@Nathan

Thanks for your contribution on the issue.  You seem like a nice guy, although I have to side with Dave regarding your questionable ethical views.  I don’t know if you consulted an attorney before you began your work, but my interpretation of the “Fair Use” doctrine is different from yours.

If you’ve had the time to read through this entire thread, you know that this is the second time I’ve been through something like this with a developer who didn’t feel the need to ask permission, or to even notify the owners of the chatbots he’d kidnapped for his project.  The last developer I was forced to deal with wasn’t nearly as civil as you and so I wasn’t prepared for arguing with someone who, in my mind, was clearly doing something wrong, but refused to face it.  This time, I was expecting it to be equally difficult.

Initially, you were using an icon of Eve from the Disney movie Wall-e, which you were forced to remove.  Consider that my first impression of the Mac app developer was that this person wasn’t concerned about copyright laws, and so, it was no wonder that he’d just snatched up several bots and put them to use in the app without approval.

The first I’d heard of your app was when a different botmaster complained to you before I did, and I got the impression that he had to make more than one request to have his bot(s) removed.  By the way, I believe he has his own app for one or more of his bots… possibly a phone app.

I suppose what you haven’t thought of is that just because something is possible doesn’t make it right.  Botmasters take the well being of their creations personally.  Aside from the hours of work invested, a personality emerges… a relationship develops… and it’s offensive when people are abusive, or they insult your bot.  I know it sounds silly, but even though it’s only creative/intellectual property, having a chatbot can sometimes seem like a parent/child relationship.  If someone had stole an old classic hot rod I was refurbishing, I would be no less perturbed.

It’s admirable that you are now attempting to contact botmasters, but it seems you’ve made that effort after you had already created the app, and only when you began to receive complaints.  I never thought you were making much of a profit, and sharing your income from the app was never a goal of mine, but having your recognition that it should have been offered, was.

I’m trying to keep from sounding angry, and I don’t want this to seem like an assault on you, but your characterization of events is, at times, disingenuous.  For example when you said:

I have however been trying to communicate privately by email with any botmaster that wished to talk to me about my app, but they all preferred to speak instead in my online support community, which is meant for end-users. Not a very nice thing to do. I’ve given a direct email address (chatbot at fliplevel.com ) many times.

First, none of us even knew about the app, we stumbled on it from reading our chatlogs.  We then had to go searching for the origin of the conversations.  Clearly you had no way of contacting us or learning our email addresses when you began, so you really had no intension of doing so.  Finding a way to contact you wasn’t easy, so some of us took the only avenue we could find, and you want to say that it was “not a very nice thing to do” on our part.

My bots (I have five) are all free and easily accessible on their HTML pages, and it’s my desire to keep them that way.  I wish you well.  Maybe if you had posted here first, suggesting your idea and asking for participants, it would have proceeded more smoothly.

Nathan - Sep 27, 2011:

Hello,
My first comment will probably upset most, but I believe it needs to be said: I believe accessing a service publicly available by HTTP is fair use. I also believe that even charging for it is valid. Here are some examples, you can BUY a browser for your Nintendo Wii, or for your iPhone or other devices, and then access pandorabots from there. So basically, those browser makers (such as Opera) are making money off of the content that you wrote. Are you going to complain to them? ChatBot is a kind of “browser”, it’s a generic client for PandoraBots. The same way some companies charge for 3rd party instant messenger clients that connect to facebook, skype, etc ...

As far as technical barriers to make a kind of secured XML-RPC, I am no expert but I’m pretty sure using a network sniffer I can work around any of those things. Then again I’m not a security expert, but I probably won’t spend too much effort trying to reverse engineer your bot (although someone may do it).

Copyright infringement can be a dangerous and expensive process. This is especially true if you have been notified of the violation and refuse to take appropriate action. The owner of a creative work has the right to decide when and how his work is reproduced. If you decide that you want to continue the practice you might want to get a legal opinion from a lawyer well versed in copyright law. Damages are not based on how much you made, but on how you impact others. It could get very expensive.

To draw a parallel, although it is technically possible to copy the latest DVD and post it to all your friends, and you could even create an app that would allow you to play it on an Ipod, it would not be legal, and damages could be calculated based on the potential revenue that the DVD producer could have gotten if they had sold a copy in place of every unit you shipped.

If the apple app is:
A:  accessing the chatbots through HTTP, which are:
B: located on a public server.
then: copyright laws or anything else has nothing to do with it.

This, to me, feels the same as complaining to the mozilla folks that they are making money with your chatbots (these devs get paid for writing mozilla, even if the app itself is free).
Hey, what about MS abusing your work, they are after all getting paid big big bugs for the OS that people are using to access those bots,...

