Snowfallgate and Startups

finally! someone in this mess says something of substance!

jeremymims said:

> I work with hundreds of newspapers and

> a dozen or so have contacted me to ask

> how they could use Scroll Kit's technology

> in the past few days. In fact,

> one of my larger top-100 newspaper clients

> signed up to use Scroll Kit this week.

> They won't be the only ones.

looks like scrollkit's gambit, as misguided as it was, actually _worked_ for them. :+)

-bowerbird

p.s. and maybe _i've_ made a mistake calling it "misguided". in one sense, sure, it was stupid to use copyrighted content from a protective source. but can anyone honestly argue that the brouhaha didn't get extra juice because it was "snow fall"? would an example based on "pride and prejudice" have garnered so much attention? yeah, right... i mean, i thought cody was a bit crazy because it seemed like he expected praise for scrollkit and he ended up with a shitstorm instead. but maybe, just maybe, he was crazy like a fox, and knew that a shitstorm was exactly what he needed right now.

This is Cody here from scroll kit.

You misunderstand how much time the Times spent making "Snow Fall." They spent six months and of those tens of thousands of hours in those six months, hundreds of it was spent hand coding the layout.

The experience involved in hand-coding the layout is painful and awkward and can be improved dramatically. Getting those hundred hours down to an hour is something we think everyone can get behind.

What it sounds like is that many of those hours were spent editing, re-arranging and designing the content, and you didn't account for any of that. It feels like saying "it took Neal Stephenson hundreds of hours to arrange the words for Reamde , and I've typed it out in six!"

hello hn, this is cody from scroll kit. I want to respond to a few things.

1.) I had no plans to write a post about nytimes legal after their initial email. I simply complied with their demand and wrote them that I had taken down the video. Their next email, where they told me to remove all references to the Times from our site was pretty absurd and thought they should be called out for it. If you’re willing to take the risk, it’s a good idea for everyone to call out a big company sending overreaching legal requests. I can only imagine how many other startups don’t challenge their demands and are bullied into complying.

2.) The biggest misunderstanding here seems to be that we're somehow undervaluing the creative struggle, and the reporting/creation of assets, it took to arrive at "Snow Fall." This doesn't make much sense to me, it's a replica which by definition means the pieces are already there, we're just coming to it with entirely different code.

A big point to make is that it didn't take the Times hundreds of hours to make "Snow Fall", it took them thousands of hours. It's safe to say they spent, at least, a hundred + hours on JUST the assemblage of their content onto the page. It's that process that we have dedicated ourselves to improving. Which, for a lot of news orgs who don't have the resources of the Times, makes it possible for them to be able to experiment with these kinds of stories.

Another way of phrasing our tagline could have been something like:

We spent thousands of hours hand-coding scroll kit so you can make a replica of “Snow Fall,” in one hour.

Ease off on the rhetoric. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I don't think anyone did anything illegal and, for what it's worth, I thought the Times' lawyering was dumb and hamfisted at best.

But there was a right way for scroll kit to handle this and there was the wrong, easy way they chose. They could've said "Have you been blown away by features like The New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? We'd like to show you Scroll Kit." And then put together their own demo video with their own work without a smarmy "it took us an hour to do what the Times did in months".

It's classless and low. But they got the publicity they wanted and seem to have a fan in you. Hoo ray.