This seems way more embarrassing to storytelling.io. The only take aways I have are how easy it is to switch to a free, open source alternative, and how loudly and publicly storytelling will complain about you. They should have handled this matter in private instead of blogging about it.
This felt like a completely pyrrhic victory. Not only did they expose how unnecessary their own product was, but they exposed how unprofessional of a shop they were by leveling accusations over Twitter [0].
I'll take scrollytelling at their word that they were doing this to take a stand for software copyright. Sure, I can respect that. But if you're fighting for a world where SaaS/PaaS developers are properly paid and valued, the most convincing victories are when developers (particularly ones that depend on open-source) and such platforms attract loyal, deep-pocketed clients who show everyone else that such a business can be viable.
This isn't like the case when The Oatmeal burned the HuffPo [1] for hotlinking. The Oatmeal presumably doesn't survive by syndicating to places like Huffpo. But clients who are somewhat unskilled at web production/hosting are the sole source of potential customers for ScrollyTelling, and ScrollyTelling demonstrated that it would rather burn them than mediate technical fuckups.
> ScrollyTelling demonstrated that it would rather burn them than mediate technical fuckups.
From what I understand, they tried contacting them directly, but were given lots of promised callbacks / actions that never materialized. Is your opinion that the "professional" way to handle that just to ignore it and move on?
I asked them on Twitter what the timeline was for the DMCA and they never replied. Their original post is vague on the timeline of when they attempted friendly contact and to whom:
So it looks like they've been emailing them at least before Aug. 28. But I disagree with the idea that there's nothing in between polite private emailing and then hostile subtweeting. Did Scrollytelling try the kind of gentle public shaming where they direct mention a few AJ editors about the matter? I don't see it.
Don't get me wrong, no matter what their intentions, AJ was in the wrong to host copyrighted frontend code, and in an ideal world, the wronged party shouldn't have to Google for Twitter contacts to get them to comply. But we don't live in an ideal world of instant feedback and retribution. Scrollytelling has the right, of course, to blow it up as they did. I'm just pointing out that it was not just limited to surrender vs. going nuclear on the blogosphere. And in the media world, media people are very quick to act on Twitter, even when they don't respond to emails. I once complained on Twitter about WSJ's paywall and immediately got a response from the executive editor of the WSJ. It ended up with him blocking me for probably being snarky, but the point is that media people up the chain can be reachable without Herculean effort.
And if you are a company whose customer base is completely reliant on media clients, it seems prudent to go for the constructive public outreach way rather than jumping right into "FUCK YOU PAY ME" discourse, especially when it seems that incompetence and not malice is the cause.
This is a good summary. Their market is not very big and they really need to face what the market realities are, however unfair they may be. Which means acting in a constructive way. Snark is very much the last thing that comes to mind when I see "professionalism".
Meh, I think "professionalism" just means "following the social rules corporations want you to follow", so I don't much care. I don't really think there's a good "professional" way to handle this situation.
But as for how I'd handle this situation as a person, I'd consult a lawyer, and if a cease and desist wasn't likely to work, yes, I'd just ignore it and move on. Shooting yourself in the foot out of revenge isn't good for anyone even if you also manage to shoot the person using your content.
On the other hand, the idea that large entities should be able to get away with "small" transgressions just because it would be too costly than is worth it to pursue litigation isn't exactly the best situation either.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but I can definitely see people at a large company working that sort of logic into their decision-making process. If all they had to do was ignore the "small guy" and he would eventually go away (due to the cost of long-protracted legal battle against an opponent with deep pockets), then they would.
Arguments between people are best kept off Twitter, period. Once they get on Twitter not only are both sides forced to become defensive but the Twitter mob / cult of popular uninformed opinion gets involved and rocks start getting thrown. Adults should know better. If Al Jazeera did not respond to private inquiry THEN perhaps it would be justified to use a public medium (as that would be the only medium available) but that did not happen.
Over what period of time? It seems like many of these Twitter shamings happen after someone doesn't respond within 48 hours or some silly arbitrary small timeline and then said company likes to rush to Twitter to try and get the mob to sort it out for them.
