[jacquesm]

Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this?

And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list.

And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!

[nostrademons]

They didn't - my previous startup (Diffle) is on the list, and I was never notified. Nor did cbinsights.com, which has a comment here complaining about how this post ripped off their original compilation of stories. I'm not all that ruffled - I figure that once you put something on the web it will take on a life of its own regardless of what you want - but it would've been a nice courtesy to the folks who sweated over those startups.

[asanwal]

Hey Jonathan - Anand from CB Insights here. Thx for the comment and for writing a great post-mortem.

One distinction - we didn't republish your post. We linked out to the original post you'd written and quoted a few lines from it which we thought were particularly telling about the reasons behind & process of shutting down.

That was the format we took throughout the post. Original link and a few line excerpt.

Hope that makes sense.

[nostrademons]

The interesting thing, for me, is that you didn't actually link to the postmortem, you linked to the addendum to the postmortem published 6 months later. The actual postmortem was here:

http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/2008/06/postmortem.html

I wrote the aftermath because I felt that there were a few other things that should be said with the benefit of hindsight, and I'm actually thinking of writing a second aftermath, 6 years later, but want to see how events unfold first. Most of the actual lessons are in the postmortem.

(I'm not miffed - I think one of the great strengths of the web is the ease of linking to and republishing content. But I do think it's worth pointing out that one of the pitfalls of aggregators is that you lose the original context of the post - in my case, there was a whole blog that tracked the startup journey, day by day, and not just a single post.)

[jacquesm]

I'm not sure I'm following you. When I look for instance at:

http://3things.gitbooks.io/77-failed-startup-post-mortems/wi...

And compare that with the linked article:

http://blog.wishberg.com/post/92014031388/the-final-note-tha...

It looks as if the whole post was copied without any commentary at all.

The diffle one is exactly like that, not quite a 'few sentences'.

[asanwal]

I'm commenting about post we did here - https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/

We're not affiliated with the book.

[jacquesm]

Ah ok, sorry I see how it goes together now. That was a reference to a partial bit in the original comment.

[jacquesm]

Let's hope everybody whose story got lifted is as laid back about it as you are. The obvious solution would be to simply publish a list of links and to then approach the authors to ask for permission for the sake of consistency in the presentation.

[dublinben]

>The obvious solution

It would be even better if authors who are going to say yes to a request like that would make it clear, by using a Creative Commons license in the first place.

[nostrademons]

That eliminates the possibility of saying yes on a case-by-case basis, though. I'm generally okay with stuff I write on the Internet appearing in compilations, reblogs, commentary, articles, etc. - but I have declined if, for example, the journalist seems to be writing a piece with a particular slant that I feel misrepresents what I was trying to say.

[dublinben]

A journalist will freely quote you and misrepresent your statement regardless of any copyright license.

[jacquesm]

That's why you write in situations like these in the first place. That's a way to pre-emptively stake your position giving journalists minimal room for creative mis-interpretation.

Interviews are a totally different situation and 'on the record' quotes out of context are the very reason I avoid interviews like the plague. I've yet to have one where that didn't happen, journalists are also called 'reporters' but from my experience 'reporting' to them does not mean reporting what was told to them but retelling in a way that suits their own agenda.