Friday, October 13, 2006
Stop the Blog Stealing
Unfortunately most bloggers don't have the money to sue these thieves into oblivion, but the ISPs and blog creation companies that enable them should also be held accountable. If it is in the terms of agreement that people don't steal content and violate the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act, those terms should be enforced. The New York Times or Sony wouldn't stand for this type of copyright infringement, and bloggers shouldn't either.
I'm on both sides of this equation as I get my ideas from other blogs or news articles frequently, but I always include links to the sources. Also, as a frequently publshed author in print and online in the "old media sense," my articles are sometimes copied directly or the concepts taken without credit.
I don't buy the argument that producing a full RSS feed on FeedBurner should give bloggers carte blanche to copy your work, as some people who I've contacted after they've taken my words allege. As BusinessBlogConsulting says, scraping is stealing, and it shouldn't be up to the publisher to use technology to prevent copying.
As the wise folks at e-consultancy point on, splogs also increase the ranking of blogs' influence on Technorati. The blog search engines rank site's influence based on the number of blog links, which isn't a true representation of their audience. The metric should also include how many unique visitors and page views a blog gets, with the number of links a tertiary factor. Allowing bloggers to control the influence of blogs creates a 'blog mafia" similar to the way a select group of individuals were controlling placement of articles on Digg. It leads to a protected circle that is contrary to the Internet's open competition.
Posted By John Gartner at 10:04 AM
Permanent Link: Stop the Blog Stealing
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