Oh, how positively quaint. DownloadSquad, a fairly prominent blog on the Weblogs Network (featuring posts on free software and downloads) goes on a long rant on – my, how shocking — some blogs are stealing the content on DownloadSquad.com for posting on their own blogs. The author, Gordin Finlayson, even goes to coin a term by calling these dastardly thieves “Blog Pirates”.
Yoinks.
I’m not sure how that kind of article ended up on DownloadSquad, but any blogger that has achieved any kind of success runs into these kind of shennanigans at some point or another. And this even applies to less successful bloggers, actually, given the kind of technology that is used. This isn`t new. It was written about as early as 1995 by both the Guardian and CNet, with both of these publications describing the rise of fake blogs populated with stolen content. `Blog Pirates`, indeed.
People stealing content isn’t new. And in fact, there are a lot of things you can do about it other than writing a post complaining that your content has been stolen. [CHEAP PLUG] In fact, my friend Jonathan Bailey has written about these kinds of things extensively at his own site plagiarismtoday.com — but also has been focusing on blogging related issues over at the BlogHerald. Check out some great posts such as 20 Best Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools, How to Follow Up on a Cease and Desist Letter, and a Content Theft Tale (what we did to follow up someone scraping our content at the BlogHerald)
A more interesting discussion around sites that are ripping others content surrounds the rise of some social news sites that don`t just feature a snippit of news, but the actual and entire post verbatim. Almost all of them have some link back to your site, but that really isn`t the point, is it? Look at a common offender TechAddress.com, which reposts your entire post as someone has “submitted” your post for voting. Thinking broadly, it really applies to any site which is able to scrape/read RSS feeds and republish them publicly. Shared google readers are another end of the spectrum as well.
What makes these latter examples a bit different than frank Splogs are that splogs are created for the purpose of creating traffic and then monetizing it through Adsense, or, through funneling it to other affiliate sites / splog sites for page rank. TechAddress and Google Reader don’t directly benefit in the same way.
But your content is being republished in its entirety which can be distressing. I think one way to get around this is to cut it off at its source, which in many cases is your RSS feed. Making sure that all of your readers are aware that your feed isn’t for repubishing without your express consent is one step. Another more drastic step is actually only doing partial feeds, which is a bit of a contentious issue, as some readers hate it, while others content that full feeds actually improves your subscribership. On the other hand, the only real easy way to stop scraping of your RSS feed is by changing what’s in your feed.
Anyway, this is all a bit of a digression, because isn’t it time we had a bigger and broader discussion of content ‘theft’ in its broadest sense — rather than splogs, which have existed for at least a couple years already? Goodness knows that technology and the tricks that some are using to get around things continue to evolve.
Shouldn’t the conversation?
