Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
So you are a fan of attribution then? On the surface it seems a bit odd that a simple link is all that is needed but perhaps that is telling of the power of a link.
Just a little modification to your hypothetical, is lifting a site's content wholesale then reposting the content on your site while not claiming it as your own and also not posting an attribution link, would that be a violation of copyright in your mind? Calibre can do this for you, with some modified recipes.
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Calibre is "lifting" the content for personal use, and is no different than the previously-mentioned Instapaper or other
offline readers. It's time/place shifting in order to read the content where and how
you want to, which fits with the "web philosophy" of user-control over how content is presented. Do you use a DVR? Do you fast forward over the commercials? Congratulations, you've done exactly what you're saying calibre shouldn't be doing.
You're still talking about something completely different -- essentially plagiarizing content. In your scenario, copying the content wholesale and
putting it on the web for all to see without any sort of attribution (and yes, a link to the original is attribution, though good aggregators won't copy the entire source but just provide a summary) certainly is stealing, because you're implying the content is yours without citing where it came from. That's not what calibre, instapaper, google reader, etc are doing so stop claiming that it is.
Edit: Just to toss this out there -- once you say "with some modified recipes", you've already lost. Calibre provides a python-based plugin mechanism, and anything you can do using python you could theoretically do inside a calibre plugin. Kovid's not going to write his own domain-specific language for calibre plugins, so really you're just saying that, "given access to a programming language, people could do some bad things." Which means that Linux, OS X, Windows, etc all are now in the business of stealing because they ship with programming languages (bash, perl, python, apple script, powershell, vbscript, etc) that could be used to do bad things.