A few weeks ago, I came across a guest post at the MediaShift blog at PBS, in which Alana Taylor — a journalism student at New York University who also writes for the blog Mashable — talked about how disappointed she was with her classes at the university, and how “old thinking” permeated the school. Among other things, she mentioned that she was the only class member who had a blog, and that her teacher was encouraging students to think primarily about getting jobs at newspapers, and that the general sense at the school was that working online wasn’t a viable career choice.

It wasn’t a uniformly negative piece, nor was it solely about Taylor’s teacher — about whom she said some nice things as well, including the fact that she at least knew that blogging could be a paying job, and could lead to “real” journalism jobs. And it didn’t say much about the other students in the class, apart from some comments that a fellow classmate made after Alana asked her what she thought about the class during a break. That’s clearly not how her teacher saw it, however: according to an update by Mark Glaser at MediaShift, the NYU instructor called Taylor into her office and told her not to blog, Twitter or otherwise write about the class.

She then reportedly read the post aloud in class, asked what the other students thought, and when there was no response said: “OK, we can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class” (according to MediaShift, other students later said they agreed with the content of the original post but didn’t want to say anything in class). Later, the instructor told Glaser that she had simply asked Taylor not to blog or Twitter *during* class, and that she had no problem with Alana writing about the class, but that she would require anyone doing so to ask the other students first before they quoted them on a blog.

Obviously, there are issues when it comes to students blogging about their classes. If someone was continually posting disruptive things or singling out specific students or posting defamatory material or some kind, then I would think a teacher would want to address that — preferably in as transparent a manner as possible. But a blanket blogging ban? What kind of signal does that send? On Alana’s blog, she says that several journalism schools used the MediaShift post to start a discussion about blogging and journalism, which I think is a far better response.

There seems to be a theme developing around the topic of comments, whether they appear on a blog or on FriendFeed. It sort of started with a conversation about the ongoing issue of fragmentation — in which comments appear on blog posts but then also appear at FriendFeed (and in multiple places on FriendFeed, as commenters on my post noted). Then Hank Williams (no, not that Hank Williams) wrote a post about how comments might even be considered copyrightable content, and Josh Catone wrote one at Read/Write Web about comment ownership — at which point, Steven “Winextra” Hodson launched into one of his trademark rants about how comments are not content.

I’m going to have to disagree with Steven on this one, however, at least from a legal standpoint (although I am not a lawyer, and don’t even play one on TV). As some of the commenters on his post at FriendFeed note, comments on blogs meet many of the tests that would likely be required to qualify as copyrighted content. Whether anyone would be dumb enough — or stubborn enough — to actually pursue such a claim is a separate question, of course. Still, as Mark Trapp points out, most mainstream media sites have a “terms of use” policy that says you effectively allow the site to use your comments, which they wouldn’t have to do if they weren’t legally required to.

I think Steven’s point was more that comments shouldn’t be thought of as copyrighted content, and that they should function more like a conversation in a bar or on a street corner — and I would agree. Legally though, I’m pretty sure they would be considered published content, and are therefore “owned” by their creator, unless he or she gives up that right to the blog or service that hosts them. So could Robert Scoble sue Rob La Gesse for deleting his from FriendFeed?

Update:

Michael Beck points out (on FriendFeed) that these questions have come up before, and points to a discussion here, and also here and here. Meanwhile, Daniel Ha of Disqus — the comment aggregation system I use here — has drawn up a prototype for a “commenters’ bill of rights.”

Congrats to Mike for being named one of Time’s 100 most influential people (although one wag on Twitter wondered whether this wasn’t just the magazine’s attempt at blogosphere “link bait”). For what it’s worth, he appears in the “builders and titans” section of the list, rather than the “leaders and revolutionaries” section or the “heroes and pioneers” section (which raises the question: if you could choose only one, would you rather be a hero, a leader, a pioneer or a titan?) Arianna Huffington says he’s the “quintessential blogger” because he is:

“intense, passionate, consumed with his subject, opinionated, sleep-deprived, forward-thinking, easy to irritate and apt to air his grudges in public.”

By my count, at least four of those descriptive phrases — “intense,” “passionate,” “easy to irritate” and “apt to air his grudges in public” — are euphemisms for having a temper. Arianna also throws in a description of him as being like Tony Soprano: “a large man, always on the verge of losing his cool.” Is that the quintessential blogger?

(On a personal note, when he came to the mesh conference last year, Mike was unfailingly polite to just about everyone, even someone he had a beef with, despite the fact that he was sleep-deprived).

Rogers Cadenhead, who long ago in another lifetime worked with Dave “I invented RSS” Winer, popped up this week with a Techmeme filter called Meme13 — a site that pulls feeds from the newest blogs to hit the charts on the Techmeme Leaderboard, in an attempt to cut through the usual Techmeme spotlight hogs (you know who you are) and show people some new content. When I heard about it, I thought it was a great idea — expose people to new, up-and-coming blogs, etc. etc.

