Medium.com proxy

Hey all,

As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!

Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
medium URL[1]

-- 
b10m

    [1] The URL must contain 'medium.com'. I realize this blocks
    custom medium.com domains, like https://padres.mlblogs.com/

b10m wrote:
"
Hey all,

As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!

Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
medium URL[1]
"

It works very nicely, however, let me suggest a use case for it:
linking to medium content through a gemini a capsule.

That use case could benefit, if you made, the url structure more
"visible" so I can link to the content from my capsule with no
thinking and probably less errors

I mean something like:

=> gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium?https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fthe-ascent%2F2
1-tiny-habits-to-improve-your-life-in-2021-without-much-effort-2ab56e680947
  21 Tiny Habits to Improve Your Life in 2021 Effortlessly

(Just literally took the first thing I got in medium)

So if you could add a litle feature to your proxy so it provides
not only the original url but the "gemini url" too that could be
a massive help for those interesting on commenting medium content
on Gemini. (and with 100% less privacy issues for our friends!)

~ Miguel (Enteka)

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 12:15:59PM +0000, Miguel de Luis Espinosa wrote:
> b10m wrote:
> "
> Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
> medium URL[1]
> "
> 
> It works very nicely, however, let me suggest a use case for it:
> linking to medium content through a gemini a capsule.
> 
> That use case could benefit, if you made, the url structure more
> "visible" so I can link to the content from my capsule with no
> thinking and probably less errors
> 
> I mean something like:
> 
> => gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium?https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fthe-ascent%2
F21-tiny-habits-to-improve-your-life-in-2021-without-much-effort-2ab56e6809
47  21 Tiny Habits to Improve Your Life in 2021 Effortlessly
> 
> (Just literally took the first thing I got in medium)
> 
> So if you could add a litle feature to your proxy so it provides
> not only the original url but the "gemini url" too that could be
> a massive help for those interesting on commenting medium content
> on Gemini. (and with 100% less privacy issues for our friends!)

Good suggestion!

I've added the gemini url at the bottom now too and stripped the
pointless bits, so the url becomes shorter.

E.g.:
  -----------
  Gemini URL:
  [1]  gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium?/the-ascent/2ab56e680947
  HTTPS URL:
  [2]  https://medium.com/the-ascent/21-tiny-habits-to-improve-your-life-in
-2021-without-much-effort-2ab56e680947

Thanks 

-- 
b10m

Le 2021-02-13 10:33, b10m a ?crit?:
> Hey all,
> 
> As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
> medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
> mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!
> 
> Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
> medium URL[1]

This kind of bridge raises a few questions

- medium.com texts are not under open licence so you can't redistribute
   it over a bridge that will strip most of it (ads included)
- the author may have wanted some specific layout/markup that you won't
   be able to render
- the authors / medium.com publishers are not aware that their content
   is available outside of medium.com

It may not seem harmful but I think it is wrong to proceed like this.

It works for something like wikipedia because the texts ARE licensed
with a compatible license for this kind of bridges.

b10m writes:
> As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
> medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
> mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!

I think it's a very fun idea, given that Medium is known for using
multiple megabytes of JS and CSS to render a page of plain text. That
said, I'm afraid what Sol?ne has to say about licenses is probably
correct. 

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | ?Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.?
                    | ? Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow

I agree to Sol?ne, this can get you in real trouble. You're basically 
stealing, modifing and redistributing their content. Of course there is no 
commercial gain for you, but you are break their copyright license.

I think Gemini should be known for genuine content and services, not 
stripped-down copies and bridges from the http world.

- Louis


Am Sa, 13. Feb 2021, um 16:14, schrieb Sol?ne Rapenne:
> Le 2021-02-13 10:33, b10m a ?crit?:
> > Hey all,
> > 
> > As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
> > medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
> > mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!
> > 
> > Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
> > medium URL[1]
> 
> This kind of bridge raises a few questions
> 
> - medium.com texts are not under open licence so you can't redistribute
>    it over a bridge that will strip most of it (ads included)
> - the author may have wanted some specific layout/markup that you won't
>    be able to render
> - the authors / medium.com publishers are not aware that their content
>    is available outside of medium.com
> 
> It may not seem harmful but I think it is wrong to proceed like this.
> 
> It works for something like wikipedia because the texts ARE licensed
> with a compatible license for this kind of bridges.
>

