design a little by “clipping” a design from somewhere else. The main difference is that instead of articles and written material it will be content people prefer like movies, mp3′s etc.

Thanks for the idea Clipmarks.com. Lets have a race who can get bought out first and make millions.

By: Harald Walker

Harald Walker — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:34:49 +0000

I use delicious to manage bookmarks and remember interesting pages. I don’t mind what clipmarks does, as long as it is not a full page clipping. Lately 3 posts of us have been copied completely, including images. According to me, this is not fair use any longer (considering US law – in other countries something like fair use doesn’t exist and this would be a clear copy right violation). In 24 hours the recent clipmarks resulted in 16 visitors coming via clipmarks. Clipmarks should improve their software and prevent full text clippings, which should not be too difficult if the source is a blog posting.

By: Atul

Atul — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:59:07 +0000

Hi Darren,
I recently started bloggin ( 1 month back) and looking at feedback I recieve on my blog http://becomeappsdba.blogspot.com I started a site with technical stuff for Oracle E-Business Suite i.e. http://teachmeoracle.com
I was surfing net today & realised that someone from chine copied my complete site pages & blog pages & pasted in his blog i.e. http://ebsdba.blog.com/ I don’t understand what to do now . He has copied every bit word by word of my pages .

I don’t know what to do in this situation , I am bit frustracted as well at this minute & seek you help about what should I do now & how to stop future copying of my technical material from blog .
I’ll really appreciate your help & comment on this.

Regards
Atul
atul_iiit@yahoo.com

By: Dale N.

Dale N. — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 18:33:30 +0000

Darren – can’t say I’ve had a good or bad experience with clipmarks personally. I’m just disgusted with opportunists trying to jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon at the expense of content creators. What Clipmarks is doing with other’s content is gross infringement with a spit in your face attitude to top it off.
So disguting that my cat had an opinion too.

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 07:42:14 +0000

dale and cynthia – I appreciate that you might not have a good experience of clipmarks – but can you please refrain from leaving multiple comments under different names – I can tell that you left both of these from the same computer. There’s no need to do this – simply say what you have to say – all comments are welcome here without having to do that kind of thing.

By: cynthia

cynthia — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 07:24:51 +0000

Clipmarks= RIPMARKS

By: Dale N.

Dale N. — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 07:20:38 +0000

Godfrey Daniel is a proud advocate of content theft out stumping for clipmarks because of his vested interest as a part of the clipmarks community of thieves. AliBaba might have had 40 thieves, but it was still theft nonetheless, Godfrey.

By: Godfrey Daniel

Godfrey Daniel — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:45:51 +0000

Calling what is done at Clipmarks stealing is small minded and silly.
Your precious content is being duplicated in another location with full credit and links. How is that theft? I have discovered, and visit regularly, sites that I might never have otherwise found because of content found at Clipmarks.
You’re essentially getting free advertising and you’re talking about theft. Unbelievable.

By: Dale N.

Dale N. — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:56:51 +0000

Don’t bother with junk like clipmarks. Scrapbook is a much better application for firefox and doesn’t risk breaking any copyright laws. The owner of clipmarks seems to be out on a pr campaign to supress honest evaluation of it’s potential reprecussions. Don’t buy into it.

By: Webby’s World » Clipmarks - Ajax Clipping Service

Webby’s World » Clipmarks - Ajax Clipping Service — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:12:18 +0000

[...] An interesting point, which I have thought about, was raised by Problogger. When does a Clipmark become a copyright breach? Copying copyrighted images and text (in quantities larger than an excerpt) surely isn’t fair use. A problem is finding the person responsible for this. It is a little like P2P software; is LimeWire LLC responsible if someone decides to use their software in copyright theft? [...]

By: funana

funana — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:53:05 +0000

Hi,

I don’t understand it… Why do you feel so about clipmarks while accepting google, google/yahoo cache, google/yahoo images and wayback/internet archiv?
I don’t get it…

Clipmarks is a wonderfull tool and there is or will be traffic if people clip a part of your work and make it public. And I think london2020 is absolutely right.

By: london2020

london2020 — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:19:43 +0000

What about Google’s cache? Is not the cache infringing copyright? Is not cache done by Google a copy of a website that may even not exist anymore? My thought is when Google is removing its cache service, then public Clipmarks may be questioned. I am a user of Clipmarks and to me it’s just a way to privately archive useful content that I find while exploring the world wide web. Bookmarking is not enough, since the content may go away next time I visit that URL The public aspect of Clipmarks is a wonderful way to promote the websites that people have clipmarked, so why the fuss? If Clipmarks goes down, I will go back to converting content to PDF documents for my private archive, but the content creators will miss the traffic. My 2 cents.

