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.
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...
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/Hiddemhigh/status/777509638002634...
[2] http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2015/BanishedNepal/
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.
"We knew there must be some mistake, so we quickly sent you a DMCA takedown requests and waited patiently."
That does not seem like the best way to start a business relationship...
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.
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
> We knew there must be some mistake, so we quickly sent you a DMCA takedown requests
Is that really the most appropriate way to start?
Someone should make a blacklist with websites that hijack scrolling. Or an /etc/hosts.
I'm really shocked how many people here are blaming the victim here...
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.
Take down the AJ flag with swords. Russians will see it as someone is acknowledging that Qatar is supporting ISIS. I'm not kidding.
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 ?
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.
I would love to hear the AJ response to this. I hope they are allowed to make it public.
Homepage:
> We are ready for you hitting the big time. We make sure your stories keep being told, even if they're on the frontpage of The New York Times.
So they wouldn't have send the DMCA to NYT?
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
It might be wise to just hire an attorney and file a copyright infringement claim. You have a pretty solid case.
What's with the flag?
Scumb bags
This is slightly off-topic, but why does this website hijack the middle-click button? It's pretty annoying.
Arabs steal. That's not news.
Ooops
Nice storytelling. (couldn't stop it)
They also translated the whole article from De Volkskrant and used the exact same images. So, plagiarism and theft, nice.
Copying front-end code is hardly "stealing".
At best you can call them out for not properly attributing merit where merit is due.
You still have your code, so your accusations of theft don't really hold up.
> What Happened to Journalistic Integrity?
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
Each Andorid app is obfuscated by ProGurd.
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.
Did they do any of that?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Hiddemhigh/status/769636034749558... it appears the journalist works for both de volkskrant and al-jazeera. scrollytelling is mad that they haven't got paid twice.