On 13/02/2021 16:13, Louis Brauer wrote:
> I agree to Sol?ne, this can get you in real trouble. You're basically 
stealing, modifing and redistributing their content. Of course there is no 
commercial gain for you, but you are break their copyright license.
> 
> I think Gemini should be known for genuine content and services, not 
stripped-down copies and bridges from the http world.
> 
> - Louis
> 
> 
> Am Sa, 13. Feb 2021, um 16:14, schrieb Sol?ne Rapenne:
>> Le 2021-02-13 10:33, b10m a ?crit?:
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>> As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
>>> medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
>>> mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!
>>>
>>> Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
>>> medium URL[1]
>>
>> This kind of bridge raises a few questions
>>
>> - medium.com texts are not under open licence so you can't redistribute
>>     it over a bridge that will strip most of it (ads included)
>> - the author may have wanted some specific layout/markup that you won't
>>     be able to render
>> - the authors / medium.com publishers are not aware that their content
>>     is available outside of medium.com
>>
>> It may not seem harmful but I think it is wrong to proceed like this.
>>
>> It works for something like wikipedia because the texts ARE licensed
>> with a compatible license for this kind of bridges.
>>
I disagree. We're not re-hosting their content on gemini, we're just 
using gemini as an interface to view it. Viewing medium in a web browser 
is a painfully slow experience, we are simply creating a better viewing 
experience for ourselves.
Would you use the same argument against, eg. A mobile twitter client? 
Twitter posts also aren't an open license. Just my 2 cents.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 05:51:31PM +0000,
 Nico <nico at itwont.work> wrote 
 a message of 39 lines which said:

> I disagree. We're not re-hosting their content on gemini, we're just
> using gemini as an interface to view it.

Although this argument has merits ("this is like viewing Medium with
the lynx Web browser, which is certainly legal"), I seriously doubt
that the legal system would agree. The big difference with a
stripped-down Web client is that you relay it to other people. IANAL
but I'm with Sol?ne that b10m is on a very dangerous field. (Not on
the short term, since Gemini is certainly not on the radar of lawyers,
but later.)

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 05:51:31PM +0000, Nico wrote:
> I disagree. We're not re-hosting their content on gemini, we're just using
> gemini as an interface to view it. Viewing medium in a web browser is a
> painfully slow experience, we are simply creating a better viewing
> experience for ourselves.
> Would you use the same argument against, eg. A mobile twitter client?
> Twitter posts also aren't an open license. Just my 2 cents.

This thread touches an important topic, which I've been wondering myself
for a while now. Regarding your particular question, I think that every
website that exposes a public API which allows access to their content
indirectly allows the user to redistribute their content. So, this is
not the same as scraping a website's HTML.

That being said, where do we draw the line between providing an
interface and simply copying/redistributing third-party content?

By reduction to absurdity, if we create a web browser that cannot render
some HTML tags used by ads or that does not interpret javascript, are we
also just copying/modifying content? In this case I don't think we are,
so it's not a simple matter.

On the other hand, there's also the more philosophical question which
has also been mentioned. Should Gemini care only about exclusive content
and services, or is it fine to get a lot of content from other
platforms?

--
Vasco Costa

AKA gluon. Enthusiastic about computers, motorsports, science,
technology, travelling and TV series. Yes I'm a bit of a geek.

Gemini: gemini://gluonspace.com/
Gopher: gopher://gopher.geeksphere.tk/

Le 2021-02-13 18:51, Nico a ?crit?:
> I disagree. We're not re-hosting their content on gemini, we're just
> using gemini as an interface to view it. Viewing medium in a web
> browser is a painfully slow experience, we are simply creating a
> better viewing experience for ourselves.
> Would you use the same argument against, eg. A mobile twitter client?
> Twitter posts also aren't an open license. Just my 2 cents.

Twitter offers an API for those clients as far as I know.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 12:51 PM Nico <nico at itwont.work> wrote:


> Would you use the same argument against, eg. A mobile twitter client?
> Twitter posts also aren't an open license. Just my 2 cents.
>

Twitter is pushing back extremely hard on alternative clients, claiming
that they cause "consumer confusion", and they may end up becoming extinct.
Medium has blocked access to its API altogether, although existing API
users are grandfathered in.  Neither site allows screen scraping.

