On account of yesterday’s post (”Build Your Own RSS Thumbnail Gallery“), I received a curt Cease & Desist email today from the Product VP of Snap.com.
Things sounded bad. His initial email suggested I was “pretty low” for scraping their data, and he wondered why Snap was receiving no credit for the screenshots. The email closed with a few obligatory threats of legal action. This was all a surprise to me for several reasons:
- Credit to Snap.com is given in the original blog post, in the SiS documentation and in the sidebar of the gallery itself, including a linkback.
- I had emailed Snap back in May with a few questions about the feasibility of my SiS concept and never heard back. I assumed they could see from their referrer logs how the screenshots were being used.
- The reason I cached the images locally instead of deep-linking them was to avoid a major bandwidth hassle for Snap. I figured so long as they were explicitly credited for providing the service, we had no problems.
I responded with all three points above, but all three were sidestepped.
Instead it was explained that Snap’s TOS was intended to prevent me from using their product in ways for which it wasn’t intended. I will cop to not reading the TOS closely enough. It was also suggested that the way I’d scraped the screenshots had excised their Snap branding — another good point. The frame around the image was supposed to feature “related searches” which promote Snap’s viability as a search engine.
So, I sent one last email. I suggested reformatting the gallery to look more like this:
But I also said:
“In this new format, Snap continues to be credited, and advertised, on the site. And it also demonstrates that Snap Shots is not just for rollovers, an interaction many users have voiced frustration with.”
To my surprise, Snap complied with the new format. My final comment was:
“If enough people check out the ‘Screenshots’ tool and see what can be done with Snap, I think it is really only beneficial for you guys. At its core, the technology is sweet, and I think people will enjoy seeing variations on what else can be done with it. In the meantime, I will hide all references to the ‘Screenshots’ tool until it is reformatted with Snap’s branding.
“All in all, the project was a lark and an opportunity to use ‘free’ resources out there. I appreciate you helping solve this amicably for the benefit of both Snap and the development community.”
Long story short, I’m happy with the way we resolved it and impressed Snap was interested in reaching a compromise with a small fry like myself. They even said they’d be interested in seeing where the SiS idea leads. So for the meantime I’ll be taking down SiS temporarily until the code complies more closely with their terms. Snap!
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