Tag: New York Times

Winer Celebrates Locking Out Users

Userland is apparently tickled pink at its exclusive deal to syndicate New York Times headlines.

I guess all of that talk about openness, avoiding lockin, yada yada yada is just so much marketing gobbledygook.

Leave it to Winer to spend months railing about standards and RSS and then reach a deal with The Times for proprietary headlines.

What shall we call this? The OneWayWeb?

It is this sort of attitude, more than any of the technical limitations of Radio (I post from four to five different computers on any given day), that will keep me from give Userland my $40 for Radio.

Dave Winer Drops a Stink Bomb

Dave Winer announced the “bomblet” he was hyping on his site yesterday — a parternship deal with The New York Times to syndicate NYT headlines through Radio. Uh, sorry, this is a step backwards. According to his promotional page on the partnership deal,

The New York Times feeds are only available for Radio 8 users. If you haven’t got Radio yet, you can get a thirty-day free trial. If you already have Radio, you can be subscribing to fresh New York Times headlines in less than one minute.

So you can have a syndicated NYT feed, you just have to use Radio 8.

If City Desk or Blogger or any of his competitors reached such an exclusive partnership with the NYT, Winer would be throwing a royal fit on his web site, complaining about how it locks users into a single vendor (which it does). Why start ghetto-izing syndication just when it’s taking off so successfully?

The only thing Winer’s announcement means is that the NYT is still clueless (and reaffirms a lot of suspicions people had about working with Winer on things like RSS 0.92).

Good Riddance Anthony Lewis, Part II

The last time we saw Anthony Lewis, he was using his last column as a New York Times writer to draw a moral equivalency between fundamentalist Christians and Islamic terrorists. Now, he’s doing a gig for Slate complete with race baiting. Talking about the recent controversy involving Harvard professor Cornel West, Lewis writes that,

What better whipping boy could we have to start this conversation than Harvard? The university that the right loves to hate. The extreme critics, like the Wall Street Journal, really pine for the days when there were few or no blacks at Harvard, when the undergraduates were largely stamped from the same upper-class and middle-class mold.

Ah, what a gifted writer and thinker Lewis is.

Creationism == Terrorism (Gag)

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis is retiring and I have two words for him — good riddance. Lewis used his last column as an opportunity to take a swipe at people who happen to believe that the Bible is literally true by comparing such people to the 9/11 terrorists. Lewis wrote,

I have been writing it for 32 years. As I look back at those turbulent decades, I see a time of challenge to a basic tenet of modern society: faith in reason.

No one can miss the reality of that challenge after Sept. 11. Islamic fundamentalism, rejecting the rational processes of modernity, menaces the peace and security of many societies.

But the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism is not to be found in Islam alone. Fundamentalist Christians in America, believing that the Bible’s story of creation is the literal truth, question not only Darwin but the scientific method that has made contemporary civilization possible.

Religion and extreme nationalism have formed deadly combinations in these decades, impervious to reason. Serbs in the grip of religion and mystical nationalist history killed thousands and expelled millions in their “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia. Fundamentalist Judaism and extreme Israeli nationalism have fed the movement to plant settlements in Palestinian territory, fueling Islamic militancy among Palestinians.

Fundamentalist Christians dare to question Darwin and the scientific method? But I thought the entire point of the scientific method was to question provisional facts and theories?

I happen to think the creationists are wrong, but to lump Fundamentalist Christians and creationists in with the 9/11 terrorists is absurd.

This argument makes about as much sense as does the argument by someone like George Gilder who points out that the worst human rights violations of the 20th century were all carried about by men who rejected Christianity — therefore, Gilder argues, it is atheism, humanism and paganism which are responsible for mass murder.

New York’s Homeless Family Problem

If you’re a New York Times reporter assigned to do a story about the rising number of homeless families in the Big Apple, it is acceptable to blame the rise on the booming/faltering economy (take your pick), landlord’s unwillingness to rent to families qualifying for Section 8 housing, but of course the one thing that is absolutely out of bounds is to highlight the perverse effects of New York’s bizarre system of rent control which provides a disincentive to create new rental housing and makes it extremely difficult for poor people to compete for existing affordable housing.

Supreme Court Erred in Freelance Decision

It was inevitable, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York Times v. Tasini was an enormous mistake. The Times and other newspapers took articles written by freelancers and included them in databases such as Lexis/Nexis or in online archives of their site. Unfortunately, they didn’t explicitly secure the rights to do so.

In fact the newspapers argued that they didn’t need to — that an online archive of The New York Times is no different than the microfilm archive that hundreds of libraries subscribe to. The Supreme Court disagreed, saying that an online database of old articles is somehow different than a microfiche or even paper archive.

There are two things you have to realize about this decision. First, the whole case generally weakened the position of freelancers. Personally, there was a newspaper I did a lot of freelance work with that, like other newspapers, decided it had to protect itself from such lawsuits and sent me a nice work-for-hire contract which would have granted all rights to the newspaper (I’d have needed their permission, for example, to reproduce my own work on my web site). Another newspaper I used to do freelance work for also sent me a work-for-hire contract. Both newspapers included letters to the effect that the only way to do business with them in the future was by signing such a contract. I passed.

Second, this really creates a legal minefield for small web publishers like myself. Specifically, it opens the door to the possibility that future technological innovations will also be considered substantially different from current electronic databases.

Suppose, for example, I reach an agreement with an author to publish an article on my web site. Do I have to get additional permission to make that article available over a cell phone web browser? Is an Avantgo version of my web site a simple revision?

This isn’t just a hypothetical question either. One group of people are freaking out over this ruling are e-mail newsletter publishers. Some of these people were distributing e-mail newsletters before the web really took off. Now, of course, many of them have gone back and archived their older e-mail newsletters on the web. But their agreements with writers only called for e-mail distribution. Do they need to go back and get additional permissions?

Many of them don’t even have any contact with the original authors and are making the same decisions as the Times — its easier to simply remove all potentially disputed material rather than try to track down freelancers and/or risk lawsuits.