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Sniff just won the Internet


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I didn't spot the spat yesterday so didn't realise Sniff was winding up CarThrottle.  I just thought it was directed at the 8,326,783 other websites that also use the same 12 steps to guaranteed SEO success - click here to find out why you won't believe what happens when they.. oh you know the sort of thing. 

 

That said, I just looked at the CarThrottle home page and the titles of the articles, and immediately thought "oh, do feck off".  Something about that style of clickbait headline, I always imagine it being read in the voice of a slightly-breathless 14-year old lad who sincerely expects the link to lead to pictures of boobies :coffee:

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I think this article hacked Mr Sniff off a bit:

 

http://www.carthrottle.com/post/the-12-best-moments-of-top-gear-series-22-episode-1/

 

You can see his point.  The TG team put in all the work, and CarThrottle just mash up a few framegrabs, throw it together into a clickbait article, and get loads of traffic and ad£s off the back of the work of others. 

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I'd never heard of Car Throttle either, but as Waylander says it has clearly done rather well (I've just looked up a few stats on it).

 

Top 3,500 site in the UK isn't easy to do, far from it.  That said, Pistonheads is top 300 so it has a long way to go.

 

Sniff is at 13,132 and that's a hell of an achievement in itself. 

 

If Car Throttle is getting its success by copying others intellectual property then I'm surprised they don't take action if it is on this kind of scale.

Edited by NewNiceMrMe
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If Car Throttle is getting its success by copying others intellectual property then I'm surprised they don't take action if it is on this kind of scale.

 

Difficult.  You infringe copyright if you take a "substantial part" of the original work.  So, taking the TG article that I linked to, they have taken a total of 12 screen grabs from a 1 hour program.  So, they would say, they have taken 0.0066...% of the frames from the program.  Hardly a "substantial part".  OK, so the 12 individual frames are highlights, and represent significant moments, so should probably represent a larger proportion of TG's work than might be suggested from just a bare frame count, but even if you up that figure by a few orders of magnitude you're still only looking at a small part of the program. 

 

Meanwhile, the "stolen" material is a substantial part of the CT article.  Which creates a quandary; the "substantial part" test was put into copyright law so that people could safely quote from an earlier work (for example) when they wrote their own book, or their own article. CT are not doing that; they are constructing  a new article entirely from the content of TG's work, adding nothing of their own.  So the TG work is clearly a substantial part of the CT article... but the legal test is the other way round to that.  It's a situation that didn't really happen when the copyright law was written, and isn't catered for.

 

Also, their article purports to be a complete summary of the best bits of the TG work, so is presenting itself as being a substantial part of the work - even if it isn't.

 

So whilst this feels like CT ripping off TG's intellectual property, the actual legal argument is not so clear-cut.  If I was advising TG* then I'd say they should have a go but I'd make no promises whatsoever, and warn them that they would be setting new precedent. 

 

 

 

*dream on :roflmao:

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I'm still rather annoyed with myself at not knowing they even existed.

 

I can't make my mind up whether I like the website or not.  The text content format doesn't appeal to me at all but the design is rather nice if a little cluttered.

 

Conversationally, it seems a bit chavvy.  Yes, that's what it is.  It is chavvy.

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Now youv'e got me looking at Car Throttle (not for long, admittedly) and there's this link http://www.carthrottle.com/post/9-gloriously-ridiculous-production-car-wings-part-2/

Can't see anything ridiculous about any of them :rolleyes:

You can tell that's a website for young whippersnappers, not a single mention of the original 'ridiculous wing' the whale tail on the Cossie!

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