In addition to copying the code, they left some original asset urls in there as well. Which means that those come out of our bandwidth bill. So yeah ... we're a little mad. Not terribly so, though. Life's too short.
You absolutely should have included that detail in your article. It completely changes the story and it's highly unethical to exclude it.
It's still wrong for Al Jazeera to use your code without licensing it, but you need to let your readers have all the facts. Without that detail, I was rather curious why de volkskrant wasn't also upset.
At no point in his blog post was it even implied that the content was stolen, only the frontend code which appears to be generated by their proprietary frontend tool.
I don't think the blog post does anything unethical to not clarify this further as it seems fairly obvious the contention is about the code copyright and hotlinking.
I mean, with a sentence like this, it's hard not to jump to the conclusion that there's more than hotlinking and code copyright going on: "We know you love us Al-Jazeera, but stealing from us and then ignoring us is not the way to express it."
I wouldn't call them unethical, just incomplete. We have a case here where someone paid Scrollytellio to create a story in their content-management system. Their system is such that, to a layperson (which I assume the reporter is when it comes to webdev), the code and presentation is inextricable from the content.
The reporter was wrong, but that's just one level of confusion and ambiguity where it's possible to understand why AJ messed up. Even more confusing is that AJ itself uses the same open-source tech that ScrollyTelling does:
A web dev/producer at a media company not knowing the difference between the open-source code they've used in the past, and the modified version that a freelancer has given to them for this one package? Yeah, incompetent, but not malicious.
Again, it doesn't excuse AJ, their web producer, and the reporter, for not following up with more speed. But I can see why it's more likely that incompetency is the culprit and not malice.
But your post makes it look like AJ just came and ripped it off, whereas the original journalist was just selling it around and you knew it. That's really poor form. By all means publicize it if you think you're in the right, but don't "selectively report" facts on the ground. For a company working with journalists, I'd expect more integrity.
You must demand integrity from journalists; it doesn't mean you will get it, but you certainly should have expectations of decent moral fortitude, and complain loudly if that doesn't happen.
There are journalists fighting the good fight all over the world (Greenwald etc). They shouldn't be demeaned just because they have colleagues like Judith Miller.
Of course you have every right to fight for the fruits of your own labor. Good for you for publicly standing up against a thief, we'll see if Al Jazeera has any journalistic integrity - wouldn't bet on it. Scummy organization run by amateurs.
Yeah that twitter conversation seems to lend credence to the idea that the Dutch paper or the writer redistributed the story and attempted to bring the presentation with it. I would be curious to see the license that scrollytelling uses, as redistribution is such a key functionality of the industry.
If the Dutch paper did redistribute/re-license the story to AJ, and if that is in fact a violation of the scrollytelling license, then they(the paper) should be the customer that scrollytelling should be name/shaming and DMCAing. It is also likely that AJ views this(DMCA/blog post) as a upstream licensing issue, and the fact that they have a business relationship with the Dutch paper may lead them to take that up with the paper and not respond to scrollytelling. As, from AJ's point of view, they have already payed a license for the content in this scenario.
EDIT: If scrollytelling does not have a straightforward and integrated solution for redistribution licensing then this was bound to happen and probably has before, they just didn't notice because it wasn't an outlet the volume of AJ.
This conversation paints a different picture:
1. Did scrollytelling talk to someone privately before the tweet either volskrant or al-jazeera? Looks like they did and thing were being worked out before the put out a public tweet.
2. In the updated conversation it seems the reporter doesn't think any thing was wrong here and it was not his responsibility, which seems odd after said he was working on it back on 28th Aug.
So it looks like there was messup on both sides.
Though there are some things which are still not clear:
1. What were the specific terms of contract scrollytelling had? Did it in any form bar sharing of content?
2. Who was the initial owner of the contract - volkskrant or the reporter? If it was volkskrant, they have to talk to them first about allowing this to happen.
They are upset that their code has been used in production without their consent. I'd say rightfully so.
Also note that the twitter post is from August 28 and the blog post that was written is from today (September 18)
So it seems that Al Jazeera was not that interested in resolving the issue.
The post does mention a DMCA request, that Al Jazeera also didn't respond to. Those are meant to be dealt with (at least with a reply) in a 24 - 72 hour timeframe.
Except: it seems unlikely to me that Al Jazeera English is hosted in the US, which would mean a DMCA request is not legally binding for them.
Except: it seems unlikely to me that Al Jazeera English is hosted in the US, which would mean a DMCA request is not legally binding for them.