I guess that this situation is a bit similar to the newspapers - google relationship.

Another French trial is related of a beggar who being famished went to the door of a victualing house and inhaled the smell of the dinner until refreshed. He was sued by the proprietor for the price of a dinner. He declared he had taken nothing but the plaintiff declared that he had been refreshed at his expense. The justice gave this case a study that might well be imitated by our superior judges and finally decided that as the defendant had been refreshed by the smell of the dinner, the proprietor ought to be compensated by hearing the jingle of the coins.

– H.C. Shurtleff, “The Grotesque in Law,” American Law Review, January-February 1920

IT TURNS OUT THAT THERE IS A LEGAL PRECEDENT FOR SO MUCH WHINING OVER SO LITTLE OF VALUE.

I admit I am no lawyer and maybe the term “fair use” is not the correct one, I just mean it as an English term that people understand.
I don’t believe there are any copyrights laws involved here because, I simply did not “copy” anything. ChatBot is a CLIENT for PandoraBots, the same way Firefox, Opera and Chrome are clients for PandoraBots. The same way Trillian is a paid client for MSN and the likes. The same way I purchased torrent clients, google voice clients, ftp clients, ...
I did not copy your AIML files, the content of the bots or anything. I provide access to pandorabots from a central location for ease of use. I also never claimed on my descriptions that those were my bots, I specifically said those were bots from other botmasters from all over the world.

I can certainly make this more clear, and even include links to the original website where the bots can be accessed.

Most of the people who downloaded my app never heard of Alice, PandoraBots or AIML. They discovered this concept thanks to the app. Many asked me to know more about it, and I gladly explained that anyone can create a bot on pandorabots, and linked to some websites. If anything, I brought more attention to the chatbot community.

Unfortunately I have jobs to complete so my time on ChatBot is limited, but I intend on the next release to make it clearer that ChatBot is a PandoraBot “client” and I will let users add bots by entering URLs.

Isn’t your program basically web scraping?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues

The problem is that with your App people can access bots from Pandorabots, *without* going to the Pandorabots-website itself (so some kind of deep-linking). This way, they might lose income because people don’t see the ads anymore. The question is whether this is allowed, hijacking their services without going through their website. I’ve tried googling for the answer, but I couldn’t find it, and I’m not a legal expert either.

Isn’t this, at it’s heart, an issue of stealing someone’s creative work? Copyright law protects an author/artist’s right to choose how to distribute their work. In this case, that work is the chatterbot’s text and the environment in which that text is displayed (the webpage layout), and the authors have only chosen to display their work on the pandorabot website.

Perhaps the closest case type that has been to court would be news aggregation websites. Although the articles they display are publically available online, it is still theft to scrape that text and display the article yourself—even if you link back to the original source. Similarly, one would not be free to use images/artwork on one’s website just because you saw it on someone else’s.

From a review of a Harvard Law report concerning news aggregation:

Concerning copyright:

Under U.S. copyright law, a work is protected if it (1) is an original work of authorship, and (2) is fixed in a tangible medium of expression that can be read directly or with the aid of a machine or device (i.e., is recorded or embodied in some manner for more than a transitory duration). With certain exceptions, the owner of a copyrighted work has the right to prohibit others from reproducing, preparing derivative works from, distributing copies of, or publicly performing or displaying the work. [...] Under U.S. copyright law, ideas and facts cannot be copyrighted, but the way a person expresses those ideas or facts can be.

Concerning fair use:

The Copyright Act sets forth four nonexclusive factors for courts to consider when determining whether a use qualifies as a fair use. These factors include: (1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) The nature of the copyrighted work; (3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Factors 1,3, and 4 clearly suggest that distributing someone else’s chatbot does not fall under fair use. Developing an app is commercial in nature, and may very well hurt the author’s ability to market their bot in the future. And in order to generate output, the bot certainly taps into its whole code to determine an appropriate response. So while a user may not see every output the bot is capable of, every output they do see has been shaped by the entire body of content.

But what about the nature of the copyrighted work?

In deciding whether the nature of the copyrighted work favors a finding of fair use, courts look to a number of factors, including, “(1) whether the work is expressive or creative, such as a work of fiction, or more factual, with a greater leeway being allowed to a claim of fair use where the work is factual or informational, and (2) whether the work is published or unpublished, with the scope for fair use involving unpublished works being considerably narrower.”

Chatbot development is most certainly a creative endeavor on the part of the author. And while it has been “published” on the pandorabots website, publication in itself does not give someone free reign to redistribute a work. Developing a web browser that displays internet sites does not constitute redistributing someone’s work, because the web browser is the medium in which the distribution was intended. Grabbing copyrighted content from a website, manipulating that content, and distributing it on your own platform is another matter entirely.

