DooYoo

[Cynon]

Hello everyone. In the last few months I think we all have read a lot of messages about moving our epinions to other servers, personaly that really isn't an issue for me since I'm new to epinions, but I found a company that might help those who have become fed up with epinions.com and have lots of epinions. The company is called DooYoo at http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/ it's a uk based company that's seems very similar to epinions.com. I haven't read all of the terms and conditions and registration information yet, so it may be just for people in the uk (although I haven't seen any indication of that yet), but I thought I'd let you all know about it. If anyone knows anything about it (i.e. how legitimate is it? is it a world wide company? do they really pay out?, etc), could you please let me and anyone else who is interested know. Thank you all for your time and I hope this site helps some of you. !santa


Cynon

[kurt_messick]

One has to make the decision not to abide by the ever-changing terms of service at Epinions to move their writing over there. It is against the rules right now.

[Cynon]

In response to Kurt's response about moving written work, I have a few basic question (sorry I'm new). Since we all know that we can't just delete our work and then magically retain full ownership of the work agian, does anyone know if it's legally possible to alter past work (i.e. re-write reviews) and move those on a new server? does that infringe on any copyright or ownership laws? Does altering reviews provide others with a legal loop hole to move their work? Personaly this doesn't really affect me since I plan on staying at epinions.com but for those who trying to find a place to go that provides more of an income, this might be of interest. I hope one of you are a lawyer or at the very least someone who has a had few runins with the law, and would be able to answer some of these questions. Thank you all for your time.



Cynon

[kurt_messick]

There are several lawyerly types here. There is also a variance of opinion among them. This is a topic (the copyright ownership, etc.) that has had various discussions here and on other boards. Search around a bit (use the nice search function here) and you may find some of the strands.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

Well, I'm the Ignorant Lawyer (tm). Really, I don't know anything about copyright. (It's weird -- as a lawyer, albeit a non-practicing one, I sometimes feel like I should know something about everything -- but of course, I don't.) But as a common sense, and not a legal, opinion, I would say that an article that was sold elsewhere would have to be substantially different in order not to violate ownership rights. The question of course is what is "substantially different," and that I really couldn't tell you. You may be able to use your instincts on this -- is the new article basically the same as the old one or very similar with just a few things changed here and there, or is it really something new and original? If someone compared the two side-by-side, would they see the similarities?

The main thing, though, that I wanted to say was about dooyoo. I haven't checked it out, but there are a a lot of sites that are knock-offs of Epinions, and this sounds like one of them. Personally, I wouldn't expect to get much money from any of the consumer-review or general pay-for-click sites -- I don't think any of them have much money to give out, for the same reasons that Epinions doesn't.

[tipu]

Originally posted by Cynon
I haven't read all of the terms and conditions and registration information yet, so it may be just for people in the uk (although I haven't seen any indication of that yet), but I thought I'd let you all know about it. If anyone knows anything about it (i.e. how legitimate is it? is it a world wide company? do they really pay out?, etc), could you please let me and anyone else who is interested know. !santa

Wellllll Robert... the following is a bit old so please treat with caution. It's snipped from a comment i made to a kessec editorial (08/12/00).

HTH!

I've been made aware of several international sites like epinions.com. They seem set up in basically the same manner.
http://www.ciao.com
http://www.dooyoo.com

Both sites are based in Western Europe, with branches in England, Spain, France, Italy & Germany, with ciao having another in Austria and dooyoo with another in Ireland (which seems to be no different from their England site).

Both sites also pay in local currency, though the Austrian branch of ciao seems to pay in DMs rather than schillings. Actually, dooyoo gives you what they call dooyoo miles, which can be converted to cash, used for gift vouchers, or donated to a charity - that's in the England site.

I've been informed by Jens (401402) that epinions tried to fight ciao.com in court for copyright infringement. Please don't take this as gospel - I'm repeating stuff I've read here....

[AuntieEmma[$]]

Originally posted by Santa Claus
I've been informed by Jens (401402) that epinions tried to fight ciao.com in court for copyright infringement. Please don't take this as gospel - I'm repeating stuff I've read here....[/i]

Assuming this actually happened, I would guess (and it's just a guess -- remember I'm the Ignorant Lawyer (tm)! ) that would have had more to do with the overall design of the site, the look-and-feel of it, and the use of site-wide features like webs of trust, etc., rather than with the content of specific reviews, which I would guess (guess!) they don't care as much about.

The way I look at it is this. Say I were to post one of my Epinions reviews on a competing site (which I wouldn't do, actually, but just say I did), and say that meant that it lost all of its value to Epinions. What would that loss be? What was my review's value to Epinions? Maybe a few cents. Maybe nothing. But when a site copies Epinions' entire concept and design (and I've seen at least one site where it looked as if they just lifted the Epinions site entirely, made a few cosmetic changes, changed the name, and plopped it into their own space), then Epinions would be out a lot -- the unique use of a design and concepts that probably cost them hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars to develop.

I don't know if Epinions actually sued or not in this situation, but it would surprise me if they didn't. Whether they were at all successful ... I dimly remember a case where Apple sued Microsoft for copying the whole idea of an interface based on icons. And then I think Lotus sued someone for copying the design of its spreadsheets. Don't remember how these turned out, though.

I don't think Epinions would bother suing one of their users who moved their reviews, though. Whether that makes it ok to do ... I think it's kind of sleazy, actually. You're not going to gain much by moving it onto a similar pay-for-click site, so why bother? And if you did have some other, more substantial use for your Epinions reviews, Epinions has said that they are willing to negotiate the rights for specific articles, and I think people should at least try that first. Who knows, they could be reasonable. I mean, that's not impossible.

[adonna]

I'm not even going to try touching any copyright issues. The TOS, however, says that epinions gets internet rights to a review posted there, with certain exclusions (among other things). I'd take that at its intent.

However, let's say you took a trip to, say, the redwoods in Northern California. So, you write a review about the Avenue of the Giants on Epinions, and one about Northern California on Ciao. Both are based on the same trip, and may contain some of the same information, but each is a different review.

Regardless of whether I was paid a cent for a writing, if I wrote something under an agreement that I'd be giving all of some publication rights to someone, I wouldn't use the same writing elsewhere, even if the danger of lawsuit was nil.

There's more important things at stake.