Jason Calacanis copies article in full

I'm guessing Jason is utilizing/exploiting (you pick) the fact that Cory's piece is licensed under a Creative Commons license - and can be reproduced with attribution.

Two points:

1) The attribution is made, but the link is broken

2) The original work is licensed under CC-Non Commercial.

One could argue that this site, which is a vanity project of Mahalo is thus commercial and would fall outside of the CC-NC license. But it's pretty common for companies to do this - Gawker end up using peoples CC-NC photos all the time and they are clearly a commercial company. This shit just kinda happens all the time.

There is also general ambiguity around whether CC attribution needs to point to a URL or not.

(The fuzziness of both points is an argument why Creative Commons licensing hasn't been a successful as it could have been - although I remain a massive proponent of it, and release as much as I can under it, but I digress)

So while I have my own views on Jason I think it's trick to be too critical of this particular incident.

Truly ironic. http://calacanis.com/2004/12/28/rss-abuse-whats-fair-use-and...

Disclosure: I used to work for Skweezer. What a difference six years makes.

TLDR: Jason didn't like our mobile optimizing proxy because we were "stealing" his content. He banned us from all his Weblogs Inc. properties.

The iPhone and its application ecosystem is the product of multiple A/B tests and basically a Darwinian evolution process. I don't have the impression that being a closed system is source of impediment. Objectively, a closed system has some benefits too.

This is an opportunity for alternative solutions. I'm very curious to see how JooJoo will do. Its specifications are very attractive too. I hope they'll open it to have a disruptive offer and not just another "me too" copy product. This might give a very interesting A/B test.