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Nextstop is brilliant (and a threat to copyright owners)

Jeremy Head15 years ago2 min. read

Nextstop is a rather smart user review website that's been developed using Google's application protocol by two ex-googlers.
It's garnering a lot of interest and I can see why.

It's really really smart.

Nextstop Let's say you want to review somewhere, it finds all the basic info for you so you don't need to spend time doing it. For example, you want to review a nice little restaurant you happen to know. Type in the name of the restaurant and the city and Nextstop offers suggestions for the address, pulls in a bunch of photos, plots it on a map and gives you some simple tick boxes to classify your review.

And... it's amazingly fast. Google worked out very quickly that speed was really important for keeping searchers using their search engine... and these guys clearly took that learning with them.

And... you can sign up using your Facebook ID so for millions of people it's just a case of entering your Facebook password and you're off. It even pulls in your profile pic from Facebook.

And... you can follow others on the site - just as you do with Twitter and Facebook.

And... you can create widgets of your reviews to stick on other sites.

Functionally it really is brilliant. Better by a mile than anything else I've seen. All sorts of clever other elements like suggesting other places based on people who've recommended like you and nearby places too. Faultless.

But for me as a content creator and owner there's a problem... Look at this. Pic number 8 there is clearly a copyrighted pic... and pic number 7? Who took that shot and does Nextstop have permission to use it?

Nextstoppic I can see this issue becoming bigger and bigger. The site scrapes pics from all over the place... and to cover themselves they just credit the site they've taken the pic from.

In the 'share-all' world of the web that might seem fine, but it's nicking other people's content at the end of the day. Photo sites like Flickr do allow you to designate whether a photo can be used by others, but Nextstop just credits Flickr, not the photographer which flies in the face of the way Creative Commons licence is supposed to work.

And it takes pics from all over the place. I can't imagine that say Beerintheevening.com from where lots of pub shots for Brighton (my home town) are taken would willing give copyright consent for the use of their images.

The new generation (ie not old hacks like me) don't really 'get' copyright do they?

I for one will never ever put my shots on Flickr for this very reason. It would be nice to share with people who just want to look at my shots and comment, but if there's a risk someone will try and profit from them, I'm not taking it.

What do you think?

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5 thoughts on “Nextstop is brilliant (and a threat to copyright owners)”

  1. Yes, Jeremy, I see what you mean. I just searched for "Siesta Key, FL" and I see that they scraped a photo from my beachhunter.net website and just credited me. At least they did provide a live link to my site. While I agree that they are definitely violating my copyright, there isn't anything I can do about it, so I choose to emphasize the benefits of it. It will probably send more traffic to my website.

    My experience is that "reviews" by the average traveler are not worth the time it takes to read them. That's the downside to TripAdvisor--you don't know which review to believe because no one has developed any trust or credibility. So I'm not concerned too much about Nextstop taking traffic away from me. I'm not sending traffic to them, but they will be sending traffic to me. I can live with that. It is a bit irksome though.

  2. Hi David
    I hadn't realised it was a live link. So that's also quite nice (more links is always good)... but I think the real problem is sites like Flickr with multiple users and copyright owners and even multiple types of copyright too. Just crediting Flickr for a pic that I've put up there in my photostream isn't good enough.
    I completely agree with you re reviews - as per my post a week or so back about UGC and the need for moderation and curation etc: http://travelblather.com/2009/06/ugc-reviews-content-travel-editing.html
    Thanks for your comments!
    Jeremy

  3. Hey Jeremy --

    I'm glad you (largely) liked what you found on nextstop. We're really trying to build a resource that's useful for everyone by helping members easily connect a bunch of otherwise disconnected information on the web (including photographs). Most people we talk to are excited about more visibility for their photos (and we do provide attribution and a live link for every photo), but if people aren't happy with how their photo is being used we're more than happy to remove it. See http://www.nextstop.com/community/help/p/10007/where-do-the-pictures-come-from/ for more information.

    Carl Sjogreen
    Co-founder, nextstop.com

  5. Nextstop is quite innocent now but I'm wonder what happen when they going to "commercialize" the site. A link back can be thought as fair but its like 1% see the link and 0.1% click on it and its very little in comparation what the photos give to the site, there is no source on the thumbnails for example. A simple user probably "steal" from Nextstop and put Nextstop as source, so its quite messed up.

    Google and other companies don't go this far. In the end, don't you want to do things that feel right in the heart?

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