There’s an Interesting post and comments thread over at Mobile Jones where Debbie Jones talks about another site that is republishing her RSS feed without permission and is running ads on the site with some fairly prominent advertisers.
This is an increasingly common occurrence and one that I’m asked about more and more. Just today alone I found three sites republishing ProBlogger’s partial feeds – all of which did so with no permission and all of which had advertising on them.
I’d love to hear other’s thoughts on whether they would allow another site to republish their feed (with or without the ads).
On one hand this obviously gets your content out there and being read by more and more people – it also could help with SEO if the site gives direct links to your posts (although I’ve noticed quite a few of these types of sites don’t do this directly).
On the other hand, the other site is creating an income stream that is largely based upon your own efforts – in most cases without any permission from you and in some cases with little acknowledgment.
What do you think about this increasingly common practice? What do you do when you find your content being used in this way?
Is this really surprising? No. Do I think it’s right that there are some out there making money from our online efforts…. No. But I do realize having a website, having RSS feeds – things get pilfered. There are ways to “try” to stop them from taking all your content – shorten up the RSS feeds… so people have to click to the source of the article. I don’t know about trying to stop people from copying websites – but it happens if there’s a way to stop it… I’d like to know.
I think it is a risk we all have to take, being online. There are those out there – who are looking for the easy way out and aren’t above stealing it.
… and that’s sad.
that is a big no no. okay to quote a few phrases, but republish the content is out of question.
There’s almost nothing that can be done to stop it. I have lots of content besides RSS feeds that’s been taken but there’s little I can do besides send an email.
It is nice to have more content out there and links back to your site and there will always be scraper type sites that steal content but how much traffic are they getting?
I guess if people are really making a profit off of your work then it’s time to take whatever action you can.
Well, I don’t really mind, as long as they give me credit. And if they publish a quote and not the whole thing.
This is one of the main reasons I publish partial feeds. I don’t mind having those recirculated — that brings traffic back to my blog, if I’ve done my job right (good title, good lead-in, etc.).
Quite apart from the lost revenue from having full content published elsewhere, though, I’m also working to build my blog into a community — and community doesn’t happen without comments, archives to browse, drifting into my forum, etc. None of that happens with recirculated full feeds.
Not even a problem for me yet..well, maybe once..but they disappeared quickly.
Oh well.
I think that republishing an entire feed without credit or permission is unethical; quoting with a link would be fine. If the republished content is generating income, this really ought to be shared with the original writer.
I don’t really mind this as I only publish partial feeds, but I do monitor it. So far I haven’t had to tell anybody to cease and desist, but the day may come.
I don’t think it’s going to go away either. It’s easy money in a market created by Google and the other PPC’s.
I feel my time is better spent on growing my peice of the pie.
If your content is designed to draw traffic for ad revenue, this might be OK in certain circumstances. But for any other type of blog, it’s outrageous and clearly infinges offline copyright laws.
I have a book blog about my book Cosmosity. Over the past year both the title and the main ideas have been stolen by three separate authors: the title by an Indian (Hindu) who wrote a book about an oppressed tribe in India and called it Cosmosity: the Book. Figure that one out.
The second, by two British authors who were writing a book about cults of serpents in history. They bolted my ideas onto this and used them as the main selling point for a book about snakes. What can you make of that? One of them even got me into an email conversation about what a jerk his co-author was, then admitted it was he who wrote the bits that contained my ideas.
I just fire off a standard DMCA notice to the host when I run across feed scraping. Takes about 2-3 minutes, since I have a DMCA email template. All I need to do is copy and paste the appropriate URLs.
So far this has always been effective at getting the stolen content removed.
On the other hand, I’m happy to give people permission to reprint a limited number of articles from my site as long as they request permission and include my copyright notice and a link. But if people steal without asking, I just treat ’em like crooks.
Whenever I see someone scraping my RSS feeds and benefiting from them I shoot off an email to them ASAP asking to remove my content from their site because they didn’t ask for permission.
I think each site is individual situation. For instance, with Steve’s #10 feed, the RSS feed is set for full feed. That’s his decision to offer full feeds and get his stuff out there – and reason why he has an email template (because he has to warn lots of scrapers). I wonder .. when people scrape his full-feeds .. do they keep the “Donation” link for steve?
