Tynt: ‘I sure wish they’d go away’
p2pnet news view P2P:- Quite a few p2pnet stories are lifted whole from p2pnet and re-published elsewhere, I said a couple of years back, going on:
“Sometimes the people who are re-running them say where they got them, and sometimes they don’t. But since most of the time I’m simply trying to pass information on, that’s cool and I don’t lose sleep over it.
“But it is bloody annoying when the on- and offline biggies pick up originals without any reference back, and the story shows with AP or Reuters, or whatever …”
Says jerryasher in a Slashdot post >>>
In recent weeks I’ve noticed that when I copy and paste text from Wired and other websites, the pasted text has had the URL of the original website appended to it. Cool, and utterly annoying, and how do I make that stop? Tynt Insight is a piece of Javascript that sends what you copy to Tynt’s webservers and adds the backlinks.
Tynt calls that a service for the site owner, many people call that a privacy invasion. Worse, there are some reports that it sends not just what you copy, but everything you select. And Tynt provides no opt outs. Not cookie-based, not IP-based, but stop-it-you-creeps-angry-phone-call-based.
It ain’t a pure useful service, and it ain’t a pure privacy invasion. But I sure wish they’d go away or have had the decency never to start up in the first place. I block it on Firefox with Ghostery.
My friend, and fellow Canadian, Joe McGuire, who used to run Tinfoil, emailed me about the item. Here’s what he thinks of Tynt Insight:
“Disgusting.”
And in a comment to the /. post says >>>
I understand your frustration. For over a decade I ran one of the largest and oldest music & digital news websites. It was highly ranked in Google and Alexa. We were getting 2.5M hits monthly, about 20-30% of them unique. Understandably there was some poaching of text.
At first I was upset – I’d spend hours each week tracing down copies of my articles – then I had a revelation.
My articles aren’t unique. If I hadn’t written them, someone else would have. The way I word them may have been more or less interesting, but people were still coming to my site in vast numbers – they weren’t going to other sites that were copying my text. I was making enough cash to make me happy, so what more could I want?
I opened up the entire bloody thing – many thousands of articles and tens of thousands of man-hours – on the Creative Commons license.
My content is not so unique that it requires violating my readers trust – and neither is yours.
p2pnet has been running under a CC license ever since there were CC licenses.
Jon Newton - p2pnet
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
re-published elsewhere – Giving credit where credit is due, May 13, 2008
- Tynt Insight Is Watching You Cut and Paste, January 14, 2010
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