About 15 days. They started contact on August 28th.
It's not that long in the business world, I'd personally wait about 90 days before making a public stink about anything except something that'd terminate my company before then.
> They should have handled this matter in private instead of blogging about it.
But they tried that first? From the first blog post:
> Hidde promised to resolve the situation. In addition we contacted you directly too. After waiting patiently we received no response. After many tries through your editorial office we got hold of an editor who promised to return our call. This never happened either. As a final measure we sent you a DMCA takedown request and waited patiently. No response.
They tried to handle it privately and were rebuffed: "we exhaustively tried to resolve the situation amicably, but our friendly requests over multiple channels were ignored. The DMCA request was our last resort." (from the first article)
They contacted Hidde who was the person who did this, and he said he would take care of it.
They then moved on to AJ whom they have no relationship with. They got a response back, but not to the speed they wanted. No idea how long this was from the article.
Their name is apparently "scrollytelling", not storytelling. FWIW I misread it as that the first time this issue aired, I only just noticed it this time around.
The value we add is not in the software we use. Far from it. RedHat does just fine too, even if you can download the distribution for free. There's room for both models.
Besides, it's far from a secret that we're standing on the shoulders of Pageflow. It's on our homepage, and we have a good relationship with them. We are overall #5 contributor to Pageflow: https://github.com/codevise/pageflow/graphs/contributors
Al-Jazeera had been using Pageflow for a long time and it's great that they continue doing so. This outcome is perfect as far as we are concerned!
Do you think the infringing code would have been removed without public shaming? Not necessarily out of malice, but in large organisations these matters tend to be forgotten or idle for a long time.
Anyway they did try to settle things amicably, to no avail.
I agree that it seems to be a case of miscommunication and It's-not-my-job syndrome at AJ and its partners. But unless there's a huge burden in hosting costs -- and the fact that scrollytelling didn't break the hotlinks (nevermind that the story didn't seem widely shared in the first place) seems to suggest that they weren't huge -- it doesn't seem necessary to escalate this in the way that it was.
> @Hiddemhigh poor form to actively link to a stolen ripoff of our code. cc @martijnvtol
I've had luck communicating with media folks by prodding them on Twitter, e.g. "Hey @editor, who is the best person to talk about etc etc". Did ScrollyTelling do that? Was it necessary to jump from private prodding to hostile accusation via subtweet?
I took an ethics course a few years ago and we had many discussions on what were the pragmatic options for improving ethics around the world. One of the most popular was "public shaming" both for governments and corporations. My problem with this was the fact that governments and corporations are always made by people and a public shaming campaign would always end up as a witch hunt of a particular person. When an individual witch hunt is combined with a relatively misinformed mass of people the outcome is often unjust and can lead to violence, that because it was 'approved' by the masses, is deemed ok. I don't think it is.
Now in this case the public shaming seems tame and does not seem to have devolved to individual witch hunts. But look no further then 'dongle gate' where a single twitter post led to two relatively innocent people being fired (neither intended the consequences of their actions IMO) and you can see where public shaming in general gets us.
Yeah, honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Al-Jazeera thought they were using the open source version and were in the clear legally and thought the whole DMCA was a bogus attempt to extort them.
With all the kerfuffle, I would not have imagined it would be so easy to replace.
So, after poking around, it looks like pageflow is the actual creators of this stuff, and scrollytelling, has built a business around supporting it and hosting it?
While concurrently, it appears pageflow can also be paid to support and host their own product?
Weirdly, pageflow appears cheaper too!
Am I missing something? Would this be equivalent of someone opening up a competitor to wordpress.com, powered by wordpress?
There was quite a common scam a while ago about selling open office.
It actually was completely legal because they were (in the fine print) selling support - the software was free, of course.
A lot of bigger companies sell support for OSS products they don't build. This can be legitimate. It just depends on how forthright you are with who built what.
They don't have to sell support. One is allowed to sell open-source software. (One of course has to comply with any relevant license requirements when distributing).
