DMCA Notice

Hi Delores,

I think the way to look at it is a tool - there are millions of feeds and web pages out there and being able to extract content from them is very useful. We use the code as part of another fivefilters.org application (PDF Newspaper) to create PDFs from independent media sites - that's very useful for authors and publishers (especially those who don't have the resources of the big media companies) to offer their content in multiple convenient formats. Many people integrate it into their news readers. There are many uses for it.

Most of the complaints come from people who've spotted their content republished on other sites - sites which have used the tool we provide in the process of republishing content. If someone uses the service to extract content and then republish it without the permission of the original author/publisher, then the original author/publisher might object (I say might because it all depends on whose content you're republishing and why). In these cases copyright holders typically ask the site holding the content to take it down. Sometimes they mistakenly assume that fivefilters.org has actually published the material. In any case, we do occasionally get emails from people who don't fully understand how the service works and what they can do about it. In these cases we have been happy to block URLs from the service.

But to say that a whole tool should be taken down because some people use it in the way person x or company y doesn't approve, doesn't make sense. If you apply that argument to many other tools we take for granted, we would have no copy and paste command on our computers because some people would argue that it enables people to easily republish copyrighted material. (You can probably imagine all sorts of other services that could be taken down based on this argument.)

Hope that clears things up a little bit. :)

Keyvan

Can you please give everyone else some insight about how to block people from getting the full RSS from certain websites?

Also, do you do anything to specifically stop people from using FiveFilters illegally? I did the following Google search and found over one million websites using your service for the distribution of copyrighted material: http://www.google.com/search?q="Five+Filters+featured+article"

A very simple, and honest, answer to the first question is: it's simply not possible to block people from getting full-text rss from websites. We are happy to block URLs ourselves, but we are not the only full-text RSS service (and certainly not the first - this type of service has been around since 2007). If you meant how to request a particular site be blocked from the fivefilters.org service, then the answer is to send me a message with the URL to be blocked. :)

As for your second question, I would ask: is it possible to use the copy and paste command illegally? And if it is, how would the creator of the copy and paste command prevent illegal use? Fivefilters.org works by processing requests for feeds. We simply cannot determine the intention of the person behind the request.

Alright, you second answer made perfect since. However, I don't think you understood my first.

I run a service similar to your and use the script you created. However, I am not sure how to prevent people who use my website from accessing the rss feeds of certain websites. So, basically I am asking how do you block your users from using FiveFilters to access certain websites?

Ah, I see. We do it by editing the config.php file. You can do the same, see line 52: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keyvan/fivefilters/content-only/annotate/11/config-sample.php#L52

Here you can specify a list of URLs (or parts of a URL), e.g.: $options->blocked_urls = array('my-important-site.com', 'another-important-site.net');

Hope that answers your question. :)