My thanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oursin for flagging up the FriendBlab incident. Briefly, for anyone who hasn't picked up on this yet: a Canadian guy called Randy Charles Morin has built a website called FriendBlab which has scraped a huge number of accounts on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal and other sites, and done this in a way that makes it appear that the users have set up accounts on FriendBlab. At the moment FriendBlab is offline; it seems to have been taken offline by the ISP, GoDaddy, after complaints from DW users began to flood in yesterday. There are, however, a number of page caches still visible on Google.
I don't know whether my LiveJournal or my journal on Dreamwidth have fetched up on FriendBlab. I can't find them in the Google caches, but it looks as though it is a couple of weeks since the googlebot last spidered the site.
A number of people are arguing that what Morin is doing amounts to copyright violation. Others have pointed out that he seems to be aggregating public feeds of various kinds, including RSS feeds of journal content. I frankly do not know what the legal position is over that, but I have taken the precaution of changing the RSS settings on my DW and LJ accounts. For anyone else who wants to do this, here is what you can do.
On Dreamwidth it is very easy. When logged in, click on the Account settings link at the top of the screen. Select the Privacy tab, find the Syndication Level setting, and choose between the options offered in the drop down menu. I hesitated over what to choose, but I have now opted for 'Title Only'. 'Brief Summary' is also an option: it serves up the title and the first few lines. The longer the entry the more lines it serves up.
The information about what to do on LiveJournal is buried in faq no. 149. Under 'Feed Content' it explains:
Whether Morin is simply displaying the contents of public feeds is a bit of a question. There is at least one report that material hidden behind cuts was being displayed publicly on FriendBlab despite the fact that the user had opted for the DW setting 'Cut Tag', which is only supposed to display the post up to the first cut tag.
There are also some even more worrying reports that some of the posts that were displayed on FriendBlab were locked posts that should not have been part of any public feed.
I note that RSS feeds on LJ and DW are limited to the last 25 posts. (The DW faq says 'only entries from the last 14 days' but that is demonstrably not the case.) Whatever the legalities are over reproducing RSS feeds, if Mr Morin is retaining the material in the feeds and aggregating it for continued display he seems to me to be breaking at least the implied terms on which RSS feeds are made available. I can't tell exactly what he is doing since I have only been able to see the Google caches.
For anyone who wants to dig deeper,dingsi has collected a lot of information and links. elf has dug into some of the history of the FriendBlab site. jenett has posted a very useful account of feeds, DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices, and other related matters.
Will FriendBlab reappear online? Hard to tell at this point. Here's a piece of advice though: if it does reappear, and if Morin scrapes/has scraped your journal, don't fall into the trap of signing up to a FriendBlab account in the hope of regaining control. Morin's Terms of Service are still visible in the Google cache. This is part of what they have to say about copyright:
They contrast very strikingly with the DW TOS: 'We claim no ownership or control over any Content that you post to the Website. You retain any intellectual property rights to the Content you post, in accordance with applicable law.' And the LJ TOS: 'LiveJournal claims no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users.'
Here is another interesting bit from Morin's TOS:'the entire contents of FriendBlab are copyrighted as a collective work under the United States copyright laws'. US copyright law has many puzzling features to a British eye, but does it really permit anyone to copyright a mass of material they have scraped off the web without permission?
Modesty is not among Mr Morin's weaknesses. In a post on his blog www.therssweblog.com (cache; original is currently offline) he refers to himself as an 'uber-geek': 'The last week or two, I've been playing extensibly with FOAF (Friend Of A Friend). … This is a great idea and something we really need to tie the Web together and make it work the way us uber-geeks invision the Web working.'
A few days later, on the same blog, he remarks: 'If you look, there's neat little XML Web services all over the Internet. And behind those Web services is data. Also known as virtual gold.' Mr Morin is a would-be gold digger.
Another of his blogs (also currently offline) is at www.webvertization.com. (Cache of recent entries.) Most of the recent entries seem to be about the success or otherwise of Mr Morin's attempts at making money online. He also offers advice on how to become a 'successful online entrepreneur'.
There is a Wikipedia article about Randy Charles Morin. It was first added to the site by user Randymorin.
