Article thieves BEWARE SideWiki.

[WritingMadwoman]

Originally Posted by mojojuju

Do you think a significant percentage of your young or sensitive adult visitors will actually be looking at sidewiki comments?

I have no way of telling whether they will or not, but regardless I don't want that stuff connected with my site(s) no matter who reads it or doesn't.

Wendy

[Billy Caldow]

Originally Posted by davezan

Unless I misunderstood what I read about SideWiki by far, they aren't putting
any content directly on one's site. Using your billboard analogy, Google puts
it outside the property owned by you.

A thousand pardons if this doesn't explain clearly, but think of it like someone
put a billboard a few meters away from your house or office. People write just
about whatever they want about you on that, yet they aren't writing anything
on your house or office's walls.

Another difference here is Google's allowing users to do that using their own
proprietary software, or toolbar in this case. Users see your site, put comment
via SideWiki, Google Toolbar or Firefox-with-SideWiki users see the comments,
yet nothing's necessarily added to your site other than what people do see in
Google's thingies no one's required or forced to use.

But...we all agree everything's open to abuse anyway. You can bet Google has
prepared a process to handle that, and it's subject to change as time goes by.

Of course, there's no stopping anyone from finding some possibly enforceable
claim against Google. Claiming some form of material harm or what-not.



Sure you can. And your competitors can either ignore it yet still make money,
other users will totally ignore you, etc.

Anything can happen.

This is my first post as a ‘Newbie’ so please be patient if I get something wrong.

I have read a lot about the issues with Sidewiki but surely there is a significant legal aspect to this.

Sidewiki does not enable anyone to add comments to your web site, as you say. What it does is copy / scrape / clone your web site to Google’s own servers and then add the Sidewiki to the copy. Surely that is blatant copyright infringement.

No small business is going to take on Google in the courts. But what if I look at a web page of one of Hewlett-Packard’s laptops and add a Sidewiki comment saying that there is an equivalent Dell or Sony model that outperforms HP’s product at a significant discount? All this appears on Google’s servers, not HP’s.

No doubt HP can block Sidewiki but the point is that eventually some big multinational corporation is going to be reaching for its lawyers if some of its pages are copied to Google’s servers with critical but legitimate comments added via Sidewiki.

Originally Posted by Billy Caldow

Sidewiki does not enable anyone to add comments to your web site, as you say. What it does is copy / scrape / clone your web site to Google’s own servers and then add the Sidewiki to the copy. Surely that is blatant copyright infringement.

The comments are posted right next to your own website and consumers will see that as comments that you condone. Yes google goes a step ahead and uses their own server also.

James

[mojojuju]

Originally Posted by Billy Caldow

Sidewiki does not enable anyone to add comments to your web site, as you say. What it does is copy / scrape / clone your web site to Google’s own servers and then add the Sidewiki to the copy. Surely that is blatant copyright infringement.

But they're not. They're loading your site in a frame, which has implications of it's own, and which other sites do as well (e.g. Current.com, but that's Al Gore's site btw, and he can do what he wants. I heard he invented the internet)

[Marilynj55]

Originally Posted by DavidO

Marty, you wouldn't be developing a financial interest involving this new "tool", would you?

Of course that's perfectly legitimate but I can see no other reason why you would defend this horrendous thing Google is trying to foist on us.

I can't figure out why this defense of such an obviously potentially-dangerous-to-IMers tool either, unless Marty is a Google mole or something. What gives? It's beyond me. I don't think I can read any more of this. The failure to get the implications of Sidewiki boggle the mind.