But the user does not go to NYTimes.com (or wherever), the app does, and gets the content and gives it to the user? If I were the NYTimes (or whoever) I would say that is "reproducing, distributing, transmitting, displaying, publishing or broadcasting" without their consent. It's not a portal to their website, it is taking their content, stripping it of all the revenue generating things they put with it such as ads and so on, and distributing it to a user. Stripping out pictures would in fact be directly altering the story so that in and of itself would clearly violate the letter of their terms of service.
Oh, great, so lynx is illegal, is that it? On any other simple browser older that the NYT's bloody online presence?
You position above is utterly absurd, and "terms of service" are not enforceable without a contract, afaik. Some countries do have crazy corporate-sponsored laws, though...
The important thing is: there is no legal standard for a web client. And any app which does not do caching is a portal to a site - those thinks formerly known as browsers become Apple's icrap got names changed. Therefore anyone should be free to create any web client to connect to a web server. What if a browser does not run scripts? That is the choice of the client, and the owner of the server cannot legally demand that it does. If the owners of a server want to restrict access, it's up to them to find a technically feasible way to do it. If they are publishing to the public in general and using a mix of open standards such as HTML et al, they cannot demand that its viewers implement specific portions of those standards. If said app changed the content, that would be different. But changing layout or stripping adds... so long as it is done (like in the noscript example) by not implementing some subset of the protocols is perfectly fine.
The most the server owners can do is to technically block access from specific clients, or sue someone who violates an actual written contract. I'm sure that any court case in any western country would eventually uphold that. But (as I mentioned above) the mental sanity and competence of legislators and judges is known to vary by country... it can get expensive to correct stupid, contradictory laws passed by some idiot.
If you have a couple hundred grand to spend on attorneys fees to test it's enforceability, then by all means!
1. GENERAL RULES AND DEFINITIONS
1.1 If you choose to use NYTimes.com (the “Site”, NYT’s mobile sites and applications, any of the features of this site, including but not limited to RSS, API, software and other downloads (collectively, the "NYT Services"), you will be agreeing to abide by all of the terms and conditions of these Terms of Service between you and The New York Times Company ("NYT", “us” or “we”.
The browse-wrap agreement, however, is really the secondary issue here. You don't need a contract to have copyright protection, and there is no question that a newspaper owns the copyright to its articles. This gives them a large amount of control over their respective "bundles of rights" that go hand in hand with the provision of content.
What do you mean by "the user"? "The user" never actually goes to any website, ever. The browser does. The browser "gets the content and gives it to the user". The user instructs the browser to visit some website (by clicking on a link or typing in a url) and the browser downloads the HTML from the website, interprets it, and displays the page. So where an HTML page would have text saying "<img src="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">", a web browser would replace that bit of text with the image that is located at "http://www.example.com/image.jpg".
In the app I'm talking about, the user would instruct the app to visit the website and download the HTML, but instead of replacing "<img src="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">" with the image, it just ignores it and carries on. (It ignores a whole bunch of stuff, not just images.)
If I were the NYTimes (or whoever) I would say that is "reproducing, distributing, transmitting, displaying, publishing or broadcasting" without their consent. It's not a portal to their website, it is taking their content, stripping it of all the revenue generating things they put with it such as ads and so on, and distributing it to a user. Stripping out pictures would in fact be directly altering the story so that in and of itself would clearly violate the letter of their terms of service.
Wouldn't that mean that text-based browsers or phones/devices that are physically incapable of displaying pictures would also fall foul of this?
This is discussed in even more detail in their terms of service. Bolded parts are where I think you might run into issues.
Spoiler:
2. CONTENT ON THE SERVICES
2.1 The contents of the Services, including the Site, are intended for your personal, noncommercial use. All materials published on the Services (including, but not limited to news articles, photographs, images, illustrations, audio clips and video clips, also known as the "Content") are protected by copyright, and owned or controlled by The New York Times Company or the party credited as the provider of the Content. You shall abide by all additional copyright notices, information, or restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Service.
2.2 The Services and Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Services (including software) in whole or in part.
2.3 You may download or copy the Content and other downloadable items displayed on the Services for personal use only, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein.Copying or storing of any Content for other than personal use is expressly prohibited without prior written permission from The New York Times Rights and Permissions Department, or the copyright holder identified in the copyright notice contained in the Content.
2.4 The Content of the Services is owned or licensed to NYT. Certain Content is furnished by the Associated Press and Reuters, which will not be liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions in any such Content, or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof, or for any damages arising therefrom.
Now perhaps you could have an argument that you are now downloading anything, you are simply providing a more expedient way for the user to download copies for their personal use. But forget the legal jargon for a second: Would the NYTimes ever make any money if people could do this? No. Your app, if popular, cuts into their bottom line so you would inevitably hear from someone's attorneys if your app became popular. Basically if you take content from any user's site and transmit it to someone else you are potentially opening yourself up to liability. This is different from a program which displays content like Firefox--what you're describing is slightly different.
Yeah, I mean, I am not downloading anything - the user is. The user connects to the internet using the app and downloads stuff. The user downloads it and stores it on the user's device for the user's personal use. I'm not taking content from any website, the user is. I mean, the app really does just display content -- except it doesn't display all the content, only the text.