Update: It looks as though Morin has abandoned the FriendBlab project. The home page is now headed: "Not under construction.", followed by a list of his websites. - 18 August
oursin for flagging up the FriendBlab incident. Briefly, for anyone who hasn't picked up on this yet: a Canadian guy called Randy Charles Morin has built a website called FriendBlab which has scraped a huge number of accounts on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal and other sites, and done this in a way that makes it appear that the users have set up accounts on FriendBlab. At the moment FriendBlab is offline; it seems to have been taken offline by the ISP, GoDaddy, after complaints from DW users began to flood in yesterday. There are, however, a number of page caches still visible on Google. I don't know whether my LiveJournal or my journal on Dreamwidth have fetched up on FriendBlab. I can't find them in the Google caches, but it looks as though it is a couple of weeks since the googlebot last spidered the site.
A number of people are arguing that what Morin is doing amounts to copyright violation. Others have pointed out that he seems to be aggregating public feeds of various kinds, including RSS feeds of journal content. I frankly do not know what the legal position is over that, but I have taken the precaution of changing the RSS settings on my DW and LJ accounts. For anyone else who wants to do this, here is what you can do.
On Dreamwidth it is very easy. When logged in, click on the Account settings link at the top of the screen. Select the Privacy tab, find the Syndication Level setting, and choose between the options offered in the drop down menu. I hesitated over what to choose, but I have now opted for 'Title Only'. 'Brief Summary' is also an option: it serves up the title and the first few lines. The longer the entry the more lines it serves up.
The information about what to do on LiveJournal is buried in faq no. 149. Under 'Feed Content' it explains:
By default, all of the entry text will be present; you can change that by going to the Admin Console and using one of the following commands:
set synlevel title
set synlevel summary
set synlevel full
to include the title (subject) line only, the beginning of the entry, or all of the entry, respectively.
Whether Morin is simply displaying the contents of public feeds is a bit of a question. There is at least one report that material hidden behind cuts was being displayed publicly on FriendBlab despite the fact that the user had opted for the DW setting 'Cut Tag', which is only supposed to display the post up to the first cut tag.
There are also some even more worrying reports that some of the posts that were displayed on FriendBlab were locked posts that should not have been part of any public feed.
I note that RSS feeds on LJ and DW are limited to the last 25 posts. (The DW faq says 'only entries from the last 14 days' but that is demonstrably not the case.) Whatever the legalities are over reproducing RSS feeds, if Mr Morin is retaining the material in the feeds and aggregating it for continued display he seems to me to be breaking at least the implied terms on which RSS feeds are made available. I can't tell exactly what he is doing since I have only been able to see the Google caches.
For anyone who wants to dig deeper,
dingsi has collected a lot of information and links. elf has dug into some of the history of the FriendBlab site. jenett has posted a very useful account of feeds, DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices, and other related matters. Will FriendBlab reappear online? Hard to tell at this point. Here's a piece of advice though: if it does reappear, and if Morin scrapes/has scraped your journal, don't fall into the trap of signing up to a FriendBlab account in the hope of regaining control. Morin's Terms of Service are still visible in the Google cache. This is part of what they have to say about copyright:
By submitting material to any public area of FriendBlab, Subscriber automatically grants, or warrants that the owner of such material has expressly granted FriendBlab the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate and distribute such material (in whole or in part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or hereafter developed for the full term of any copyright that may exist in such material.
They contrast very strikingly with the DW TOS: 'We claim no ownership or control over any Content that you post to the Website. You retain any intellectual property rights to the Content you post, in accordance with applicable law.' And the LJ TOS: 'LiveJournal claims no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users.'
Here is another interesting bit from Morin's TOS:'the entire contents of FriendBlab are copyrighted as a collective work under the United States copyright laws'. US copyright law has many puzzling features to a British eye, but does it really permit anyone to copyright a mass of material they have scraped off the web without permission?
Modesty is not among Mr Morin's weaknesses. In a post on his blog www.therssweblog.com (cache; original is currently offline) he refers to himself as an 'uber-geek': 'The last week or two, I've been playing extensibly with FOAF (Friend Of A Friend). … This is a great idea and something we really need to tie the Web together and make it work the way us uber-geeks invision the Web working.'
A few days later, on the same blog, he remarks: 'If you look, there's neat little XML Web services all over the Internet. And behind those Web services is data. Also known as virtual gold.' Mr Morin is a would-be gold digger.
Another of his blogs (also currently offline) is at www.webvertization.com. (Cache of recent entries.) Most of the recent entries seem to be about the success or otherwise of Mr Morin's attempts at making money online. He also offers advice on how to become a 'successful online entrepreneur'.
There is a Wikipedia article about Randy Charles Morin. It was first added to the site by user Randymorin.
Update: It looks as though Morin has abandoned the FriendBlab project. The home page is now headed: "Not under construction.", followed by a list of his websites. - 18 August