Technically, and as a layman, I'd say a DMCA takedown would never be binding, because that's a provision intended for public online service providers like ISPs and website hosting platforms. Al Jazeera, as author and editor of their own site, does not qualify for the Safe Harbor protection, and can be sued outright by the aggrieved party, even if they did take down the article in response to the request.
BTW, what makes a DMCA request binding for a company: does it have to host its services in the US, or would it be sufficient that it has a legal entity in the US?
I can imagine that many companies could have an office and a legal entity in US while the actual service is run somewhere else, and I'd think that DMCA would still be enforceable towards the US legal entity.
Good question! I don't know the answer, but I did find a forum comment by a host with servers in the Netherlands, Bulgaria & Ukraine who say they comply with DMCA requests because they are also a registered business entity in the US:
The original blog post does say that scrollytelling sent a DMCA to AJ. But, that was probably handled with, "what link is that DMCA on?", "Oh we payed for that license, ignore it and tell de Volkskrant"
How is Scrollytelling in this business without realizing that news outlets frequently syndicate their content in this way? Why put the reporter in the middle like this? It's bad form.
News outlets syndicate content under certain terms and conditions. Even if it's the reporter's fault for offering the code assets, it still required Al-Jazeera time and effort to rewire it for their own site, at which point someone should have noticed the copyright notice.
Well it's out there anyway, whether they like it or not, and they've made their point by now... now if someone is looking for the content and they probably don't speak Dutch, might as well make use of the situation?
This was added after the blog author was called out on misrepresenting the truth. In the first version, they did not mention the fact that the original writer had resold the piece to AJ, implying AJ were just ripping them off.
Since they didn't mention even an estimate of the server costs, it's safe to say that it's probably not large enough to cause a stir over, at least in comparison to the cost of what they'd charge for using their CSS and other front-end code.
They could've just denied access to the assets so that the AJ webdevs would have to recopy-refix them, while at the same time continuing the legal press. A couple of weeks is not a long time when going through the legal system.
I'm not saying that winning a lawsuit is the ideal situation. I'm saying it leaves open the possibility that someone with actual power at AJ notices the problem, gets things fixed, and says, "Hey, this is a cool product, can we talk about a long-term deal for future stories?".
Now they not have virtually no chance in getting AJ as a customer, which is too bad because AJ actually has money for these kinds of deals. But even if scrollytelling didn't want to work with AJ out of principle, they've now unnecessarily turned off other big media clients. Big media clients, i.e. traditional outlets with the morals, lawyers, and funds to pay for proper distribution contracts. These companies generally have lawyers who do not like dealing with vendors who litigate over Twitter.
This ... is not the best way to take advantage of what is basically a sales lead. After all, Scrollytelling is a small company with only a handful of clients, of whom De Volkskrant appears to the most important, so why barge in with DMCA takedowns and angry allegations before you have to?
This would have been a great opportunity to work through Scrollytelling's existing relationships with their clients (and their clients' reporters) to get in front of AJ and make a case for their platform (and only go for the lawyers if talks broke down). Instead they've now ensured that, regardless of anything else, at least one reporter is never going to use their platform again and is going to be one hell of a net detractor. For a small company, garnering a reputation as being troublesome loose cannons isn't a good way to grow market share.
It's worth noting that we didn't barge in with the DMCA, so I updated the blog post to reflect that. Besides, nothing wrong with a DMCA. It's a valid, and expected way to take down infringing content. Which Al-Jazeera chose to ignore.
We're not treating them as a sales lead. What they did is not a great start to a fruitful relationship. We just would like them to take down the infringing code and at the very least stop using our bandwidth for their stories. It's kind of ridiculous.
As you say, we're small. So when a large bully steals from us, that makes it okay? I really don't understand. People go to jail for copyright infringement but when Al-Jazeera does it to a small startup nobody bats an eye. We chose to speak up after it was clear that Al-Jazeera would keep ignoring our friendly requests and formal demands.
Ah, your update definitely clarifies the situation, and your course of action makes more sense.
I get the feeling that you've got a mismatch between your market's expectations and what you're providing -- they seem to think of your service as an authoring tool that gives them rights to the generated results, whereas -- as I understand it -- you see yourselves as a service provider that retains full rights. Given how low your price points are, I wonder if this experience might suggest a change in direction; for example, a more expensive tier that allows a client to repackage content for distribution.