I see it differently for sites like Problogger (and mine), who don’t offer full feeds. A site can scrape the partial feed and toss some income monetization on it, but who’s going to read it? they’ll end up coming here, won’t they? I’d get pissed off reading someone else’s RSS feed in my bloglines that is summarized, click on the header and go to their site – and it’s still a summary. Maybe I’m too small fish fry, but people can steal my feed if they want .. it’s a summary and I don’t mind.
For specifically popular sites like problogger (and steve’s) ..Really .. just i.m.h.o. (out of curiousity) .. what’s the difference when people see your words around the net .. or, people link to your own blog and change your words and meaning and publish their own viewpoint on matters that were discussed? Both of you amply cross-link to other parts of your own blogs … One would think it’s better to get your own RSS feed there “scraped” then, someone re-editing it?
And a final food for thought .. it’s just too easy to replublish feeds .. with feedburner, rss-to-javascript, tickermyfeed, and other scripts and utilities out there .. I think that’s a cost of blogging and being online and having a RSS feed – just like getting spammed with email .. are you guys being scraped the ones really being victimized here? Or, are we, the public seeing duplicate content around the victirms? :)
I don’t like it, I would prefer that they just take a paragraph or two – but at the same time it doesn’t bother me enough to get my gander up. (As long as credit and a link are provided.)
In the long run, sites that do this regularly are hurting themselves. If a blogger thinks that readers would benefit from another writers material, then s/he should add something to the original work – such as personal commentary, updated links or graphics.
It’s ironic that you brought up the subject of republished content today because this morning, for the first time, I did exactly that on my blog! What I reposted was not a blog post pre-se, but a comment WITHIN a blog post.
I decided to do this two reasons: 1) The original link where I got the material no longer works. 2) I thought the comment was particularly astute.
I made it abundantly clear in the opening paragraphs that I did not write the essay. Also, in order to offer something unique to my readers I added pictures and corrected the spelling and grammar.
All in all, I probably spent the same amount of time getting the comment ready as if I had written original content.
I’m curious what other bloggers think. Did I follow proper netiquitte?
Here’s the post:
http://www.brainshrub.com/canadian-comment-invade-iran
victirms? oops s/b= victims .. // saw Southparks’ episode recently about the people coming back from the future to get a better job .. and been saying this everywhere I go ==> “they turk ur jurbs”
I’ve had this happen with my weblog, but I’m actually okay with it — when it’s happened, it’s contained a link back to my site, and that extra bit of traffic doesn’t bother. Also, as i run a lingerie weblog and a lot of my revenue is from product affiliate links, so I’m quite happy for those links to be spread out into the wild — if the reader finds my post somewhere else but clicks through and buys, that’s not so bad.
With that said, i think i’m a special case and in most cases, it’s as simple as theft — it’s a shame that there’s no way to really prevent it besides limiting your feed (and therefore penalising your readers)
I hate content thiefs. It has happened to me several times especially with my image blog:
link removed by Darren due to adult content. Sorry but this is a family show
There are a few products out there that create link farms by suchking down other peoples content and inserting their clients keyworks / links.
Others copy content and use it for their own blogs which are peppered with adds. They make money from other people’s work. That’s what I would call a freeride.
Most bloggers don’t mind if content is copied – but not without permission and not totally automated.
Most of the time you hardly see any visitors coming to your site even when there is a full link to your site – because they have already seen everything at the content thieves website.
It’s much less common yet in Hungary, but what’s acceptable in my point of view is to use other sites’ feeds as an “added content” – on a sidebar, with a title like “From other blogs”. And of course, just the other blog’s name, the post’s title, maybe a few first words, and then the link to the post.
I wonder if anyone would have problems with this kind of usage – I wouldn’t have, if somebody was using one of my feeds this way.
I have to agree that taking an RSS feed without permission, unless your site/feed is governed by a certain kind of licensing such as creative commons that allows duplication of content under certain circumstances, is just wrong, bad, evil, etc.
When the stealing site is ad-based, even moreso immoral in my opinion.