This content might be a nice-to-have on Gemini, but the downside is
extremely high: in the U.S., the penalty for willful copyright infringement
can be as high as $150,000 *per document*, plus court fees and legal
costs.

When I worked at Reuters, this was an excellent way of getting new
customers: google for a sentence from one of our published articles, see
which if any were on unlicensed sites, and contact the site owners.  It was
a lot cheaper for them to license the content than to pay those damages.
(In fact, almost all of the companies said that they did not know the
content had to be licensed, and they would much rather license it than stop
hosting it.)

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
It was impossible to inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.                      --W. H. Auden, from "People"
(1953)
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Am Sa, 13. Feb 2021, um 18:51, schrieb Nico:
> I disagree. We're not re-hosting their content on gemini, we're just 
> using gemini as an interface to view it. Viewing medium in a web browser 
> is a painfully slow experience, we are simply creating a better viewing 
> experience for ourselves.
> Would you use the same argument against, eg. A mobile twitter client? 
> Twitter posts also aren't an open license. Just my 2 cents.

Please don't get me wrong. I think every effort to make the Gemini 
ecosystem richer is good.

The advice we give is more about the dangers of bridging a commercial 
content publisher like medium.com. Bridging and redistributing content in 
a modified form without consent (which happens here) breaks not only the 
Usage Terms of medium.com but infringes copyright of the author on the 
other side. Because the author published on medium.com and not on a gemini 
proxy under the domain b10m.net. That is a big difference in my opinion.

With your argument, Nico, I could build a streaming proxy to Netflix, 
re-encode the video stream to a smaller size and in black and white 
colours and offer the content to anybody using a different protocol than 
HTTP. I'm very sure it wouldn't take long for a Netflix lawyer to write me a letter.

With my capsule, gemini.tunerapp.org, I also redistribute content from 
radio-browser.info, but their data is licensed under public domain and the 
software is GPL. Just because Gemini is a grassroots community project 
doesn't mean that it is legal to ignore other's terms, licenses and copyright. 

- Louis

On Sat, 2021-02-13 at 10:33 +0100, b10m wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
> medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
> mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!
> 
> Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
> medium URL[1]
> 

Thanks for creating this great project, I really like it.
Apart from the Copyright thing (it sucks) I think this project is
really cool. If you are willing to share the source code, I would be
hosting one instance of this over Tor (As I do with other stuff).
I don't think there's a big difference between your platform and things
like, for example, Invidious, Nitter, Bibliogram or even Drew Devaults
HackerNews script. It simply makes reading *a lot* more pleasant.
I really like reading in my Gemini client and it sucks that so much
content is only published on Medium. 
I say take back the web. Copying culture is part of it. The thing you
do absolutely is in the spirit of the early web, including free
availability of information, to everyone.

People on mobile, with data caps, in rural regions of the US (or
Germany for that matter, or quite a lot of other countries) also have a
right to access this content, in my opinion. Your project is *great*
for that.

Thanks again, you are my hero of the day

I think this would be a lot less legally dicey if it were something you 
could run on your own LAN, akin to a caching proxy like Squid.  Offload 
the HTTP mangling and content scraping to a dedicated system and point 
your Gemini clients at it.


Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

??????? Original Message ???????
On Saturday, February 13, 2021 2:18 PM, Waweic <waweic at activ.ism.rocks> wrote:

> On Sat, 2021-02-13 at 10:33 +0100, b10m wrote:
>
> > Hey all,
> > As I see more and more fun projects arise, I hacked up a quick
> > medium.com proxy for gemini. Medium tends to offer long reads with
> > mostly just text, so it's perfect content for gemeni!
> > Have a look at gemini://b10m.net/cgi-bin/medium and paste your https
> > medium URL[1]
>
> Thanks for creating this great project, I really like it.
> Apart from the Copyright thing (it sucks) I think this project is
> really cool. If you are willing to share the source code, I would be
> hosting one instance of this over Tor (As I do with other stuff).
> I don't think there's a big difference between your platform and things
> like, for example, Invidious, Nitter, Bibliogram or even Drew Devaults
> HackerNews script. It simply makes reading a lot more pleasant.
> I really like reading in my Gemini client and it sucks that so much
> content is only published on Medium.
> I say take back the web. Copying culture is part of it. The thing you
> do absolutely is in the spirit of the early web, including free
> availability of information, to everyone.
>
> People on mobile, with data caps, in rural regions of the US (or
> Germany for that matter, or quite a lot of other countries) also have a
> right to access this content, in my opinion. Your project is great
> for that.
>
> Thanks again, you are my hero of the day

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 07:20:52PM +0000,
 Vasco Costa <vasco.costa at gmx.com> wrote 
 a message of 36 lines which said:

> I think that every website that exposes a public API which allows
> access to their content indirectly allows the user to redistribute
> their content.

