opinion : licensing and / or protecting your blog
Posted on April 11, 2007
Filed Under experiments, opinion |
A couple of things have happened over the past couple of days to make me think about the licensing of this site.
Firstly I’d like to thank Aaron and Scot for letting me know about this site, which is republishing everything posted here. Word for word. Using my work doesn’t bother me, I’m here to draw attention to good things relating to WordPress. If other people spread that news I’m happy, it means that guys like Aaron and Scot get more coverage.
Spamblog?
What bothers me is the lack of care taken in doing so. All of my posts are reposted word for word, but with stylesheet over-rides which ruin the layout of some posts. No credit to this site as the originator is included, and no effort is made to change the content of the site. Note the massive adwords block:
I’ve contacted the site operator, but have had no response to date. Do I call this a spamblog? Probably.
However…
Tumblr.com
I have an experiment running at wp.tumblr.com which pulls together a number of RSS feeds. It’s effectively a public feed reader bookmark. Every link pushes traffic to the originator, not this blog. The content is presented as a collection of feeds. No ads are operated on the page.
With all that considered, I’m still wondering if the tumblr site is any ‘cooler’ than the apparent spamblog. I may pull it down in it’s current form.
Licensing
I’ve always been a fan of the principles behind creative commons licensing. This is where my conflict arises. On the one hand I want to let people use anything they find on Wordpressguy.com in any way they please. On the other hand, the spamblog incident slightly ruined my morning today. I found another interesting license here which is effectively a DIY license precisely tailored to the individuals needs.
Advice
So, what licensing do you run on your blog? And why?
I’m inclined towards a relatively open sharealike CC licence. If this costs me some Google Juice by making my posts open to spambloggers then so be it. To start things off, This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Comments
12 Responses to “opinion : licensing and / or protecting your blog”
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First of all, that a-hole that is copying your content is just wrong. Morally, ethically, wrong. People like that make me wish for the old days of Internet frontier justice when people would get a good old fashioned DOS attack for this kind of crap.
Of course, your other option is to contact their upstream hosting provider and inform them that you’ve got a Terms of Service violation complaint against that domain for illegal copyright violation.
Beyond that I’m not sure there is much else you can do.
John
I had it happen to me on one of my first blog posts - it got ripped on about two or three different spam-blogs.
It prompted me to write this article: Join the anti-splog vigilante brigade
Have a read because there’s a few tips in there. Also check out the AntiLeech plugin as it can be used in some pretty interesting ways.
My advice:
Change the url of your images to something rude and obscene. He seems to be copying your image urls, too ;).
Now, that is evil!
– Scot
Evil indeed!
Antileech plugins look interesting.
I think I’ll create a couple of subdomain, non pinging, fake content WP installs this weekend and set one to leech off the other to test these plugin methods. I’d hate to send anything odd to genuine readers. I’ll post about the results after the weekend.
I’m a pretty moderate guy about these things, but lazy rip offs annoy me.
Would love to hear how your little experiment goes - keep us posted.
I am the owner of the site in question and have spoken to Steve regarding this matter but as of yet am yet to recieve a reply.
I must firstly start by stating I am very unhappy in the way this has been treated, for Steve to state he has had no reply is a little obvious considering the email didn’t arrive in my inbox until almost 3pm (UK), I am not sitting on my emails 24/7 so time should be given for a response.
Secondly, I am not leeching ANYTHING. I am using a widely available free WP plugin that anyone can use. I have not edited in ANY way, so for people to start stating things like “Change the url of your images to something rude and obscene. He seems to be copying your image urls, too. Now, that is evil!” is a little pathetic to be honest and shows your lack of research into this topic.
Thirdly, Steve declared that WPGuy site get’s no mention. Anyone visiting my site will instantly notice that WPGuy is credited everywhere possible.
In response to Steve’s email, I stated that the plugin wsn’t displaying as it should do because I had set an option incorrectly, just one little option that’s it - and with me working 12 hour shifts on nights, tending to this little error was very difficult until the weekend - ahem, which is sort of like now (for me anyway), the option change has been made and all posts appearing on my site now links directly to it’s original source, just like my other site at http://www.lfcrss.com already does - so I’m not giving you a load of old blarney, that was a genuine mistake.
The usage of this plugin should be restricted if it is allowing people to violate any licensing laws without actually knowing they are doing so, after all, if you don’t want people to track your work then pull your RSS feed.
As I said earlier, I am awaiting Steve’s second email, he’s most probably busy working or tending to real-life things (get the hint?), but the offer of pulling his feed still stands as I have no intention of stealing anything from anyone - this is my site and this is what I intend on doing with it, albeit, it is days old with very little work going into it at the moment - but life and family comes first as with everything.
Regards
Marc
Sorry Marc, I have been deadline bound for 24 hours. I see you’ve made the change to point the article at the originating site, so fair enough.
The episode was highlighted to me by my readers, so I felt keeping them up to speed worthwhile.
The episode has also led me to a decision to publish everything under a GPL style license which would explicitly give you the right to do what you originally did in any case. I’ll post shortly about that in more detail.
No hard feelings from this side anyway!
Marc
Thanks for taking the time to respond to us - I think that’s useful for Steve to know what’s going on and if he’s happy for you to continue using his feed in that way then everyone’s happy.
However, my opinion is that regardless of whether you do this through a widely used plugin, I still think that what you are doing is leaching.
You are taking someone else’s content that they have created, you are then sandwiching that content within heavy Google Ads - and benefiting from someone else’s hard work.
However you frame that - I disagree with it pretty strongly. However, if Steve’s happy for it to continue then that’s up to him.
Marc,
Using any tool - free or not - to swipe articles written by others, post them on a new site without any original content of your own, and plaster advertisements all over it stinks of foul play.
I’m willing to give you credit for making a newbie mistake, but it’s still wrong. And I think Steve is being far, far too nice about it. You should not misconstrew his “there is really nothing I can do about it” attitude for acceptance.
People who spend a tremendous amount of time writing articles do not appreciate having them copied word for word onto another site, and the commonly understood etiquite if you want to quote another article is to summarize and then provide a link to the full article.
Setting up a robot to snatch articles from other sites and post them to your own obnoxiously-plastered-with-ads site is not cool. I find it infuriating, and I have at least 50 robot blogs doing it maliciously to my site daily. Steve is too nice because I ban their IP addresses!
Indeed, when you snatched one of Steve’s articles that links to my site you then involved me because your blog created a ping-back on my site. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s an automated comment. That comment was summarily marked as Spam via Askimet, and if you get too many of those your new site is going to be unable to link to any blog on the net.
There is no value in arguing with anyone about this matter. The absolutely best thing you can do at this point is provide a simple apology stating that you didn’t understand and then remedy the situation by stopping the offending behaviour. Nothing else will suffice.
Everyone will be happy for you to republish portions their articles, or even republish your good ones, so long as its done in the spirit of fair play.
John
[...] few other posts have rung true, and a couple of posts here about protecting wordpress content have got me thinking. I’m going to follow the lead, and highlight sponsored themes where I [...]
I saw that site, the one you’re referring to. I received a trackback from that blog and when I checked it out, I thought it was familiar and then I remembered your blog and your trackback to my post for the Sakura WP theme review coz it was the same post.
Splogs and scrapers suck big time! I hope there was an easy way to get rid of them.
He seems to have switched off the scraper since moving to a new theme. He also deleted this article, pointing out that he was taking the content from elsewhere, from his site - surprise surprise!