If anything, something like Instapaper would more fall within the above, because in that, the website itself is downloading from [some website], and then reproducing it on its website in a different format. E.g. if you put http://www.economist.com/node/21528687 into Instapaper you get this: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http://www.economist.com/node/21528687&article=204802582 (hope that link works). That's reproducing the content, without the pictures, on its own website. The app I am describing doesn't even do that. The app is solely a client-side thing -- there's no middle-man or 3rd party website, just the user and the user's app on the user's device connecting to the website and displaying that website directly on the user's device.
If these guys can't get sued, when they're literally reproducing content on their own website, then I don't see how I can when I'm really just making a browser that only displays text.
I didn't have time to read the last few pages of this thread, but on the filtering of a downloaded webpage, to remove ads, doesn't that fall under "fair use" if that content isn't redistributed?
E.g. make a Firefox add-on that receives the webpage, and then with a toggle removes banners, but displays text.
Redistributing the text would be violating copyright law. But taking an excerpt for review is fair use. If it weren't, then people using highlighters on hard copies could be taken to court (ad absurdum). Providing that add-on is no sue worthy either, as long as it is designed so the user does the configuration (not the programmer).
I didn't have time to read the last few pages of this thread, but on the filtering of a downloaded webpage, to remove ads, doesn't that fall under "fair use" if that content isn't redistributed?
E.g. make a Firefox add-on that receives the webpage, and then with a toggle removes banners, but displays text.
Redistributing the text would be violating copyright law. But taking an excerpt for review is fair use. If it weren't, then people using highlighters on hard copies could be taken to court (ad absurdum). Providing that add-on is no sue worthy either, as long as it is designed so the user does the configuration (not the programmer).
What about PrintWhatYouLike? If a newspaper doesn't have a real good print-version you can use that to strip out graphical junk so you don't waste ink. Sometimes I use it to create PDF versions of articles.
What do you mean by "the user"? "The user" never actually goes to any website, ever. The browser does. The browser "gets the content and gives it to the user".
Yes... that's exactly what I said. Which could bethe problem if anyone wanted to bother you about it. If an app "gets" content it could, technically, be considered to be reproducing or distributing that content via this transmission process.
Look, I'm not saying this will happen. In all likelihood in fact, you will probably be fine and no one will bother you about your app. You may even win this hypothetical lawsuit if one ever happened! But, if someone wanted to bother you about it, there are a variety of ways they could interpret what you are doing and respond accordingly. I am simply informing you of this possibility since you asked. If you believe the risk is slim, I would probably agree with you. But if a website offers premium content, for example, and you give it away, then maybe the risk goes up. It depends. You do not know whose feathers you are ruffling on the internet sometimes.
And don't take current lack of lawsuits against a current program as evidence of immunity, this is a mistake. Just because a reviewer reviewed something does not mean that NYTimes' attorneys would be unable to pursue legal action against someone that corporate did not like, for example.
@Goodgame
Taking an excerpt of an article for personal review or education or news reporting purposes is fair use, I agree. I do not think a commercially available app or a program that distributes news articles would qualify, however. The end user might, but the app is a piece of the chain that needs to be analyzed. But things like adblock and ad removers and so on are another arena and are in a grey area and do not fall under fair use. (The ad and the content next to the ad are two different things.)
It's a bit nebulous how a host of a website or an ad company could go after people who strip ads out of content, since the ad is not the copyrighted part of the content being produced. I think the trend there is self-help--content providers who want to instill trust in their revenue streams simply have to look for either new creative ways to make you see ads, such as work arounds for ad block or whatever (I use ad block and some websites have figured out how to sneak stuff in, especially on streaming video) or popularize browsers that refuse to support blocking ads, such as Chrome. (Not a coincidence that Google, whose bread and butter is ads, is pushing their own browser that will never support adblock.)
Google is simply betting that the goodwill generated by the small amount of users tech-savvy enough to block ads is worth more than the ads they're blocking.
Yes... that's exactly what I said. Which could bethe problem if anyone wanted to bother you about it. If an app "gets" content it could, technically, be considered to be reproducing or distributing that content via this transmission process.
Look, I'm not saying this will happen. In all likelihood in fact, you will probably be fine and no one will bother you about your app. You may even win this hypothetical lawsuit if one ever happened! But, if someone wanted to bother you about it, there are a variety of ways they could interpret what you are doing and respond accordingly. I am simply informing you of this possibility since you asked. If you believe the risk is slim, I would probably agree with you. But if a website offers premium content, for example, and you give it away, then maybe the risk goes up. It depends. You do not know whose feathers you are ruffling on the internet sometimes.
And don't take current lack of lawsuits against a current program as evidence of immunity, this is a mistake. Just because a reviewer reviewed something does not mean that NYTimes' attorneys would be unable to pursue legal action against someone that corporate did not like, for example.
I use a 3rd party ad blocker (admuncher) because I find it has better features than in-browser plugins and I use 4-5 different browsers on a regular basis.
But Google only uses video on Youtube, which the adblocker addon for Chrome is able to block (but only Youtube video ads; all others can't be blocked). Why would Google allow their own ads to be blocked, but not anyone else's?
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