This may be your personal opinion but it is not legal advice. This
redistribution is certainly illegal in most legal systems.

> By reduction to absurdity, if we create a web browser that cannot
> render some HTML tags used by ads or that does not interpret
> javascript, are we also just copying/modifying content?

Here I agree with Jonathan's answer:

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 10:24:46PM +0000,
 Jonathan Lane <jon at dorsal.tk> wrote 
 a message of 42 lines which said:

> I think this would be a lot less legally dicey if it were something
> you could run on your own LAN, akin to a caching proxy like Squid.

The big issue is not when you render things in your own way (using
lynx or Dillo is legal) but when you provide access to others.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 11:18:14PM +0100,
 Waweic <waweic at activ.ism.rocks> wrote 
 a message of 30 lines which said:

> I don't think there's a big difference between your platform and
> things like, for example, Invidious, Nitter, Bibliogram or even Drew
> Devaults HackerNews script.

Indeed, there is no difference. I guess that Invidious or Nitter
authors rely on the hope that Google or Twitter would not want to look
as the bad guy by suing them. And that the use of these services is
limited enough not to threaten YouTube or Twitter. But they are at the
mercy of a change of opinion from Google or Twitter and any service
running these programs could be shut down very fast.

On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 08:32:59AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 07:20:52PM +0000,
>  Vasco Costa <vasco.costa at gmx.com> wrote
>  a message of 36 lines which said:
>
> > I think that every website that exposes a public API which allows
> > access to their content indirectly allows the user to redistribute
> > their content.
>
> This may be your personal opinion but it is not legal advice. This
> redistribution is certainly illegal in most legal systems.

Yes, just my layman opinion, however I meant the redistribution
conforming to the API terms. For instance, Twitter provides an API for
developers to create third-party clients. In my opinion a client that
you download from an app store, using such API, isn't breaking the law
by showing unaltered tweets. Or otherwise what's the use of such APIs?

Now, like I've also said in my original message, this is to be
contrasted with simply scraping a website's HTML where there's not a
public API to extract info. In this case it seems clearer to me that
content isn't meant for redistribution.

However, I honestly have no legal background at all, and I'm just trying
to figure out myself what can or cannot constitute infringement. I think
this is an important topic and hopefully we can learn from each other's
more or less educated guesses.

> > By reduction to absurdity, if we create a web browser that cannot
> > render some HTML tags used by ads or that does not interpret
> > javascript, are we also just copying/modifying content?
>
> Here I agree with Jonathan's answer:
>
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 10:24:46PM +0000,
>  Jonathan Lane <jon at dorsal.tk> wrote
>  a message of 42 lines which said:
>
> > I think this would be a lot less legally dicey if it were something
> > you could run on your own LAN, akin to a caching proxy like Squid.
>
> The big issue is not when you render things in your own way (using
> lynx or Dillo is legal) but when you provide access to others.

I totally agree with this as well.

--
Vasco Costa

AKA gluon. Enthusiastic about computers, motorsports, science,
technology, travelling and TV series. Yes I'm a bit of a geek.

Gemini: gemini://gluonspace.com/
Gopher: gopher://gopher.geeksphere.tk/

Maybe some of the legal issues could be mitigated if this was an app
like YouTube-DL rather than a web service. A local web server or even
just generating the gmi files.

Uh, this is legally not legal advice. Just thinking out loud. But that
way you wouldn't be redistributing the texts yourself.

On 14-Feb-2021 13:53, Sandra Snan wrote:
> Maybe some of the legal issues could be mitigated if this was an app
> like YouTube-DL rather than a web service. A local web server or even
> just generating the gmi files.

Like Duckling - this is the primary use case to be run as a 
personal/local web->via->gemini proxy

https://github.com/LukeEmmet/duckling-proxy

 ?- Luke