Free for a Fee

Last year The New York Times unleashed its vision of digitally native storytelling with “Snow Fall.” The piece broke away from standard newsprint-transplanted-to-Web design, offering interactive graphics, videos, and other multimedia integrated into an overall narrative. It wasn’t necessarily Earth shattering, but it demonstrated a cool concept for others to aspire to.

The push to move beyond common content templates is precisely what drives the tiny start-up Scroll Kit. According to a blog post by founder Cody Brown, the company works “to help publishers break from their templates and craft powerful digital stories” by streamlining this process. So Brown saw “Snow Fall” as an opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of Scroll Kit. He continued: “Instead of tweeting about how awesome ‘Snow Fall’ was, I wanted to do something that would show its admirers that they can do it too—I made a replica. It took about an hour to put together, and I recorded a video of the process.”

Nice homage, right? Not quite. According to the cease-and-desist letter Brown later received from NYT, the video is actually a nice example of copyright infringement. 

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