Cody Brown | TechCrunch
Cody Brown received a takedown request from The New York Times’ legal department after he posted a video showing how to replicate the “Snow Fall” experience using his tool Scroll Kit.
After he answered that request, Deborah Beshaw-Farrell of the legal department asked him to remove some crowing language from Scroll Kit’s site:
It took The New York Times hundreds of hours to hand code “Snow Fall.” …we made a replica in an hour.
Scroll Kit intends to keep that copy on its site, Ryan Lawler reports.
“The rationale is that essentially this developer is bragging that it took him an hour to infringe our copyright,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy tells Poynter via email. “As we fully support innovation, we would prefer that he use his tool to create original material instead of appropriating our content, content that was conceived and created entirely by Times journalists.”
“While the NYT has a strong copyright claim against ScrollKit using the text and assets of Snow Fall to sell their product, the argument against simply mentioning the name appears to be based on nothing more than a sense of moral outrage,” Verge Managing Editor (and copyright lawyer) Nilay Patel tells Poynter in an email. “It might not be actionable, but you can see why they’re mad: high-end feature design and execution is about more than tools, and saying ScrollKit can build Snow Fall in an hour brushes over the hard work of actually producing such feature.”
Previously: NYT says it was ‘simply asking for proper attribution’ from Quartz | Twitter suspends ‘NYT On It’ account after New York Times complains
