Content Owners vs. Content Mash-Ups

There is an on-going discussion how far the content mash-up start ups can go in their relationship with content owners and how much content can be grabbed from a page without jumping into copyright infringement or going against the content owners' interest.

Web2innovations.com thinks that as long as the service/application that grabs snippets of text/content does not recompose the content in a readable format where you can read it at 100% just like you’d be if you were on the original content but offers a link to the source (content owner) instead, then it is OK.

A guy named “AP” made an interesting comment at Techcrunch, which summarized represents the following:

“this is an excellent site for the consumer. but does this mean that the content owners would be screwed over? for example, if enough people clip techcrunch, clipmarks could get the ad dollars piggy backing on techcrunch content.
http://www.clipmarks.com/tags/techcrunch/

saving clips for personal consumption is one thing. re-distributing it probably needs
more thought.“

Yes, we, just like w2i (web2innovations.com), think if enough clips are made over a given content, Clipmarks could make a few ad dollars, pretty fine by me, yet you would not be able to read the whole content based on the snippets alone, therefore as long as you cannot meaningfully read over these clips but, instead, you are sent to Techcrunch as the content owner (the source), then it is OK, in my view.

After all this is what Google does too (as well as all other search engines out there), it just extracts parts of the content and serves the searchers with, but none of us can read the whole content based on what the search engine’s results are and still we need to click on the links to go to the original sources… etc, etc..

web2innovations.com mentions about an interesting concept called NosyJoe that is, by the way, planned to be a new breed of social search engine that semantically extracts the meaningful components in the content (meaningful keywords, phrasal components and whole meaningful sentences) and then serves the searchers in a proprietary way by linking to the source and those guys there gives us pretty much the same explanation about the relationship between content owners and content mash-ups.