contentious.com

(UPDATE, Apr. 20, 2005: Furl and Del.icio.us: Almost Perfect Together)

I’ve been writing recently about the online personal archiving service Furl (10 Cool Things to Do with Furl, More Furl Tricks, One More Furl Trick: Pre-blogging, and Furl Tricks: Save Exactly and All of What You Want). I wanted to clear up a potential controversy I’ve seen brewing.

I’ve recently had some private conversations with online publishers and copyright lawyers about Furl. Predictably, several of these professionals expressed strong concern about (and opposition to) the idea that users of an online service might archive their intellectual property and freely share it with the public, outside of their personal control. That would, they said, constitute unauthorized republication and thus copyright infringement.

Being an online publisher, I can understand and largely share their concern – although personally I don’t feel that online archiving necessarily threatens the value of my own content in any way.

To clear up any potential confusion over Furl and copyright, I recently spoke by phone with Furl founder Mike Giles. He clarified where Furl archives fall in terms of copyright law…

CONTEXT: COPYRIGHT IS GOOD AND NECESSARY

First of all, copyright protection benefits everyone – people who create and publish any kind of content, as well as the people who use and enjoy any kind of content. I am NOT in favor of scrapping copyright law. I think it’s vital – and it also should continually evolve to suit a changing media environment.

Rampant ignorance of copyright online already poses significant hazards and challenges to publishers and content creators. While courts have tended to modify copyright law to accommodate major technology advances that affect how people access and use content, US copyright law hasn’t quite fully caught up with the Internet age yet. (For more on this, read the speech that Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation delivered June 17 to Microsoft, on why digital rights management is a bad idea.)

HOW A FURL ARCHIVE WORKS

When you sign up for a free Furl account you can create a personal directory in which you can store achived (saved) versions of Web pages, complete with graphics and other bangles. These archived pages live in your account forever – which gives you a measure of protection from “linkrot.”

Linkrot is one of the great plagues of the Web. It occurs whenever a Web page is moved, deleted, secured behind a limited-access wall, or significantly modified. When any of those things happen, existing inbound links to that page cease to work – your either get a page not found error, or a password prompt, or find yourself on a page with content that bears no apparent relevance to where you just clicked in from.

How bad is the linkrot problem? I know it’s getting worse; I encounter it increasingly often. The most recent linkrot statistic I found was in the Idle Words weblog entry by Maciej Ceglowski, dated Jan. 14, 2003. At that time, he wrote: “The average half-life of a link on an education site is fifty-five months – less than five years. What do you think the figure is for weblogs? What do you think it will be for trackbacks, or site comments?”

…Ironically, Ceglowski got that “average 55-month half-life” statistic from a Newswise page that is now either gone or available only to account holders – in other words, the direct link from that blog entry no longer works. Linkrot in action!

Anyway, Furl was designed to give Web users a simple measure of protection from linkrot, by allowing them to save their own personal copies of pages that they like, in a sortable, searchable, and shareable framework.

SO WHAT WAS FURL’S POTENTIAL COPYRIGHT PROBLEM?

Some online publishers and copyright lawyers were concerned by the fact that Furl users can make all or some of the contents of their archives available for public access.

Things got a bit confusing because when a Furl user is logged in to the system and accesses his or her personal archive, they can choose to view either the external link (to the site where the page was found) OR the archived version. Viewing the archived page is an option available only when browsing your own archive – not someone else’s archive. But this is something you’d notice only if you accessed someone else’s public Furl archive.

Until today, the Furl FAQ didn’t clarify whether sharing your archive with the public meant you were offering direct access to the archived versions of third-party pages. Such access obviously would violate existing US copyright law big-time. That FAQ omission was an oversight, explained Giles. So he took immediate action.

TODAY, after our conversation, Mike Giles added this section to the Furl FAQ:

“Isn’t Furl a huge copyright violation?

