May 27, 2007
Copycats, Innovators, or Rick-ripper-offers?
China Law Blog posted an interesting piece the other day, examining an NBC World Blog article which made this assertion:
China needs to produce businesses that come up with the kind of “path-breaking innovation” that he says begins with technological breakthroughs.
“There isn’t a single innovative Chinese company,” he adds, citing the country’s low rate of patent applications. At last official count, in 2004, China still only filed 2 per cent of the world’s global patent applications. Source
I think to say there’s not even a single innovative Chinese company is going a bit far. But given fact that there are 1.3 billion+ brains out there, and factor in the ammount of money it sinks into research and development — I’m sure China’s not where they want to be right now.
Especially since Japan is sitting at the top of the list of world innovators. And they spent less to get there.
Still, I wouldn’t dare say there’s no innovation in China.
But just when you thought it was safe…
That said, I appear to have become the latest victim of a certain not-so-creative (read: content-stealin’) Chinaman.
- See my Feb 23rd Post: Money Management in China, and in My Country
- Now check this out, from New China, New Chinese: Foreiner (sic) in China? Money Management: in China, and in my Country
Dude, that’s not cool.
Now if I submit my content to an aggregator like Chinalyst, no problem. But I don’t remember giving my consent before this one.
I feel so used and violated! 
But oddly enough, there’s a strange sense of post-violation satisfaction as well. 
Maybe I should have a smoke…
I think it’s hilarious. Good for them! They even ripped off Time’s China Blog. Now if they can just get the perfect Adsense…
Blimey, they don’t even link back, which is bad. Now if in the blogosphere we could get some kind of ‘backlash’ going before they get established…
Regarding permission: I was thinking about this in relation to what we’re doing on daliandalian.com aggregating news (with an editorial eye), and what I’m doing more conspicuously on chinawebmasters.org. But it’s different, as we don’t quote whole posts and link back – it’s traffic generation not leeching, and completely fair use.
Ripping off content is nothing new. Traditional media has been doing this for ages. Take a well written article in a semi-niche category (something that may not have already been widely read). Re-word it slightly, keep the same quotes, add some filler “China has 144 million Internet users” and an ambiguous attribution, and voila, it’s the same abuse, but this time it’s fair use and legal, still without a back-link to cited stories. Even modern Internet-focused sites like China Tech News don’t link back to original articles, which is pretty poor.
Backlash I say, backlash!
Ya. China Tech News is seemingly a great site. But I’m not entirely sure where they get their info from. I suppose it’s possible that if they are super well-connected, they might just be the mother of all primary sources.
I tried to comment on that “New China, New Chinese” site, but it appears I can’t remember my blogger password!
Ah well…
Splogs have been doing this to me for ages and it’s a pissoff. Not all too long ago a travel blog site started to import my entire posts. I complained to them and the webmaster told me that they thought it was fine because I use a creative commons license.
I explained to him that the creative commons license is for NON commercial use, and therefore if you start filling your site’s content with RSS feeds, and said site has Google ads or whatnot on it… it’s a violation of the license.
I’d be careful of this with DalianDalian. It can be a very volatile thing. It’s an area I’m always iffy of with Hao Hao as well, but as the principle of HHR is to generate traffic to other sites, I rest somewhat easier.
Ya. Daliandalian is kinda similar. Since the delicious links, once clicked on, go straight to the source. I sure it falls under fair use, in any case.
But yeah, it’s a fine line for sure.
Maybe it’d be better if when we tag delicious links, that we give an original summary (written by us) summing up what the article is about.
I think that’d take care of any doubts.
Original summary definately. As I understand that’s ‘fair use’ but quoting everything verbatum is not ‘fair use’.
Actually, I changed the aggregator software today to something more similar to Chinalyst – so when clicking on the title one gets taken to the short summary and the opportunity to make comments, but a link to the original article is clearly shown (and a 300 character summary is pretty light to be of any deep interest). What do you think?
Ryan: What was the outcome with the travel site?
Estradiol….
Estradiol. Estradiol pregesterone human pheromones….