I have a feeling that the AP is going to be unhappy with the implementation, even if they agreed with the idea in theory.

He just gets away with anything he can hack. Amazing. The NY Times techies actually met with him.

Usually there’s no real “business” that emerges from these hacks but he keeps pushing them out as innovative uses of the web.

With all networking the hard part is doing something cool, legal and sustainable. Dave gets “cool” but the details escape him.

But the “cool” feature of the app is the quality of those images. They don’t come from Flickr.

Does anyone think that Dave’s access and sharing of the AP photos is consistent with the uses AP intended when they allow him access? Maybe they approve but somehow I doubt they expected hundreds of copies of the images to be downloaded without any statement of license restriction.

It’s easy enough to find out. I’ll call the AP tomorrow and see what they say. Dave could be looking at millions of dollars in damages in a copyright infringement suit if not.

I was able to find the feed link:

http://static.flickrfan.org/ap/rss.xml But Google Screen Saver doesn’t see it as a valid “Photo Feed”. So, I started scripting. The file the URL gives you has “Enclosures” for about 200 AP Photos. I extracted the photo URLs and dpownloaded the images using the links.

I noticed the photos are named sequentially and are found in “month/day/” folders on Dave’s server: static.flickrfan.org. I scripted the previous photo links and was able to download a collection of 1,400 AP photos and point Google Screensaver at the download folder.

Where there’s a will… would Dave approve of me getting the photos without using his tool? I also have a Mac running and was going to oopy the photos to a DVD before I started hacking on the PC. So, the PC is a “back-up” for the Mac downloads, in a sense.

Does anyone think that Dave’s access and sharing of the AP photos is consistent with the uses AP intended when they allow him access? Maybe they approve but somehow I doubt they expected hundreds of copies of the images to be downloaded without any statement of license restriction.

Dave gets away with shit many would be sued for… He’s only doing it for the public good but still. Is there an invoice in the mail? (Number of users * 200 photos * HDTV’s) or some such financial nonsense. The server has the download data. Is Dave picking up the tab or does AP get the idea of making money because of the internet and NOT from the internet. That’s an idea most old school media companies just don’t get at all.

Call me when someone breaks a contract with you and claims they have some sort of inherent, moral right to do it.

It sucks. Apparently, Scoble was beta testing an import feature for Plaxo. Facebook just gave Plaxo and huge free PR event.

The trick for Plaxo will be to make the interactions run at the speed of a user “clicking” through the contact info. It will take more time to run but the import feature will work.

You can own a customer for a while but they often just rebel and FaceBook will have to compete. Scoble was just the first of many users trying to extract their contact info. The issues will get lost in the blog storm. Go figure.