“Contrary to these concerns, we believe that Furl is a boon publishers because it lets people share the interesting and useful information that they find online. This means that any publisher/journalist who produces good work, regardless of their strength in distribution, can be found by thousands of people who otherwise would have never ventured to the site. We know, personally, that we have read many wonderful articles that we never would have seen had it not been for Furl. If you have any concerns with regards to this issue, please contact us.”

As far as I’m concerned, that removes my concern of being potentially liable for copyright infringement due to the public contents of my Furl archive. Hopefully, it also relieves publishers’ and lawyers’ concerns about Furl violating their copyright.

I DID TEST THIS

To check out that what Giles told me was true, I accessed Furl, logged out, and then tried to access another person’s Furl archive (that of Darlene Fichter, which I found through a Google search).

I clicked on the current first item in Fichter’s Furl archive, West Builds Cutting-Edge RSS Technology Into West IntraClip Service. Apparently, that link has rotted: I got taken to this error message. That’s significant because I was NOT taken to the archived version of the page that Fichter stored on June 30, 2004.

When I clicked on the current second item in Fichter’s archive, Canadian Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG), I was directed to the external URL where that page resides, not to the archived version.

…So I hope this puts to rest the concerns of my publishing colleagues and their attorneys. Again, I do think Furl is an extremely useful service for which there is a huge need, and I agree with Giles that publishers can benefit from it because it drives traffic to their sites.

I hope that Furl also raises awareness among publishers of the general problem of linkrot. There are many simple ways to combat linkrot, such as meta refresh redirects. I wish more publishers would consistently implement such measures. Broken links look bad all the way around.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: OTHER VIOLATIONS?

The need for anti-link-rot tools like Furl is likely to grow. However, online archiving always presents potential risk of copyright violation. Consider these services in terms of copyright law:

• Spurl: This new free service sounds remarkably similar to Furl in several ways. I couldn’t make its button/toolbar work quickly in my preferred browser, Firefox, so I’ll have to report back on this later. I do not know whether public Spurl archives offer access to achived page files or just external links, but with this kind of service that’s always a possibility that should be checked out.
• SurfSaver This $30 tool, which has been around for awhile, allows you to easily archive Web pages to your computer’s hard drive. This info page says, “The SurfSaver Network version lets multiple users save, search, and view information. In addition, folders can be emailed to other SurfSaver users.” Now, I didn’t see any evidence that you can use SurfSaver to put your archive on a server connected to the Internet, rather than your computer, but I suppose it’s possible to create a tool which would do that – and that might open the door to copyright infringement through archiving. Or, someone could create a Napster-like utility to share archive files online.
• The Internet Archive project maintains a permanent archive of a vast swath of the Internet, in order to preserve a historical record. Publishers can opt out of inclusion in this collection. However, some online publishers consider this project a major copyright violation.
• Google caches pages from most of the Web sites it indexes. It doesn’t ask for permission to create or maintain this cache, which undoubtedly includes billions of pages of third-party intellectual property. Right now, I can link to a Google cached page as easily as I can link to the the original page on the owner’s site. If Google can provide public access to cached pages for future reference, why can’t you or I, through an archiving service like Furl?

  For more on the Google cache copyright issue, see this July 9, 2003 CNET article, Google cache raises copyright concerns, by Stefanie Olsen. (Ironically, I first found that article on this page in the RankForSales site, which appears to be a likely unauthorized republication since no permission from CNET is mentioned. (That’s copyright infringement.) Heh.)

• Some public libraries are providing greater access to copyrighted electronic resources, such as e-books and commercial databases – often to their cardholders only, but sometimes to the public. While you often must go to a terminal at alibrary to use these resources, in other cases libraries can supply at-home access over the Internet.
• Back in the dot-com boom there was a company called iHarvest which apparently offered an archive service much like Furl, for a fee based on the amount of storage space used. It’s since folded. I don’t know why it folded, or whether copyright issues had anything to do with its demise.

…Yeah, in my opinion, US copyright law still has a bit of catching up to do.

’s a good plain-language backgrounder to the major pieces of US copyright law that are relevant to the Internet: Limits to the Copying of Digital Content, by Joseph Laferrera, published in MarketingProfs.com.