Just my 2 cents.
I have several sites that take the news from UMPC Buzz (http://www.umpcbuzz.com) and do not credit the source. Ideas are taken from blog posts and forums. In contrast to a few sites that republish the RSS feed. I am not sure which is worse – they both seem like bad form – unless they are adding value through additional features, searches, opinions, etc. (which none of them are doing). Guess this just goes with the territory.
Layne
http://www.umpcbuzz.com
I have done this and felt guilty afterwards. The are both issues of manners and law (IP) surrounding this question. Brevity seems to be the answer, both in RSS feeds and in quotes.
Of course, shutting down the interconnectedness of the web defeats much of its purpose and most of its wonder.
The middle ground is to negotiate for links back to the originating site.
— From a sinner.
One of my blogs is about Photoshop, each tutorial has several screenshots. I have found through my stat logs that some people not only republish my tutorials but they are also hotlinking the images used for the tutorials. I wouldn’t mind them publishing the tutorial with proper attribution but these people
Use my content
Don’t provide a link back
Steal my Bandwidth
What do people think about republishing just headlines from feeds? I am thinking about adding a few headlines from different sites to a site I’m working on, and each headline would link directly to the original site. Seems to me this tactic would only benefit the original writer since its free promotion.
I think it depends on the kind of site. I love Planet Micro-ISV, a site that aggregates the content of several micro-isv blogs. I would never subscribe to the dozens of sites that are aggregated there, but I do like reading them. The authors do not seem to mind, because they use their blogs to talk about their business, and the more readers, the better. It doesn’t matter at all where they read it. As far as I can tell, most authors were happy with the planet, even if the planet site owner did not ask permission in advance. The planet owner is trustworthy and I am confident he would remove anyone who asked immediately.
On the other hand, I cannot imagine why someone would not ask permission, or at least notify the aggregated blog, and give a simple way to be removed. If you are a legit, trustworthy site, surely that’s the logic thing to do? If there are ads, offer revenue sharing, that could make it even interesting to some bloggers.
Dimitri #21 .. that’s an easy thing to fix .. through your cPanel and the “hotlink protection” tool. Set it so pictures can’t be seen other than from your server, or alternatively to display another image .. perhaps a little .jpg that says .. “See Dimitri’s site for original pictures” with URL
Paul -V-: That sounds about right, depending on how much of the material you quoted. I quote other blogs fairly regularly, always with attribution, links and attention paid to not quoting too much (generally a few sentences).
Kevin: I aggregate feed headlines on my blog, and I think that’s a fine practice. The page with the aggregation spells out what’s going on, and as you said all the links drive traffic to the sites in question. I honestly can’t see anyone getting upset about this (I don’t).
Darren,
This happen to us. A doctor published our post containing various types of skin disorders and placed all around our research advertisments selling their own skin products. None of which was our product.
He didn’t site our blog for the credit either.
I saw that someone had created a syndicated LiveJournal out of my RSS feed. it was essentially my ENTIRE site on LiveJournal. I just added an .htaccess rul on Apache that blocked LiveJournal from accessing my site. If LJ can’t access my site, it can’t steal my content. Worked like a charm.
I already have hotlink protection on. I was amazed at how many people were using my images and stealing my bandwidth. I put in a rule so that instead of the original image, they will see an animated “ad” for my site. So, now I welcome hotlinkers – it’s free advertising for my site :)
Brian
Maybe what is needed by bloggers is a comprehensive Terms of Use for syndicating RSS feeds. Failure to comply with the terms could result in having the sites shut down for breach of copyright. It is quite easy to see where a blogs content is being reused. Maybe the next step is a program which checks that the user of this content is complying with the RSS’s terms of use.
Being as 90% of blogs are taking from other peoples blogs.. i dont think anyone can sit and point the finger, usually if they are taken content from one blog, that blog had taken it from somewhere else..
there is about 10% of blogs that are real content.. the rest are just a new form of splogs.. ie.
This site wrote ” whatever”.
I say let people put my content on their site, I welcome it with open arms. This is similiar to the record companies saying that napster killed their album sales. Hell most people bought more records as a result of napster. So I embrace reposting and have set a special post on my blog where anyone can get my content and place it on thier pages via javascript.