Finally, I'm going to risk being a bit stentorian here and say that ethics in business is a one-way street; it puts a lot of demands (quite rightly) on us, but doesn't help when someone acts unethically and even unlawfully towards us. When it happens -- and it will happen, repeatedly -- you have to put aside any moral indignation and just focus on turning the situation to whatever advantage you can wrest from it.
In this case, what's your BATNA -- your "best alternative to negotiated agreement?" If, for example, your clients, their reporters, and AJ all ignore you, what is your best option? What course of action protects your rights without damaging your prospects and incurring needless costs? That becomes your new baseline and, combined with the other players' BATNAs, becomes the context in which you try to build negotiations.
Now that you've knocked on the door of legal with a DCMA request, you need to have an escalation path. My experience is that legal action is generally used to force negotiations, not end them, and a DCMA request is actually a pretty canny way of starting the process since it's short of actually filing a lawsuit. But if this doesn't lead to getting everyone in a room to discuss options, then you'll need to determine whether you have to escalate or break off. Difficult problem, really.
It would seem equally likely that your original client was the entity that performed the white labeling. In which case they white labeled the site, and sold that cleaned product to AJ. In that scenario, AJ never saw a copyright, and your client is not only responsible for the issue, but also for distribution of copyrighted material for profit, which may not be in the best interest of your business. You have not mentioned any communication with the original client, which I doubt is the case, but I would tread lightly as the Dutch seem to be pushing for criminal pirated resale guidance from the EU, unless you are comfortable with that escalation.
We've given serious thought to this issue but it really does not seem to have been the case. All our contacts have behaved ethically, unless they're lying to our faces, which I find very hard to believe. It seems to have been a rogue developer at AJ who chose to ignore established practices, and is now being kept out of harm's way (while unfortunately leaving the situation to exist). As far as escalating--well that can never end well, can it? I'd be okay (not happy, just okay) if they just took it down or moved all remaining assets over from us to them, so that it's no longer costing us out of pocket.
Was that necessary? I mean, at that point, how much resistance had they been giving you? They are in the wrong no matter what you call them on Twitter, but I can see them being even more recalcitrant after that. Having worked for and with media orgs, this feels like a classic case of crossed wires and ineptitude; the vast majority of editors and reporters at Al-Jazeera and elsewhere have no clue about what copying CSS/assets mean. That is, they think of webpages as being some immutable discrete package, as if someone had sold them a video.
Being a big news org makes them move a bit slower than is ideal. Throw in the factor of this being freelance work, and then the tech component, and yeah, I could see incompetency being the reason rather than malice. I agree with the original commenter that this was a possible sales opportunity with one of the few online media orgs with actual money and runway to try out different story-telling forms and vendors. This was a needless way to antagonize them.
More importantly, you've dampened the possibilities for other relationships to news orgs. Web devs/techies at media companies, having had to deal with a decade of Web incompetency by media cos, are likely to side with the possibility that this was an honest mistake. And these web devs are already reluctant to outsource content-production/delivery to a third-party. If they're ever asked about using scrollytelling.io vs. any of the other possible vendors, this incident is not going to weigh in your favor.
Safe harbor only protected hosts from content they were unaware customers were hosting. You can still be brought into the fray once you know you're hosting that content. E.g. Google search results may have a link at the bottom with a list of sites that were excluded due to DMCA requests (ironically I've heard people say it's a great way to find out links to legitimate pirated content)
Actually, the DMCA is evil. It was invented by evil men. It's been used countless times to terrorize people and maintain a corporate oligarchy. Nobody should utilize the DMCA, you should find a way to get the things you need without resorting to that particularly evil method.
There is some philosophical debate to be had regarding whether your code is deserving of copyright protections. Precisely what parts were duplicated? Just the CSS? Is there a better way to write those parts? If your way was the best way, copyright laws cannot prevent someone else from duplicating that method. This is known as reverse engineering, and is completely legal.
I'm a designer and developer myself so I understand your perspective, but you are not necessarily the righteous ones in a battle of good vs evil. It is definitely a blurry grey area.
Quite frankly, "code borrowing" happens everywhere in development. Most lessons on "How to learn to code" encourage people to explore other's code and adapt it for their own projects as a means to learn. The history of computing supports borrowing and adapting other people's code. You probably aren't aware of these things.
The Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA is extremely important to preserving the Internet as I think we all want it to be. It protects joesvideoshack.org as much as youtube.com. If you host a site to publish your own blog articles, I don't think you would want to be legally liable for the contents of someone's comment on a blog post.