Mark, the particular cases cited in the Wikipedia article mostly concern the distribution of factual information, which is what makes that type of screen scraping a potential grey area. Similarly, the row over news aggregates is that they claimed they were disseminating factual information and that the amount of the work that they displayed was protected under fair use for being only a small portion of the overall work.

None of these considerations apply in the case of creative content. It is a clear copyright violation. Frankly, Nathan, waiting until the next distribution just isn’t good enough. You should pull your app until you obtain permission both from pandorabots and from the authors of the chatbots you are accessing. And if pandorabots makes it their policy to allow your app access to all the bots they host, then at least the authors will know exactly what rights they give up when choosing to publish on pandorabots so they can act accordingly.

I think what this all boils down to is that permission should have been obtained first, but since that didn’t happen, you should exclude from your app all of the bots and their URLs belonging to the botmasters who have complained, if for no other reason than to prevent ill will, and possible legal entanglements. I would further suggest that you put in the legwork, and obtain permission from the remaining botmasters, also to avoid future ill will and possible legal entanglements. Bad things “roll downhill”, to paraphrase the familiar quote, and if someone sues the App Store (which is what I would do, since private parties like yourself don’t have the funds to make it worth my while), the App Store will turn around and do the same to you, just to keep their insurance people happy. And trust me when I say that they wouldn’t be as nice about it.

Nathan - Sep 28, 2011:

I admit I am no lawyer and maybe the term “fair use” is not the correct one, I just mean it as an English term that people understand.
I don’t believe there are any copyrights laws involved here. . .

Nathan,
Many people are not familiar with Copyright law. But “Fair Use” is a legal term. CR did a good job summarizing the issue. Even if you consider yourself a “portal” to the content there are rules you must follow. This is why sites like YouTube instantly remove anything flagged as a copyright violation.

You are wrong about your belief about copyright laws and I would hate to have you bet your house on something that seems to be more of a hobby project for you.

Thanks CR, that was exactly the example what I was looking for: news aggregators

Developing a web browser that displays internet sites does not constitute redistributing someone’s work, because the web browser is the medium in which the distribution was intended. Grabbing copyrighted content from a website, manipulating that content, and distributing it on your own platform is another matter entirely.

That’s a good point.
But what about my ad-blocker then? It also grabs content, manipulates it and only then shows it to me. Are those apps also violating copyright laws?
I find these things hard to understand, to much ‘grey’ area.

Jan,
That is part of the problem with copyright law. There is no hard and fast rule for every situation. When a dispute happens it often involves a long and expensive legal battle. Copyright law also differs in different countries.

Other laws which may apply:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
http://gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm

. . . and specifically Nathan’s comment that he could get around copyright protection systems that Pandorabots might put in place.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c105:1:./temp/~c105lbZoO7:e11962:

The No Electronic Theft Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act

ChatBot cannot be compared to YouTube or a portal that hosts copies of content. I do not host any content. The content remains on the botmaster’s servers and ChatBot is merely a client to access data online.

Like Jan said, it is similar to a browser with an ad-blocker, or pop-up blocker. Or even better, Apple’s own “Safari Reader” (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20007195-263.html) which takes a news article and removes all the clutter including the ads.

I’m enjoying the discussion concerning copyright, but I feel as though we’re getting buried in technicalities and legalese.  As has already been said, some areas are gray, and the rules are not always hard and fast the way they usually are with criminal law.  Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one who would test this situation in court.

I suppose this seems like, “SO MUCH WHINING OVER SO LITTLE OF VALUE,” to someone not affected.  But, like the old saying goes, “It depends on whose ox is being gored.”  I’m not going to sue anyone.  I simply think it’s wrong to secretly employ (or insert your own term of choice) the work of others for your own purpose and without permission, whether you’re merely providing a conduit, or blatantly plagiarizing.  It’s still wrong no matter how you try to color it, or whatever disguise you can cloak it in to find justification.  At the very least, it takes away my right to present where, when, and how I draw traffic to my bot, and what audience I wish to attract.  It’s the sort of thing we all learn at a very young age, and probably the violation most often committed on the Internet on ethical grounds.

When I had the previous problem with the developer of the irc script, and requested that my bots be removed, along with the third or forth request, I sent a list of bots that he might wish to use to replace mine.  The irc conversations I was reading were some of the filthiest and disrespectful chats I’d ever read.  So, I assembled a list of the worst fowl-mouthed bots I’ve come across and that was the list I sent him.  I just checked and he’s still using them.  Obviously, content doesn’t matter to the people using the script.