This is just one person’s opinion, and it is just that an opinion.
I both blog and run some aggregators.
When blogging, I use a very liberal licence, because there are lots of people blogging about similar topics and I want my stuff out there being read: why else do you blog? As long as I get a copyright credit (and ideally, a link back), I don’t think I’d ever bother chasing unless it was derogatory treatment.
When aggregating, I try to follow the copyright terms in the RSS or on the linked page, but many sites just don’t bother publishing copyright terms. From my personal aggregator’s cache, less than 1 in 5 feeds put any copyright notice in their RSS and under 1 in 10 actually put their terms in there. I notice Steve Pavlina’s RSS file doesn’t state its terms: why not? I’m rather saddened to read of such casual use of DMCA take-downs. Attacking your audience sucks.
Of course, my private aggregator is a typical mix of interests. I don’t want to put feeds onto public aggregators without checking the permissions. It’s much easier if the RSS has copyright mentioned in it, else I ask the publisher.
Please, use the dc:rights tag to state your terms and/or tell people where to visit on your site to read the terms, if you care about redistribution either way.
Come on. The whole idea of rss and any other xml based system is other systems can read it.
Does “Mobile Jones” have a statement saying what the RSS feed can not be used for? No
Does “Mobile Jones” give permission for “My Yahoo” to republish her RSS feed? No
Does “Mobile Jones” give permission for “My MSN” to republish her RSS feed? No
Does “Mobile Jones” give permission for “Google” to republish her RSS feed? No
Does “Mobile Jones” give permission for “Technorati” to republish her RSS feed? No
Even if “Mobile Jones” did give My Yahoo, MSN, Google, and Technorati explicit permission to reprint her RSS feed, where does she give all the other sites with similar services permission.
My Yahoo makes money of the RSS feed of “Mobile Jones”
MSN makes money of the RSS feed of “Mobile Jones”
Google makes money of the RSS feed of “Mobile Jones”
Technorati makes money of the RSS feed of “Mobile Jones”
My site makes money of the RSS feed of “Mobile Jones”
I bet that any other site with a similar system makes money off republishing RSS feeds without explicit permission.
This is the whole point of RSS, so that this can happen. People are just envious because other sites make money off it. It was your choice to offer an RSS feed in the first place.
Ha Ha Ha, My Firefox browser is a content thief as problogger does not give firefox permission to use its content… Or can someone point me to where this explicit statement is made?
———————— RSS on R3C ————————
“In short, its a means for describing news and events so that they can be SHARED across the web.” – http://www.w3.org/2001/10/glance/doc/howto
I encountered this problem very recently, where other sites have been publishing the content on my blog. Normally, I write a strict mail asking them to remove the duplicate content. As we all know, google strongly penalises duplicate content.
However, If someone asks for permission I generally allow them to quote from some of my content with a link to my site.
They’re stealing from you?!?! Congratulations!!
You now have more opportunities to monetize your blog.
RSS: Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication. The first definition is new to me. I always thought the purpose of RSS was to ‘syndicate’ – or share – its contents.
Sharing for free is your loss leader; the little extra something that gets people in your door. Now that they’re here, do you still need the loss? That’s for you to decide. Meanwhile consider these potentially profitable — and not mutally exclusive — alternatives:
1. Offer the offenders the opportunity to continue their practice for a fee, like the big media moguls. :-)
2. There are ways to advertise right in an RSS feed, and take a ‘fair’ cut of their profits. There is a good chance this will work since your content likely has ‘the hot spot’ according to AdSense. Worried they might just lower your feed priority and stick you with PSAs? It’s worth checking to see how that works. As you recently noted they only get three sections to advertise with per page, but how many can you have for ‘your’ feed? How do they work together?
3. If they are using AdSense consider a small ongoing site targeted AdWords campaign so at least some of the ads they get come back to you. ( If the numbers don’t work out, then are they even a threat? )
“Leave the gleanings for the poor”.
I’m far from a blogging expert but these few opportunities jumped out at me, mostly from just reading your blog for awhile. How many other ways can you think of to turn this into something good?
