You are missing the point. This isn’t what the user can do under fair use. It is what another company can do for profit. AutoLinks is being done for profit, whether direct or indirect profits. This means that AutoLinks is not covered by fair use laws. AutoLinks is not about the user modifying a page under fair use, it is one company modifying the copyrighted materials of another. This is not covered by fair use.
Agreed, if the opt-out mechanism is going to be used for such activities, there needs to be one single meta-tag that all companies who provide AutoLinks type of features or who use the content of web pages to target their own ads (e.g. Opera Google rads) have to use and obey.
The catch with this whole issue is that case law needs to set a precedent. This isn’t going to happen until a major case makes it all the way through the legal system, which can be expensive and most defendants in such cases try very hard to settle out of court to prevent any case law from being established that rules their activities to be illegal.
I speak for many webmasters when I say please remove the new “Autolink” feature (especially the amazon.com linking) from the new version of your toolbar. While I understand that this feature may be beneficial to users, it can have detrimental effects on many website publishers, many of whom are Adsense users. Take for instance the ISBN feature, which links ISBN numbers to amazon.com listings. While this definitely makes searching for a book easier for a user, many webmasters run sites that have their own affiliate links to amazon.com. If a user clicks ISBN number and buys a book off of amazon through a Google link, that website will lose revenue.
As you can see, this feature will jeopardize Google’s relationship with website publishers. Please remove it.
I don’t like this move from google, but there are several ways in which google can make it a serious and good enhancement to searchers while maintaining webmasters reputation among webmasters.
[list=1]
[]Google should only show autolinks after they get permission from the webmaster.
[]Webmasters should have an ability to agree/disagree with autolinks on their website. There should be several ways of doing it… (right on google’s website, by placing some special script or whatever to their site code (or to some special file similar to robots.txt) ). I think that by default autolinks should not be shown on websites that didn’t give their permission.
[*]Webmasters should be paid by companies which the traffic goes to (Amazon, Maps, dunno… whatever… ). This should work similar to adsense ads.
[/list] If these three rules are followed - I guess there won’t be anything bad in autolinks feature. It will serve the searchers great, it will bring some $ to google, to webmasters and to sites that autolinks links to.
Thank goodness it is IE only at this time. You can view the crappy, invalid markup that it generates with the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar. Here is a sample address lookup:
<A id=_googt_a title="Google Toolbar AutoLink Show Map for: 1234 Street, City, State Zip" href="http://maps.google.com/?q=1234 Street,City,State Zip" target=_top>blah blah</A>
Then it shouldn’t be too much trouble for someone to create a JavaScript that reverses what the Google ToolBar does ala the script I use that reverses TextTop modifications. I’d hope, however, that we could put an early death to this functionality without the need for JavaScript hacks.
That’s just what IE thinks HTML is. Try saving a web page to your hard drive using IE: It reformats the page into markup exactly like that. I’m guessing that the toolbar uses the DOM instead of direct HTML manipulation anyway, but that’s just a guess.
Off Topic:
Thinking along those lines, could a script be written to effectively turn off the DOM to protect the site from external manipulation? Something to ask in the Javascript forum.
It’s more or less an opinion article so I don’t expect everyone to agree with it all but according to this thread I’m sure most will agree. If I missed any important points let me know. I’ll release it later through my mailing list to other tech sites for it to be posted, so it will get around quite a bit I’m sure.
I know a petition has been mentioned, has anyone started one? Since if yes I’d link to link to it from the article. Petitions don’t mean much, but it still shows that many people are concerned of the situation and it may make google realize this will piss off lot of webmasters.
The best form of petition is for people to email Google directly with a well articulated message that explains what they object to with this new feature. People should use the email address on the Google Toolbar contact page linked to a couple of times in this thread.
All the hard work webmasters have expended to create content for their sites and Google will be the one to make profit for it. It’s exactly like Microsoft MSSmartTags. Google is getting greedier .
am wondering if Google has realy though the question of “web page modification” through… or WORSE I worry that Google HAS thought this issue through!
This is a ‘Bet The Farm’ decision that Google has made launching AutoLink web page modification and Google could get into real trouble and suffer a fate similar to Netscape’s fall from glory. It doesn’t take long to topple.
I wouldn’t hesitate for one second to blacklist Google’s IP ranges and deny them any and all access to our systems.
Also consider this …If Google succeeds in quashing oposition to this it opens this whole area up to Microsoft rerelease
All you guys mentioning blocking their spider or IPs from your site, bear in mind: I’d be willing to bet that the auto-detection is done client side, so there’d be nothing you could do about it.
Anyhow, onto the main issue. I’m in two minds. I firmly support the user’s right to do whatever they want to the incoming data, redistribution aside. (I support ad-blocking and such things, for example.) Speaking as a user, I’m not going to have someone tell me what specific actions to do to the stream of bytes entering over HTTP. If I want to override your stylesheets, I will. If I want to use OmniWeb’s feature that lets me edit the source of foreign websites in realtime (for whatever purpose), I will.
My problem with this feature is that users would probably install it accidentally, along with the search box (which is the bit of the toolbar that they wanted). While I support the right of any user to make ISBNs clickable, when a company starts forcing this on users it’s a different matter. It doesn’t bother me as much as it did, though, since it seems to require a button click every time to activate.
Basically, the only thing I find wrong with this is that it’s a big company doing this. If a surfer wrote their own keyword parser and ran it on their own browser, I’d be fine with it. Anyone else feel this way?
There is still the “magazine as product” as opposed to “website as data service” perception. Same with people complaining about fluid designs vs fixed pixels designs. In a mag, you get to charge per copy, then stuff it with ads too. On a website, people don’t get to take a copy home, so there is resistance to pay the price of a mag to get into the site. Same way that people would rather pay for a single track on iTunes rather than grab the whole album, they might rather pay per article. In a mag lying on my desk, the mag cost 6 pounds, and there are about 35 articles in it. That includes a cover CD with software, images etc too, so for simplicity lets count them as articles too. 600/40 = a maximum of 15 pence per article. Doing the maths for a newspaper, you’d probably get closer to 2-5p per article, even then I’m not sure who would pay that to read articles online.
So, charge 1p per impression per user? I think we’re still looking for a service to charge users amounts that small, you migh need a new browser (or a toolbar ) to keep track to them, so that the user doesn’t need to log into every site s/he visits. (You could probably hack this together using HTTP authentication in the background to validate what the user is to be charged. The only company in a position at the moment to do this would be PayPal, though if someone could get consensus between mags, and make it easy to plug everything together, and get around the privacy issues (the toolbar will be tracking the browser history and telling someone the info so that people can get paied)).
Would people pay? Perhaps - people still pay for music post-napster.
This all goes against the “everything is free” mentality of the net - but you guys seem to not like people taking it for free, so what do I know?
They control the web they can do what they want not straight away but little by little :google: upside down.
Hey just me give a funny idea searching for “Google sucks” on yahoo brings this http://www.google-watch.org/
but it doesn’t show up on google at least on first page (didn’t look further)
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) to keep track to them, so that the user doesn’t need to log into every site s/he visits. (You could probably hack this together using HTTP authentication in the background to validate what the user is to be charged. The only company in a position at the moment to do this would be PayPal, though if someone could get consensus between mags, and make it easy to plug everything together, and get around the privacy issues (the toolbar will be tracking the browser history and telling 