Right. Copyleft licenses (the GPL and the like) only require you keep software free as in freedom, not as in beer. You can sell the software just fine, so long as you provide the source.
And non-copyleft licenses let you do whatever you want. You can take non-copyleft open-source software, add your proprietary junk and sell it at a killing, if you want. You don't even have to provide the source.
You sound like selling an open source software someone else made is inappropriate. Apparently nothing is wrong with that as long as the license is applied.
What's inappropriate here is he did not allow his clients to redistribute and modify the source even though his work is based largely on an open source project.
It's a common business model and there are loads of companies that offer WordPress hosting with various management services to compete with WordPress.com
Companies take open source software and package up management, hosting, and consulting services. That's basically what Red Hat does, for example.
This isn't a good example - WordPress.com doesn't offer the same product as other WordPress hosts. With the latter, you're still getting "self-hosted" WordPress, but with the former, you're getting one install added to their giant multi-site installation (and all the limitations that that imposes).
So while many hosters will offer a single instance (as it's more flexible), some, often companies doing it internally will use multisite just like wordpress.com.
They downplay it, but this situation was exactly what I said it was the other day: AJ syndicated a piece from another outlet with whom they had an agreement, and they understandably thought that the layout was part of the deal.
Ultimately, it sounds like someone screwed up and used a tool they shouldn't have to build the layout. (That tool being Scrollytelling.)
The lesson here, apparently, is that if you're syndicating content, open-source tools are best.
Yeah this outcome should ensure that no outlet will publish with the proprietary platform again, and that there are controls in place to ensure that it is not available for that to happen.
The "guilty" party in this scenario also seems to be EJC for not properly licensing the original content.
Edit: It also seem very reasonable to think that AJ thought scrollytelling was simply a host of the opensource resource, and removed all links backs except the CDN file that was obfuscated.
After looking at scrollytelling.io, I am now even more confused about their claim. Their pricing model is based on hosting, with bandwidth and upload limits. Along side that monthly hosting service they offer a one off service for "in-house production" of a story. So. Their model is to collect the production fee for a one off or let the user "produce" the story and profit from the volume savings on hosting.
I can not determine how in either model having the story that has already been paid for hosted remotely would be not a good thing, unless there is a license were somehow scrollytelling retains the ownership of the product they were paid to produce.
I am not sure why they would want to bare the cost of an AJ level distributed, if they are a hosting company. But, if they are a content creation firm maybe they are not actually creating content for the purchaser, but allowing the purchaser to use scrollytelling content, which the purchaser already owned?
Edit: In short I don't understand why the purchaser would not be able to redistribute.
Anyways, I have no idea how the model works inside its industry context, and if I am confused even with the current context provided by the OP, I can not imagine that a journalist would not be.
As far as I can see, ScrollyTelling offers as a base service, an editor for creating content and hosting of said content. This template and editor allows a non-web-dev to create scrolly-format multimedia stories fairly easily with the additional convenience of online hosting.
The journalist has to come up with the content and multimedia assets themselves, unless they hire ScrollyTelling to do it. I'm assuming that's not the case here as most independent journalists who cover these kind of stories are capable of collecting video/photos and writing text themselves (I mean, that's the whole damn appeal of being such a journalist).
So this journalist "sold" the story to one outlet who already had a hosting deal with scrollytelling. Then the journalist sent the story over to Al-Jazeera -- I'm not sure if anything was really "sold", per se, as Al-Jazeera has a syndication relationship with the original outlet. Either way, someone at AJ thought this meant that the assets that the original newspaper paid for was fair game, and then apparently decided to copy some and hotlink other assets from the newspaper's site.
Neither the newspaper nor the journalist nor Al-Jazeera realized that the CSS design (like the little dots used to navigate) and cloud storage was meant to be redistributed. Sure, that's on them, and AJ and the other parties are definitely at fault for not acting sooner. But I could easily see this as being a case of each stakeholder thinking that it's the other parties' job to deal with what seems like a confusing technicality. And this is a case where the stakeholders are a freelancer, a Dutch newspaper, and a global news network, three entities that normally have communication problems.
