Replies

I certainly respect any publication's wish to protect their copyright as they see fit. I won't argue that at all even though I feel like what we're doing is fair use. But the crux of the issue seems to be money. The offended parties can always claim that their chance at revenue reaped through advertising banners is lost when a person reads the article here on FR and not at the original website. That's fair enough and I can understand their perspective. But is there not a way to get around this argument? I mean, would there be a way to write the software so that every time a thread was opened, a seperate window was opened that led to the original? That way, they could still reap their economic benefit- in fact, they would probably find that their revenues were increased much like Drudge increases hits to websites by posting links.

Failing that, a program that allowed FR users to view the article at its source while at the same time allowing people to point to the article and post in the same window might be an answer. It would perhaps look like a split screen that the user could resize as wanted (the origin site could be a few pixels wide while the FR posts section would be dominating the page.) It is difficult to carry on a discussion about an issue when the center of discussion is not readily available to look at.

Surely some accomodation has to be found to allow people to discuss what they see written in the news. One problem that I find vexing is the fact that often the original article gets dumped at the source after a specific amount of time. For example, Reuters articles posted from Yahoo. From the Operation Iraqi Freedom timeline, these original articles are gone and I can only see them in their original version here at FR. In that sense, we are providing a valuable service to the public by archiving the articles. Many original Washington Post articles are no longer available at the WP as well and the pity is, we are not allowed to archive them here. The Washington Post was at the center of the misunderstandings surrounding the Jessica Lynch story. How are we to bust these guys and make it stick if we don't archive their material?