By: Wally

Wally — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 16:09:35 +0000

I have been using Clipmarks for a couple of months and find it very useful.
I stumbled on this post after reading about the amblogger incident. While reading through these comments, it appears that the biggest problem was the actual clipping of whole pages. I took this to mean “archiving” the whole page versus bookmarking. I tend to think that the reason people use Clipmarks is it allows them only to save snippets to refer to later. When I’m clipping it seems silly to save the whole page because then I would just bookmark it. Of course, there will be people that will save(archive,cache) the whole page and this is something they can already do with hanzo:web, furl, and spurl. In fact, that is the main purpose of these sites. Anyway, I know this post is a month old, but just wanted to comment.

By: AmBlogger » Blog Archive » ProBlogger talks to AmBlogger!

AmBlogger » Blog Archive » ProBlogger talks to AmBlogger! — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 05:44:38 +0000

[...] Clipmarks and Copyright [...]

By: Walter Jeffries

Walter Jeffries — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 22:15:25 +0000

Eric, you may need to find a way to solve the preemptive blocking since with your current model you’re violating copyrights and you’re probably going to face a lawsuite on that. It may require significantly changing how your system works to make it legal.

You ask how is it different from Google: the answer is you’re storing and distributing a lot more content. If all you did was a sentence and then a link you would be doing something like Google. What you’re doing is far beyond what Google does.

On the patent issue, I’m critizising the whole system.

Merry Christmas,

-Walter
in Vermont

By: eric goldstein

eric goldstein — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 16:23:10 +0000

Like i said earlier, i respect this issue and am sensitive to it. I don’t, howerver, think it is nearly as black and white or broad as Walter says. For one, there is no conceivable way we could preemptively block ‘all of your past, present and future works in any format in part, derivate or in whole’. So if i stated here that we would grant that request, i’d be being disingenious.

I also think that your statement about “a link to the source not being good enough” is a bit shortsighted. If that source link proves effective at driving traffic to your site (and we are going to try to make that source link as noticeable, enticing, effective as we can) then i can’t see why you would view it any differently than Google. I’m sure that a search on Google for content relating to your work results in excerpts (aka “clippings”) of it being served on the page alongside advertisements by others. In this instance, Google and the advertiser are profitting from your work. I assume that doesn’t bother you because you want to be included in their search results because of the “link to the source.” If our links are effective, i expect that you’ll feel the same way about Clipmarks. We don’t have 1/100,000,000,000 the traffic of Google, so i can’t really form a judgment on that yet. I can tell you that we are working on ways to make the source link more attractive so that it is more effective. We should have a first stab at something new out in a week or so. I’d love to know your feedback.

Lastly, I don’t see how you could feel so strongly about the right to profit from your work and then criticize our right to seek patent protection for technology we invent. That seems very imbalanced.

I don’t have much more to say about this at the moment. I assue you that i am and will be seeking advice, opinions and suggestions from people about this issue and will continue to listen carefully to everyone’s concerns.

Finally, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukka to everyone!! I’m off to spend some time with my wife and daughter so i won’t be checking this until later.

By: Walter Jeffries

Walter Jeffries — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:21:00 +0000

Suggestion: Contact Eric Goldstein a.k.a. Clipmarks.com and let them know they may not reproduce any of your works in part or whole if that is what you wish.

From the GoDaddy.com WHOIS about Clipmarks.com:
eric goldstein
156 West 56th
new york , New York 10019
United States
eric@amplify.com
2125822209
NS:AUTH01.NS.COLOSPACE.COM

My objection is he is going to try to make money off the work of other people without just compensation. A link back is just not good enough. If I write an article I don’t want someone else making the money off of it, I want to make the money. Simple economics.

Frankly Clipmarks looks like a solution looking for a problem.

My second problem with what he is doing is the little note at the bottom: “Patents Pending”. I am very against the patenting of software. Even hardware is of dubious validity for patenting – e.g., multliple people can come up with the same idea at about the same time completely independently. Software is even worse. We won’t even talk about the patenting of life forms…

Eric, you leave a very bad taste in my mouth. Please do not store or distribute any of my past, present or future works in any form in part, derivative or in whole. I said it politely but that is still a command. Got that? No touch.

On the plus side I appreciate it that you, Eric, took the time to participate in this forum. I hope you listen to people, learn and address their concerns in your policies, that you’re able to change your business model so as to stay out of court. Copyright infringement can get very expensive.