I agree that ignorance of scrollytelling existence was the most likely cause for the situation.
If you put the CDN bandwidth tester file aside.
Wouldn't a paying client of scrollytelling be able to distribute that product (CSS included) if they wanted to? If their platform is a content creator/editor then the purchaser should be able to redistribute, and if they are a production shop then the same would be true. If not wouldn't it be similar to photoshop or sublime claiming copyright on something created with those tools, and if they are a production shop something similar to a commercial studio claiming copyright to something they produced and then sold to someone after they resold it.
I understand they are providing a service and a value add, but wouldn't the output belong to the purchaser? I assume scrollytelling could have a very onerous license that prohibits this, but it seems if their customers knew those limitation they would probably be hesitant to purchase.
I'm assuming that scrollytelling has this as part of their terms. I mean, that's the only way to get customers to pay the €399/month subscription fee [0], which seems to be the minimum offering, i.e. there's no plan for just using the editor and then exporting it as flat files that can be uploaded to any file server.
I don't really understand the negativity towards scrolytelling in other comments here.
They are providing a hosting service and product, based on Pageflow. Which is mentioned right on it's homepage!
They contacted Al Jazeera directly and were brushed off (can easily happen in a large company, doesn't imply malice).
The page would probably never have been taken down without the media coverage. And said coverage might have informed some devs about Pageflow, but it's also good publicity.
People often forget that one actually has to make money too. If you do that based on an open source product without violating any licenses, and even contribute back, why not?
They have every right to shame companies using their product without paying for it.
We're not embarrassed, and the_duke's comment is spot on. It's not a secret we're built on Pageflow and I am the #5 overall contributor to it. We exist thanks to Pageflow and will do everything to promote it. We've referred many leads to pageflow.io. There's plenty of room for both models to happily exist!
For anyone else that doesn't know what it means to come in fifth place: 786 commits by the lead developer, then 58, 46, 34, and finally 24 by yours truly.
Given this is in fact the source code that the developer in question has admitted was the basis for their code, it would be interesting to know if they were correctly using the MIT License here:
https://github.com/codevise/pageflow/blob/master/MIT-LICENSE
i dont think its fair to accuse and scold scrollytelling.
On their homepage they have a tech section where they state:
"Our software is built on top of the Open Source version of Pageflow. We are committed to giving back to the community, which is why we are active contributors, and have open sourced our software too."
and they have put a lot of their software up on github.
Yes, this is very similar to Wordpress companies. However it is still their source code, and scrollytelling's webpages are better... dare i say.
Was this a marketing win? Scroll telling got their name out there, but al Jazeera response was that they apologized and switched over to the free/open source equivalent to their product.
"Al Jazeera used our code without permission, so we made them switch over to a competitor, showing everyone how trivially interchangeable we are, and we're telling you about it!"
I'm not blaming scrollytelling for making the claim, I'm blaming them for making Al Jazeera switch to a different tool, rather than asking them for a testimonial and some credit on the article page, which would have been much better marketing.
Scrollytelling would have written much the same post, except "AJ was using us in an article without their knowledge, we asked them to credit us, they did, and gave us this awesome testimonial as well".
Seems like a one-time marketing win in the form of a couple blog posts, and also they chased away what must be one of their largest and most visible users.
This alerted to one the existence of one of the companies. This is a data point for good behavior for each company.
In the future if I need either of the companies products, I might consider them.
I guess that is a win, but then again I am not likely customer in the first place.
It wasn't good behavior for each company though. Scrollytelling really rubbed their noses in it, and almost seemed to take some level of joy at repeating back their ethics statements like a college newspaper would.
All that tells me is, you can never trust doing business with scrollytelling.
Per posts yesterday Scrolly said they tried to notify them by email and were met with silence. This is probably a bad point for AJ, then Scrolly did what they could and published.
Per the discussions here yesterday Scrolly hadn't included that in its first draft. Once alerted by this bigger publicity AJ fixed their stuff and responded professionally.
