Follow-up on Interfacelift and their witch hunt

I had recently wrote a post about publishers going after syndication which was triggered by vague situation around my Media RSS enhancer for Interfacelift wallpapers feed.

I had since got clear explanation from Yahoo Pipes staff so I can evaluate this mess in full. :)

What it was

My Pipe was enhancing RSS feed from Interfacelift by adding group of Media RSS tags to it:

• type of media content (image);
• thumbnail link (already present in RSS);
• calculated direct link to image file, in chosen before subscription dimensions.

Functionally that meant such feed could be additionally used in MRSS-aware software, such as John’s Background Switcher, in addition to regular feed readers.

Aside from that feed was untouched, there were no edits, claims of ownership or any kind of online integration by me. It became moderately popular with multiply clones made by other users in Pipes system. Doesn’t surprise me – as far as I know Media RSS support is something that people were asking Interfacelift to implement and were denied.

Interfacelift action

Situation was stale for months. I had only done minor update on pipe when Interfacelift changed link format. I had to be alerted by Dan Rough about changes, because I wasn’t even using Pipe myself at that time.

Until Interfacelift made formal “copyright violation” complaint against me to Yahoo.

Yahoo response

• my pipe was silently deleted;
• as far as I know no clones of my pipe either public or private were affected;
• Interfacelift was provided with instructions (openly available anyway) on blocking Pipes system from accessing their site;
• I was not made aware of what is going on by either party.

Situation went completely over my head. I received no demands, messages or other information and had to sort it out post factum.

My biggest gripe was about my pipe nuked together with Media RSS code that took some effort to develop.

Fallout

Interfacelift:

• Pipes access blocked to site and feed;
• RSS feed crippled to single item;
• terms of service updated with change of anti-syndication reasoning from server load to lost revenue (something I pointed out in my previous post) and prohibiting direct linking to images, as well as integration in any online service.

Yahoo:

• I was provided with explanations and offered to restore my pipe to reuse generic parts of it;
• as far as I see – no other action and no gripe against my Yahoo account.

Me:

• I won’t make an effort to develop and publicly provide new solution;
• I am confident that Interfacelift won’t win such arms race – I made things public by openly sharing my solution but there are numerous alternatives any inquiring techie will discover and use if interested;
• Interfacelift showed no desire to communicate with me directly and went after my Yahoo account instead with bogus (as for me) copyright complaint. Not nice.
• I care about my accounts, more than I ever will about Interfacelift and their anti-syndication witch hunt. So this was bit of a scare for me.

Opinions

I tried to be careful in my judgments but one clear result of going after syndication is alienating power users. So far feedback I got only confirms that. Fellow techies see Interfacelift actions as regressive and atypical to modern Internet.

Non-techies could not care less.

Was I breaking Interfacelift TOS? Probably bordering that. Don’t expect me to feel very guilty.

Was I breaking their copyright? Hell no. Interfacelift doesn’t even hold copyright over images. And despite idea occupying idle heads from time to time – no amount of linking to freely accessible file could possibly violate copyright.

Overall

The way Interfacelift handled situation shows that they are more worried about spreading idea of syndicating their content (and hypothetical loss of revenue) than fact of syndication itself. Otherwise they’d start with prevention of syndication and not with complaining about it going on.

Objectively they cannot enforce non-syndication without making content private and they can’t make content private on site fueled by community submissions.

Hence witch hunt after the idea. Luckily in modern Internet ideas are big scary monsters that are real bitch to hunt.