Appropriations  

Yesterday I stumbled on this archive of news stories relating to the University of Chicago (scroll down, middle column), and I was amazed to see that not only are news stories being republished there, but the relevant webpages are mirrored on site as well. The code seems to have been snatched whole from the Trib, New York Times, etc, so the images and even the ads are hotlinked (ie they load directly from the chicagotribune.com, or wherever).

I'm no big defender of property rights when it comes to content published free on the web, but this is really pretty extreme. First of all, the university is stealing the stories themselves, since many are no longer available free after a few days. It's also stealing bandwidth by hotlinking. And it's also stealing ad revenue: either the news service isn't being paid ad revenue for its stories because they appear at another location, or (if clicks or hits are somehow being counted through the hotlinking) the advertising client is paying for its ads to appear on a U of C server, but at rates calculated for a different location entirely.

Anyway, I was just amazed at the shameless theft, and the (naive) attempt to control the web's unpredictable transience by physically appropriating it. There are certainly less intrusive ways to keep track of things, and the whole thing seemed a bit out of character for U of C...

MORE: Along the same lines, what exactly is this? Is my content actually stored on a disk somewhere, or is it acquired at the moment you click the link through some fancy php action? And to what end is it being republished? Surely one copy of this blog is enough...