Completely disagree with this, you handled yourself well and expressed yourself honestly and made an interesting PR case for yourself and your firm.
I'm inspired by how you stood up for yourself.
"a reputation as being troublesome loose cannons isn't a good way to grow market share."
They sent a DMCA notice that was ignored and are justified in being angry. Perhaps a reputation as someone worth copying who doesn't put up with bullshit is exactly the reputation they want vs. willing to roll over because we think we might make some money somehow, or want to win the approval of others.
There is a misconception that being "angry" is somehow a character flaw. We live in this world where everyone is pretending to be "happy" and we shame others for expressing anger.. Anger is a super healthy emotion and when acknowledged and not stuffed into your shadow it can help drive amazing progress.
Thank you! I also didn't see the DMCA takedown as especially angry or hostile. It's the established way to (try to) take down infringing content, not a lot of room for emotion that I see. For a person it's quite something to receive one, for a business with a large online presence not so much I think.
Even large companies do that. When a company I was working for began to grow, we got some contacts from Adobe etc. About "hey, you're using illegal copies and we can help you go legit."
Looks like a) journalists using their platform don't really understand what they are paying for [1]: a license to use the story platform, when they expect to use it as a content creation tool and fully own the result. And b) either Al-Jazeera has copied them before [2] or there is some mutual stealing going on...
> And b) either Al-Jazeera has copied them before [2] or there is some mutual stealing going on...
looking at the source and at what they are showing in the updated page of the eggplant story[1] they seem to be using an open source version[2].
I'd start serving hilarious, huge pictures of dicks and boobs on the dodgy asset links or injecting js that does silly (but not malicious) things to browsers.
That isn't directed at Al-Jazeera though. If they wanted Al-Jazeera to sign up, they would not have started with a DMCA.
This is pure marketing. They go out of their way to explain what features their product has and why it is beneficial to sign up. If they get even just 2 new sign-ups with this article, it has already paid off. The "our service is great!" message is not there to remedy things with Al-Jazeera.
This. It would have been perfect opportunity to pitch their product but decided to make a fiasco put of it. I'm surprised they didn't start serving dick pictures to Al Jazeera from their server to get even more attention and 'new customers' .
haha! I remember when there were blogs who lifted entire Something Awful articles but forgot to change the image links, so SA replaced the files with a big image that just said "STOP STEALING OUR IMAGES!"
If these guys were seriously angry at Al-Jazeera I'm sure they'd have done the same.
Just the words? That's weak. When someone used our large images in their signature on a popular forum (eating half our traffic cap), I found a quite disturbing public domain photo to use in its place. It stopped in just a couple of hours :)
Still, doing so as a business would be just stupid, frankly. Simply cut them off (send an HTTP error) and send them an email.
My thoughts. Why not just drop them an email, or call to ask them to remove it? It would be so much nicer, plus you could always send the DMCA afterwards and refer to your previous, "nice" enquiry.
Personally I'd try to first contact Al-Jazeera (in a friendly and direct way, not DMCA) before a name and shame. This could after all be the fault of some technical intern at Al-Jazeera who didn't think twice about ripping code. And I suppose DMCA notices are easily ignored if they come via e-mail.
Update: clarified that we exhaustively tried to resolve the situation amicably, but our friendly requests over multiple channels were ignored. The DMCA request was our last resort.
There are more specific details a little later in the article, and the line quoted in the parent post appears to have been amended.
Someone is interested in your product, even if they are ripping it off. The next step is to make them a paying customer and look at it as a chance to start something. Just because it started the wrong way doesn't mean it has to stay that way.
Yea, that was my first thought as well. Imagine this scenario playing out in international politics: "We'd like to trade with your country, and knew there must have been some cultural mis-communication when our diplomats met, so we quickly bombed your capital with nukes and waited patiently."
Lesson #1 - It will be hilarious when they'll discover that Al-Jazeera is actually paying a license to them. Just under a different name. (Yes, big international companies have many legal names and subsidiaries and buying departments).
Lesson #2 - Seriously. Do NOT let 20 yo bro-grammers handle the business and marketing.
Noone could care less about your code + The DMCA notice is plain silly. This is exactly how you SHOULD NOT handle business leads and customers.
1. As they are also host the content, I doubt their contracts are signed without knowing who will be hitting their servers. (How do you think they knew some random party was pulling from their servers?)
2. Seeing as they're a small start-up, the bro-grammers can do jsut fine without business and marketing. Which cannot be said about business and marketing doing well without bro-grammers.
