{"id":1310,"date":"2009-03-30T14:45:13","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T13:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1310-sys-con-vs-aral-balkan-in-web-20-war-over-intellectual-property.html"},"modified":"2009-03-30T14:45:13","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T13:45:13","slug":"sys-con-vs-aral-balkan-in-web-20-war-over-intellectual-property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1310-sys-con-vs-aral-balkan-in-web-20-war-over-intellectual-property.html","title":{"rendered":"Sys-con vs Aral Balkan in Web 2.0 war over intellectual property"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aral Balkan<\/a> is well-known in the Adobe Flash community as an independent speaker and developer; I first came across him a few years back as a champion of open source Flash<\/a>. On Friday Balkan was surprised to find that he was apparently a key author at Ulitzer.com<\/a>, a new online publication from Sys-con media<\/a> which has been launched with the extravagant claim<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Ulitzer is designed to replace Wikipedia with Its three dimensional live content offerings and dynamic topic structure.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Balkan found that he had an entire sub-domain on Ulitzer devoted to his work, with articles he had written. He had not been consulted about this or offered any payment and was indignant, declaring on Twitter<\/a> (note the sub-domain has been removed):<\/p>\n

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WTF is Ulitzer and why am I listed as an author on it? Sys-con, remove me now!!! http:\/\/aralbalkan.ulitzer.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He was not alone; and along with a number of other authors contacted sys-con to have his content removed. Balkan expressed his feelings in a series of tweets using the tag @plagiarismtoday and remarking<\/a> that:<\/p>\n

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They’ve never had any respect for authors\/speakers. I was once announced as speaking at an event I wasn’t approached about!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fair enough; and the drama could have ended there, except that Sys-con decided to fight back on its blog.<\/p>\n

\n

Sys-Con libels me, calls me a "gay son of a bitch" in article titled "Turkish Fags Who Live in London"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

tweeted<\/a> Balkan in response to an intemperate blog post, letting loose a salvo of tweets expressing his emotions towards the company.<\/p>\n

Next up, Sys-con blogged under the heading Turkish Web Designer declares Death on Twitter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Company representatives contacted the Interpol and Scotland Yard to locate the Turkish Web Designer who is suspected to live in London. Aral Balkan seemed to be organizing a Twitter group who may harm the company representatives according to his Twitter logs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

and going on to recall the attempted assassination of the Pope John Paul II.<\/p>\n

All very silly; though in saying that I don\u2019t want to underestimate the impact this kind of outburst can have on individuals \u2013 it can be profoundly disturbing. Certainly it is not the way a reputable media company should behave. It strikes me that Sys-con has underestimated the influence of a popular individual armed with Twitter, a blog, and the attention of numerous influential folk at companies including Adobe and Microsoft, which are Sys-con\u2019s advertising clients or potential clients – Sys-con\u2019s site is currently plastered with ads for Microsoft\u2019s Visual Studio.<\/p>\n

The episode interests me because at heart it is a battle over intellectual property. One way to look at Ulitzer.com is that it gets free content from others and profits from it \u2013 something which Experts Exchange<\/a> also does, but in that case successfully and openly. That\u2019s worrying for those of us who make a business from selling our content. The episode is causing some bloggers to have second thoughts about the Creative Commons license:<\/p>\n

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Take a scroll down the right-hand side of this blog and you will see that I have removed the Creative Commons License and reverted to specific copyright protection.<\/p>\n

Why? Some rather interesting facts have come to light about a certain publishing house over the last few days. It seems that they are doing nothing short of scraping blogs and recycling content under the auspices of a "publishing portal" labelled with their brand, claiming the original blog authors as their own featured authors as if the content was written specifically for them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

says Robert Turrall<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I doubt Sys-con need fear assassins; but it should not under-estimate the power of a community or the importance of reputation.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: sys-con<\/a>,aral balkan<\/a>,web 2.0<\/a>,twitter<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aral Balkan is well-known in the Adobe Flash community as an independent speaker and developer; I first came across him a few years back as a champion of open source Flash. On Friday Balkan was surprised to find that he was apparently a key author at Ulitzer.com, a new online publication from Sys-con media which … Continue reading Sys-con vs Aral Balkan in Web 2.0 war over intellectual property<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adobe","category-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}