This is the problem with online copyright protection… ever since the Internet came to be mainstream, copyright infringement is rampant from mp3’s, movies, books and blogging content. I don’t see this slowing down anytime soon so long as there is money to be made.
This sure is hard to stop :(
#16, A “Not Safe for Work” statement would have been nice before linking to your site. Girl that sits behind me has just given me a filthy look and walked off.
As for RSS content theft, this really depends on the type of site and the context in which the text is placed.
A site designed to scrape an RSS feed and present it as the authors own, with no source acknowledgement and no further comments by the site owner is wrong – its just duplicating content and harming the original write.
A full RSS feed quoted with source acknowledgement, along with feedback/comments by the site owner is not quite as bad, especially if the RSS taken is in the context of the ‘stealing’ site. I would prefer to see excerpts form a post and a link to the original personally, but sometimes if the post in questions is very short, its easier to quote the whole post rather than try to hack a single sentance out of it.
I think for 99% of the blogs out there if a blog has taken a post and put it up even if it has ads next to it, that is a big bonus for the person whose content has been “stolen” as long as there is a link back somewhere. Your content has been read, recognised and acknowledged. That`s what any average blogger wants.
For a larger blog or a “problogger” this obviously has drawbacks. That said I wish this blog offered full feeds. I find it a pain having to click through to read an interesting article and I do find many on this site.
One day I`ll be brave enough to follow in the Evil Genius Chronicles blog`s habit of deleting all feeds that don`t publish the full content. I agree with his stance- let the reader in on the full conversation or not at all.
Really interesting becuase whenever similar issues crop up the need for deciding what it is you want people to do with your blog/or web site in general, always crops up.
Going to a free standing site, especially if the site contains a copyright notice, and “lifiting” content and publishing it as one’s own seems dead wrong and is likely always illegal.
“Lifiting” a paragraph or so, attributing it to the original author and (especially) providing a link back is normally fine (fair use) and most likely always legal .. even polite. However, consider, even a paragraph on another blogger’s site may be the bait that causes a click on his/her site …. so s/he “made money off your content”. But the link back may send a reader to your blog that would not have found it and that reader might clcik on that visit or a subsequent vist .. so you have now “made money off their content”.
If you choose to publish an RSS feed however, you need to think through the meaning of “syndication” and decide what use you wish to allow. It’s your content to begin with so you own copyright. But (as mentioned earlier), few ever post any noticeas to what others may do with it … it’s just a feed coming in and how is an individual reader to imgaine what use you wished to allow unless a notice is posted?
There’s a good arguement/issue here that requires thought … but my view is one can’t go off half-cocked complaining what use is made of your feed unless standards are clearly defined.
RE: the full versus partial preference issue … I always opt for summarized content … the whole purpose of tools like Bloglines (to me) is to consolidate and give a teaser … if I wanted the full text of evey blog I’d just go there to begin with.
I have set my rss feeds in wordpress to summary.
That way if it happens then at least they’re not getting the whole content.
Plus if the site has high PR having other people publish the summary will be beneficial for google search results.
Don’t want your RSS being read by parsed in other websites?
Don’t publish an RSS feed, it’s that simple. Remove it from your WordPress.
If a fashion website, as an example, finds your blog RSS useful and relevant for its readers, and decides to publish your RSS feed, what have you got to lose?
On this point I agree with comment # 32.
There are some sites doing this to my full feeds.
You can’t fight them, there’s too many. Instead, take advantage of them. When writing articles, incorporate links to your older articles as references, and use those guys to build backlinks.
I don’t see how it’s any different than Technorati, Google, or any advertising-based RSS reader. Technorati takes a snippet of text found in the RSS and links to the source. No one complains. Some online RSS readers are supported by advertising. No one complains.
If you’re publishing RSS it’s for other systems to read, not just human eyes. If you don’t want something published elsewhere, don’t include it in your RSS. But also include a license in the RSS feed. Isn’t the last S for Syndication?
main difference – Technorati takes ‘snippets’ – a lot of these RSS scrapers take whatever you publish in your feed – quite a few of them then remove links back to you which is poor form.
