Content Theft: Die Splog Die
Regular feed and email subscribers of Simply-Basic may have noticed a somewhat harsh-worded copyright notice in Simply-Basic’s articles (web readers don’t see this). The notice reads like this:
Copyright © 2008 John Kolbert. If you are reading this message anywhere besides your feed reader, then this article was stolen. Visit the original article at [url of article here].
Why do I do this? Lately Simply-Basic’s articles have been finding their way onto spam blogs. It’s quite simple for them. They have a plugin or script that takes the RSS feed from any site they choose, and it gets republished on their blog without any action by the person who set up the site. Why would they do this? Money. Their websites are full of advertising. They make a quick dime off of my (and other bloggers) hard work.
Awhile back Lorelle wrote a great article on what to do if your content is getting stolen. I used some of her advice and contacted the blog as well as the blog’s host (Yahoo! domains), but have gotten no response. So the very least I can do is try and make reader aware that the article they are reading may be stolen.
I hope this hasn’t caused any confusion for the subscribers. Anybody have any other or any better ideas to combat this? Content theft is a reality of any service, especially when the content is so easily stolen. All we can do is try our hardest to combat it. It’ll be interesting to see this article stolen and put up verbatim on a spam blog. Is it even worth the fight? If I get one site taken down, five will come up in its place. It seems like a never-ending battle.
So here are my questions for you: How do you combat content theft, and is it worth it?
I won’t answer the first part of the question because I talk about it on my site almost exclusively and it would make this comment far too long for anyone to stay awake through, but the “is it worth it?” question certainly seems to be addressable.
I have my process for dealing with content theft pretty well honed. It only takes me about 10 minutes to handle a single case of it. I think it’s ten minutes well spent considering the damage content thieves can do to your search engine ranking, your readers and your bottom line. It did take a while to reach that point, but with new tools and better information, others don’t have to learn as I did, the hard way.
Would I say it is worth it, probably. If you plan on making any money from your site, making some effort in this area makes sense. It might not be a situation where you stop every singe case, but at least the worst infringers.
If you don’t make money from it, you need to decide how much personal time you want to invest in it. If you don’t particularly care, it might not be worthwhile, if you care a great deal, you might wind up staring a site called Plagiarism Today and doing it for a living.
Hopefully I”m the only one that takes it to that extreme.
Hope that helps!
Jonathan Bailey’s last blog post..Video: Professor Lessig’s Final Free Culture Lecture
@Jonathan Thanks for stopping by! It’s great to hear from someone who knows what they are talking about on the matter! I think a problem with content theft for newer blogs like mine is that we’ve never dealt with it before. Thus the process of contacting ISPs and sending notices is entirely new to us. For a vetran like yourself the process may take 10 minutes, but for a beginner, it could be several hours while we figure out what we are doing! Luckily your website has proven very useful in this. Thanks for your comment!