Duncan Riley of Techcrunch says
Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.
Doesn’t this sound like Sam Zell’s complaint against Google News? I am not sure if Mike Arrington subscribes to this view of Duncan Riley. If he does, I would say that techcrunch is still in the Web 1.0 era while covering a lot about Web 2.0 companies. Isn’t Mike Arrington the guy who was pitching Digg as a replacement for New York Times? I wonder what he feels when his employee takes an entirely opposite stance when it comes to new social media technologies. Duncan dude, get over it. The way we consume media has changed a lot. The ideas about copyright has changed. As long as the original source is linked in the linkblogs, it is not a copyright violation. If linkblog is bad, techmeme is bad, digg is bad and we can extend such a logic to claim that the whole idea of social media is bad. It is not Google that should drop the idea. It is Duncan Riley who should drop the old fashioned thinking about media consumption. Times are changing dude. Being the torch bearer of Web 2.0 companies, it doesn’t look good to talk in Web 1.0 slang. Robert responds to Duncan’s comments here.