Some people, however — including several bloggers I respect, such as Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests and Frederic of The Last Podcast — immediately posted Twitter messages, followed by blog posts, calling Rogers’ new thing “a scraper blog.” As Tony outlines in his post, he believes that publishing the full feeds is no different than any of the dozens of scrapers out there. Frederic says in his post that he agrees, and that while Shyftr — the most recent subject of a blogstorm over appropriating feeds — tried to create some value, Meme13 just scrapes.

Since I’ve emailed back and forth with Rogers Cadenhead in the past, I asked him for a response. Here’s what he said (posted with his permission):

“I figured that concern would be raised at some point. Sites don’t stay on Meme13 for long — around two weeks at present — and never come back. Although I could cut from full-text to partial, I think this weakens the ability to sample these bloggers.

Another thing I’m not doing is keeping old content around. I don’t think I’ll be archiving old entries. I think the short-term use of the feeds makes Meme13 legal and a bit different than a scraper, but we’ll see how it is received by the community.”

For what it’s worth, I sympathize with Tony and Frederic — but I don’t think Meme13 is anything to get too upset by. If anything, I think it provides a service by making it easier to find new content, which I think many Techmeme critics would agree is a good thing (Marshall has another way at the Read/Write Web blog). And as Mike Masnick has noted at Techdirt on the Shyftr question, sites that repost your RSS feed can actually be beneficial, and at worst are a nuisance that will soon fade if you are providing real value (which Tony does).

Ironically, as Tony has noted, Meme13 has been showing his post about the flaws in Meme13 as the top post for some time now. Says Rogers: “My robot has already turned against me.” In any case, whether you like Meme13 or not, it’s apparently all Steven Hodson’s fault :-).

Update 2

The blogger that Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter to earlier this week isn’t going to back down quietly, it seems. He has published a response on craigslistblog.org to Jim Buckmaster’s recent post, in which he says that the ads were just to “cover some hosting costs.” He also says that with his misleading post, the Craigslist CEO has “tarnished Craig Newmark’s reputation forever,” and that Buckmaster should “do the right thing and step down today.” Gee, Tim — hyperbole much?

Update:

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has posted an entry to the new Craigslist blog in which he apologizes for the “ham-handed” C&D letter described below, which the site sent to a blog called Craigslistblog.org. But Buckmaster also provides some more details about why the classified service went after Tim White’s blog; among other things, he says the blog was running misleading text ads with Craigslist’s name in them (the ads were apparently removed from the site before the blog post got a lot of attention).

To me, that changes things substantially. One of the principles behind domain-squatting cases is that in order to avoid such accusations, a domain should have been registered and used in good faith — in other words, not to generate revenue based on the potential misunderstanding generated by a similar domain name. It seems pretty clear that Craigslistblog.org was designed to do that, and so I am backing Craigslist on this one. Jim Buckmaster’s post, incidentally, is a nice example of how to apologize and still make your point.

Original post:

Seems like Craigslist is in some hot water over a blog. But not because its new official blog is really ugly, poorly-designed and difficult to use, which it is — although given the somewhat… er, “distinctive” look and feel of the classified site itself, it’s probably not surprising that the blog looks like my daughter’s fifth-grade class designed it using a version of Microsoft’s FrontPage from 1998 (Craigslist doesn’t have ads? Not to be outdone, the blog doesn’t have comments or an RSS feed).

In any case, it’s not Craigslist’s official blog that’s the issue — it’s a site called Craigslistblog.org, which was started up about a month ago by a guy named Tim White as a way of getting some discussion going about Craigslist, both good and bad. Then he got a rather brusque C&D letter from none other than Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which Tim has posted on his site. In no uncertain terms, it directs Tim to stop using the domain and the name Craigslist immediately or face legal action.

Tim,

We need you to stop using the infringing domain CRAIGSLISTBLOG.ORG immediately, and arrange for tranfer of it to us asap – using/selling/transfering infringing domains is illegal, and penalties up to $100,000 per domain can be applied.

Tim, however, responds that Jim has “gotten some bad legal counsel” and asks whether the company plans to shut down other sites with craigslist in the name, such as craigslistmap.info. Jim then copies Tim on a letter to Craigslist’s attorneys, in which he not-so-subtly mentions that the law firm does intellectual property work for “Google and a lot of other prominent companies.” As far as I can tell, Tim isn’t planning to back down.

Is Craigslist in the right here? I’m not a lawyer (although I sometimes play one on TV), but from my reading of past cases involving domain disputes, both WIPO rules and U.S. law require complainants to satisfy several conditions in order to win such a case. The first one — whether the domain name is confusingly similar — is a slam dunk for sure. But the other criteria are whether the defendant is making legitimate fair use of the name, and whether it was registered in bad faith (i.e. whether the defendant registered it with intent to profit from the confusion).

Those last two are a lot harder to answer, and I happen to think Tim has a pretty good case. Whether he can withstand a legal onslaught from Craigslist — which has about $60-million or so a year to play around with, as far as I can tell from the recent revenue numbers — is a separate question. It’s also interesting to note the anti-Craigslist comments on Tim’s post. I expect plenty of criticism of the classified site based on the contrast between its touchy-feely ethos and its actions.