I agree, if there are absolutely no links in general, it is bad form. There should be at least one link shown that is taken from the RSS feed itself.
[…] […]
Right, Darren. In the case I cited, not only did the site publish the whole post including graphics, the content is stored on their servers and the post links were to a subdomain of their site which prevents my blog from gaining artribution.
In addition, their copyright and TOU informed others who wished to republish my content from their site that they have an option to either artibute copyright to me or to the aggregator. This is completely unacceptable as it gives them the ability to supercede my original copyright which would now be undefendable in any legal sense. Imagine that Napster stated that you might include a copyright statement which indicates Napster is the copyright holder of Emimem’s song catalogue. There’s the rub.
To Random Webmaster, the copyright statement on my blog that says “all rights reserved” means just that. That statement does all the specification required, however, following this incident I may decide to include the definitions of both “all rights reserved” and fair use as many seem to be confused about the distinctions.
I don’t see Technorati, Tech Memeorandum, Google or Megite in the same class as aggregators who publish the full feed or link to their subdomains instead of back to my site. With Technorati and other blog SEs I take a number of deliberate actions to be included within those sites including: add my blog, ping them on updates, and allow their bots. If I want, I can block the Google bot or any other bot from indexing my content. So my choice to participate or not participate remains within my control. And as Darren points out, an excerpt is used rather than the full post.
I’m thrilled to see so many bloggers engaging in this discussion on Darren’s blog as I believe that it is important for content creators to decide what sort of ecosystem they want online. Aggregators are fine so long as they stay within the boundaries of fair use. I’ll talk more about this on my blog and how aggregators serve a role similar to radio stations for music or teevee networks for shows. There was a long standing battle between radio and record labels over who needed who the most. Will blogs and aggregators have the same discussions?
Finally, in other media a fee is paid to the content creators as are residuals and/or revenue shares for the use of their content. There are established business models and revenue models for dealing with original content use. Only online is the claim to copyright treated with disregard and disrespect. At what point do creators of original content cease to create, because the benefits for doing so no longer exist.
For the benefit of everyone involved in this conversation I would like to clear-up some of the misconceptions that seem to continue about the nature of our project.
The Wireless-Watch.Community is simply a platform that was set-up (behind login & password) to provide a working example of a system we designed for mobile media publishers to aggregate traffic and share ad revenue. We invited a target group of publishers to preview the opportunity and sign-up (via a written agreement) if they wish to participate. We will only go public with content that has been authorized. ALL of this information was clearly stated in our original invitation e-mail send to those target contributors.
We provided contributors full-disclosure the project existed, we locked public access during trial phase and offered opt-in participation, with a detailed contract, or full content removal with “no hard feelings”. We have patiently, repeatedly and diligently taken steps to address Debi’s concerns, point-by-point, both in public and via e-mail in private.
Two quick extra closing points I think are important to note:
All articles pulled into the system do indeed include full attribution, with bold link back to the original source page as provided in the RSS feed (that function was built-in from day 1) and it is with the upmost “Regards and Respect” for our fellow mobile media publishers that we have put together this community platform.
Hi Lawrence, if you want to follow me and contribute it would be in your best interests to do so with full accuracy and disclosure.
Can you explain why after my article your organization removed login protection from the subdomain under which my content was published?
Also, what is that you don’t understand about ask first and then publish? Not publish for a month and then ask. In addition, the login information was shared beyond the invitees. True?
Finally, you don’t disclose here that not all of those impacted received emails. At some point a mea culpa would make more sense than your attempts to change history.
For the take of an other mobile blogger impacted by the project see Darla Mack’s post, Pimp my Blog – do you have the right to republish?
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2006/03/pimp_my_blog_do.html
I always find it interesting when folks whine about this sort of thing…Google and Yahoo both started because folks kept lists of sites and SHARED them with thier friends, and so on, and so on…and that’s how traffic came to those sites…The Internet itself was started to SHARE information…I just think its very interesting that folks whine about thier stuff being SHARED…
Frankly, I think they should feel good good that anyone even gives a crap about thier stuff at all, and cares enough to SHARE it…
Just my opinion…
;)