There are several faults here, on both sides. But much can be attributed to the simple mistake that people make when trying to get work done. There was clearly no conspiracy, No one intentionally hurt anyone, no one had to take it all the way to way, and I don't remember any unreasonable threats of legal action.
This could have been much worse and I have personally dealt with much less reasonable companies trying to screw me harder.
I don't believe there was a conspiracy, or that anyone was intentionally hurting someone.
Scrolly assumed bad faith in their initial post.
"In other words, our code had been stolen, by you."
Then they got ahold of the person who caused this mess, and he said he would resolve the situation.
"We contacted the author of the piece, Hidde Boersma, who told us he sold his piece to you. This is fine. Our source code however was not included in the sale, nor could it have been. Hidde promised to resolve the situation."
Then they contacted AJ, who didn't respond back quickly. They had no relationship with Scrolly, and it's not unreasonable that this didn't get taken care of. Hidde was their man.
"In order to clarify any potential confusion on your side, here is what we were confronted with."
Dramatic language.
"In the long run, it’s likely to have been a lot more expensive to have a developer copy our code, copy the assets and put these on a server. The links not only had to have been updated by hand, inside the document, but someone would have had to un-optimize our JavaScript code, and do all the other work that allows the production to be somewhat available.
They didn't even do a good job. They did not rip many images, leading to a bad experience for your readers:"
Just being dickish, to the party that wasn't aware of Hidde's issue.
"To add insult to injury, you didn’t do a great job at ripping the code either."
More dickishness.
"Al-Jazeera, we know you understand all about journalistic integrity. You have a whole section of your website dedicated to it. The first point states:"
This is college newspaper level lame writing. You'd almost expect it to have read,
Webster's dictionary defines "ethics" as....
I'll stop now, but I don't see two parties coming out of this looking professional and reasonable, just one.
Wow, making a claim who broke the license is rubbing nose?
If voicing the wrongdoing makes a company untrusted, I have no idea your view of trust. Maybe someone who can keep wrongdoing a secret is more trustable.
They did, the initial article was really unprofessional.
I didn't say voicing wrongdoing makes a company untrusted, but instead that doing it in an unprofessional way makes you someone that I wouldn't do business with.
Its almost like you expect perfection and a complete lack of mistakes from companies despite the fact that companies are made of people like you and me.
If a group is willing to acknowledge a public mistake and fix it that is great news to me. So many fear critique like yours and would rather keep doing something wrong than fix it.
I certainly wouldn't use a product that could run the risk of having my company publicly attacked by a vendor. I find it hard to believe anyone else is going to take that risk with scrollytelling.io either.
Exactly my feeling, you would never do business with anyone who would act this way in public. The risk is far too great that you trivially upset them, and they go on a similar crusade against you.
maybe all of this was planned in advance ...maybe just a big PR stunt that worked brilliantly. I hope the NYT steals the code from my website. I could use the pR
Maybe next time just email them before issuing a DMCA request, and assume charitable behaviour before evidence dictates otherwise? edit I was wrong, see below.
"In addition we contacted you directly too. After waiting patiently we received no response. After many tries through your editorial office we got hold of an editor who promised to return our call. This never happened either. As a final measure we sent you a DMCA takedown request and waited patiently. No response."
"Initially we were taken aback and confused. We knew there must be some mistake, so we quickly sent you a DMCA takedown requests and waited patiently."
They "clarified" it after a while, but if someone read the original version of the article and did not see the update, it could be easy to miss.
> [W]e quickly sent you a DMCA takedown requests and waited patiently
That makes it sound like the DMCA takedown was the first response -- I'm surprised that a gently worded e-mail wasn't tried first. "Hey guys, it looks like you are using this ... I'm sure it was unintentional, but .... "
The updated version does claim that they reached out before DMCA, but something still feels wrong... That is why I put quotes on "clarified" -- I don't think it really qualifies as clarification. I'm more of the belief that one of the two versions is factually wrong.
It did require going one beyond the linked article to be truly sure they had done so, though there was a hint in the mention of "diplomatic solutions."