3a. Who cares about what Peter Noone thinks?
3b. I agree, the DMCA is notice is plain silly, they should
have sued them outright as per breach of the issuing contract.
I almost cared until I read the snarky, passive aggressive tone this article took along with the fact that it intentionally attempts to frame the entire situation differently from how it actually happened. This is not randomly scraping some content and then re-publishing it. It's a contract dispute about whether the original publisher had rights to redistribute it. What a bunch of brats. Grown up. Yuck
I'm not saying it's not an option to consider, but starting out by engaging them politely is more likely to lead to a mutually-beneficial outcome than sending in the lawyers.
Obviously they do not, but did Al-Jazeera even know that the original came from there? They bought the story from the author. It is possible (even probable in my eyes) that they thought that all of the assets were included in the sale. It is possible (even probably in my eyes) that the author told them this outright (because he was mistaken). And if I'm running a company in a non-US country, a DMCA request is going straight into the round file. I'm sorry that people assume they can inflict their laws on people outside of their country, but it is not the case.
If you are in the business that storytelling.io is in, you have to assume that some fraction of people are going to make mistakes. You also have to assume that most of those people will not be in the US. Al-Jazeera is in Qatar. Qatar only joined the Berne convention in the year 2000. Their attitude toward a DMCA request is pretty predictable.
Honestly, I found the article insulting, myopic and reactionary. The imprecise (and legally incorrect) usage of the word "stealing" is simply used to justify their outrage. Even though they appear to have edited their page 2 or 3 times to improve the content based on suggestions in this thread, it still has no details on how the original transaction was handled (what did the original author sell?). There is no indication that storytelling.io made any attempt to rectify the situation other than sending an incorrect legal request and then complaining on social media.
To be totally blunt, if I were thinking of using a service like theirs, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole because they really appear to have absolutely no idea what they are doing on the legal front -- something which seems to be crucial to their business survival.
I hope they can figure it out. I'd start with realising that even when you are in the right, you can do the absolute wrong thing to try to correct it. This is going to happen again, so back up, take stock and ask yourself how you are going to improve your reaction next time.
Maybe they didn't understand they didnt have that legal ability...theyre used to work in a particular medium (text) where I'm sure they usually buy exclusivity and re-publish rights.
I use an extension called stylish, where you can pretty much inject your own css handlers for each website. I know its a bit tough to deal with but maybe someone can make a list which people can subscribe to just like the ad-blocking lists (eg. easylist).
When the victim thrusts himself into the public sphere, it's sensible to raise alternate hypotheses and call his story into question ... if only to conclude that he is, indeed, the victim!
This knee-jerk cry of "don't blame the victim" is just that: a knee-jerk response. Few people want to humiliate victims, but I don't see a reason not to ask pointed questions.
I mean no disrespect, but I think comments like yours lower the level of discourse and are pretty toxic despite their good intentions.
That's fine, I posted the story expecting exactly that. And to be fair our original post missed details that needed clarification. Always a tough choice between a short, shareable story and a longer, complete one. People have all the right to doubt our claims, and I hope I've been able to post sensible replies.
Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, the only country in the world with a major slavery problem in 2016; I don't think plagiarism is what you should be worried about.
Something feels off about this whole post, but can't put my finger on it.
For example, appears the company makes money selling their code to online newspapers, but when a major media company uses their code the response is to tell them to stop doing it.
I would be curious to see the take down notice that was sent literally said.
Right, that's obvious, just like it's obvious you'd call them up and sell them on paying you to use it, not tell them to stop via so legal notice that might not even legally apply to them.
So what's your move when they simply ignore your call and continue to use your work? After all, they got it for free, no one else seems to care, why should one call from you convince them to pay after the fact?
AJ is a professional company. If you read the other comments, which were posted after my comment, it's clear the developer made an agreement a freelance journalist, not AJ; which isn't even mentioned by the developer in the blog even though they're 100% aware of it. Given near the journalists or the developer have committed publicly to the terms of the agreement between them, I don't see the point in speculating what their agreement was; I do know on GitHub that the developer use the MIT license for some other code, which would have allowed the journalist to reuse the code where ever they wanted.
As for what to do, volumes of books are published on the topic. If the content was hosted in the US, the next step would be contact the ISP that's hosting the content.
What's up with the Al Jazeera logo with swords underneath it? Might be misunderstanding but I thought misappropriating branding logos was usually something that was a touchy subject (i.e., no license to modify the brand logo).
