Slaw Réchauffé
One of the Google alerts I run, well, alerted me to the fact that something called Sedna RSS is catching our RSS feed and in effect reposting Slaw. We’re only one of seemingly more than a hundred blogs warmed over by this French site? organization? person? — I can’t seem to penetrate to any explanatory page.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. We run over a Creative Commons license that lets our content be used for non-commercial purposes and in derivative works, so as it stands now there’s probably no copyright beef. (I think I’ll change the license so derivative works are not permitted. Fat lot of good it will do, of course.) But there’s something wrong about building your enterprise, free or for profit, on the work of others entirely.
Can other Slawyers discover who or what is behind this? How do you feel about it?
It may not be the first. There seem to be a few feeding our musings back to the universe: http://www.kbcafe.com/profiles.aspx/www.slaw.ca/feed/
the entirety of the content of each post is included in the slaw feed, but these services are only posting the description portion, with a link back to the original slaw post for the full content.
to my mind, if these services help someone to stumble across the blog, and don’t represent themselves as the originators, then i’m not sure that what they are doing is anything different than what google does in indexing the web.
one might even argue that the sedna service is actually do a better job of ‘indexing’ the site by providing a more extensive feed history than the current slaw feed. it’s pretty useful to be able to see on a single page how the blog has evolved over time without having to click thru to each post of the blog archive.
It looks to be part of a larger law portal or ‘juriblog” called Service Doc, created by Stephane Cottin. He lists himself as “documentaliste juridique. Actuellement chef de service du Greffe et de l’Informatique du Conseil constitutionnel” See: http://www.servicedoc.info/_Stephane-Cottin_.html
I think this is his work place’s main website: http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/
Perhaps if you email him, he would be kind enough to post an introduction here; you can email him via the page link above. (An aside: perhaps he would be willing to become a foreign correspondent?)
I don’t mind being reposted as long as no one is making financial gain and they are linking us back to our main site. Increased exposure (from Europe!) for us.
Wouldn’t hurt to revisit the Creative Commons license, as you imply Simon, to ensure this sort of thing is well-defined.
Hello from Paris,
So sorry if my way to syndicate your feed could bother you. I found the url of the rss feed on the frontpage of your website and I noticed the CC Licence (I use the same one on my site), so I considered as normal to syndicate your informations.
I used to put google ads on some portions of my website, but never on syndicated pages, and I gave up the commercial ads one month ago. I can understand the surprise of Simon Fodden because my “sedna” pages have lost their headers and all legal mentions : my website knows thoses days a complete reorganization, and I had not enough time (my wife will very soon have our 4th children) to rebuild all the pages of my personal website (www.servicedoc.info). This site is a kind of sandbox for my professional ones : a way to test several techniques with other colleagues librarians or information specialists. But this site has now 1500 to 2000 unique visitors a day. As Connie Crosby found out, I am the Head Registrar (Greffier en chef) of the French Conseil constitutionnel (mutatis mutandis the equivalent of your supreme Court), and I am (among other stuff) in charge of the intranet of my institution. I founded http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr in 1995, and helped at the creation of several official websites, for ex. http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr .
Sorry again not to have asked permission to syndicate your feed. I like to read your very interresting discussions, so may I officially ask to syndicate your feed on my sedna pages. As the 120 others feeds, I only take the “description” field and I don’t offer the full text of your posts, a link is done towards your original pages.
Yours
Stephane
Thank you Connie for finding Stephane, and thank you Stephane for writing. You have my permission and, I trust, the permission of all of us to continue as you are doing.
I think I’m coming to terms with the varieties of “re-broadcasting” that are out there, which range from “splogs” to technical experiments such as Stephane’s. Thanks, everyone who commented or wrote me.
Bonjour, Stephane! Et, merci!