Whoa ... I'm sure you've thought about changing the urls of your assets and update you code before publishing it again, then why haven't you done this ?
Probably because they are trying to open up an account for them, rather than Al-Jazeera stealing their code. Changing the URLs would probably make them angry/upset and not thinking about making business with Storytelling
I've thought about this but that does not move the discourse forward at all and it hurts the readers of the story. We're not here to make anyone upset, least of all readers of the story. We'd just like Al-Jazeera to not leech off our bandwidth bill. And if they want to come on board, that's awesome. Still welcome.
Dear Al-Jazeera: 1) instruct your developers to only use open source code so as to avoid situations like this 2) slideshows are terrible, lots of work for viewer to get through. text or video work great, stick to them, don't use a format only suited for demo-ing the limited capabilities of cd-roms circa 25 years ago.
How does one scroll on a laptop without the browser's scroll bar on the right? What's the point of the "software" if you take away the base feature of a browser?
Good luck enforcing an dmca on a website code vs a foreign company. The court history of such cases is rather funny. From cases thrown out of the court, to unenforceable defaults
Not to mention, a "company" owned by the government of Qatar. You couldn't hope to enforce this against a private company in Qatar, and there's no way you'll enforce it against a national government.
But I wouldn't be surprised as it's a "scrollytelling" website, which is probably made to hijack lots of browser controls, especially those to do with scrolling. We all hate it, but I guess it looks cool if you're trying to be a modern newspaper.
I highly doubt that plagiarism is taking place. I bet you that the original outlet simply gave AJ permission to use the article's content and template.
Do you have some special knowledge to indicate that this was done with permission?
When reprinting it's common to include a 'with permission of' or 'originally published in' or especially 'translated from the original'. I might have missed it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't there.
I've been watching and reading AJ (in both Arabic and English) for >10 years, and I've never seen them do something like this i.e. blatant plagiarism. Actually, I don't think any reputable news org would ever do that on purpose.
They sell a product. That product is the ability to produce beautiful stories for online publications. There is code in there, and because of the poor copy, it's obvious that the code was stolen.
But, what I don't understand is, why didn't they call it plagiarism, which is usually what you would call a copied story.
both are copyright violations, but is one worse in terms of law?
Yeah, despite even the SCOTUS making that clear[1], many people still use that manipulative technique. Still, in this case AJ actually used resources hosted on Scrollytelling's servers, so I supposed they can be said to have stolen the bandwidth.
[1] From Dowling v. United States:
"It is less clear, however, that the taking that occurs when an infringer arrogates the use of another's protected work comfortably fits the terms associated with physical removal (...). The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."
It's owned by the Qatari government; I'm not sure why anyone should trust the independence of a news outlet owned by a foreign democratic government, nevermind Qatar's [0].
But then, a shocking number of people seem to love Russia Today in the UK, so it really is a sad state of affairs.
EDIT: I understand the comparison to books and other creative works. However, many writers don't outright copy someone else's work word for word, they appropriate the tone, style, setting, etc.
The point I was trying to make is that front-end devs are like the creators of Stranger Things. We may not outright copy code character for character on the front-end, but we sure do give a lot of nods to the greatest hits. And the web is a better place for it
Isn't the entire point of copyright to protect things that people put "out into the world"? Proprietary server-side software is already a trade secret, but creative works that must be published to have any use at all (like books, newspaper articles, and client-side software) is properly protected by copyright.
Even if you can read the details, the copyright still stands.
You do not need to compile/obfuscate your work in order to have it be protected by copyright.
If I'm in the jury and I can easily cut/paste - than that is on you. Obfuscation has to get better in HTML5.
There are now some paid tools that obfuscate CSS and HTML5 variables, not just Base64, and inject that it can run on only one domain.
Android applications are compiled, so they can be obfuscated. Web applications do not work that way at all, and proper obfuscation is impossible. There will always be a way to reverse this, and the actual content shouldn't be obfuscated anyway, as this would have severe negative effects on SEO.
Other than that, just because you can steal other people's hard work doesn't mean you should.
> If I'm in the jury and I can easily cut/paste - than that is on you.
A copy-paste litmus test is silly. You don't get to copy and paste Harry Potter just because it's in plaintext. Creators don't surrender their rights just because it's easy to steal them.
Actually, I managed to reverse all of the Google apps as compsci student in a matter of weeks, within the legal boundaries, and write specifications how to write apps to replace them.
Android is far less obfuscated than most stuff on the web.
