Here’s a great article on what to do if someone steals your web content and posts it on their site.

A couple salient points:

1 – Just because it is on the internet does not mean it is free (contrary to the claims of Columbus Underground).
2 – Hmm, the article mentions a cease and desist order. The idiots at Columbus Underground thought that such a thing did not exist.
3 – Author also mentions the pressure that websites are under to create content. When they can’t continue creating their own content, they steal that of others. Sounds familiar.

Gizmodo buys stolen iphone and posts all the details reminded me of my situation with columbusunderground.com -

“Finally, there’s the misguided idea, long espoused by many in the tech community, that “information wants to be free.” But whether it’s in the form of proprietary trade secrets embodied by Apple’s latest iPhone or intellectual property subject to seemingly endless illegal downloading and file sharing every second of every day, information is not free.”

Proposed British Law will require ISP’s to shut down copyright violators’ sites

Trackback feature of blogs doesn’t justify stealing content

Trackback is a feature of blogs and a method by which internet authors request notification when another links to the author’s content. This feature allows the original author to keep track of who is linking to his/her articles.

Some argue that trackback allows other sites to do more than just link to an article.

I would disagree and argue that the trackback feature would not allow another site to post significant portions of another’s content verbatim as well as original photos and then claim that such a posting was just a link. In other words, the stealing site cannot disguise stolen content as a link. A link should be no bigger than a phrase or maybe one sentence long at most. A link should not consist of a photo and a couple paragraphs of content. This is true especially when the two paragraphs of stolen content came from, let’s say, a three paragraph article.

How to prevent other sites from hotlinking your photos and images

I’ve run into at least three sites using my photos and text without my permission – columbusunderground.com and playinggolftips.info were two of them. I recently discovered a feature in the control panel for my websites which prevents hotlinking.

Hotlinking is where another site puts your photos or images on their website by linking to the photo or image at its location on your server. Not only are they stealing the photo or image but they are stealing your bandwidth when they do this. Not sure why people think this is ok but in my opinion it is unethical and illegal. And simply because I have a feed doesn’t mean that all my content and photos are up for grabs. Ahh children, their reasoning capabilities are still to be developed.

How do I know when someone is hotlinking my photos? Check your stats. You should be able to tell when your site is being called up by another site but you aren’t receiving the same amount of visitors from that site. Here’ an example below:

You’ll see that I received 23 visitors from this website yet my image showed up 151 times on their site. Nice use of my image to help their site but I only received about 1/6 the traffic out of the deal. The other website also used my server 151 times without my permission.

Heck, let’s look at the year 2007 view if 151 isn’t a big enough number for you:

How about these numbers? This website made use of my servers about 2300 times in 2007. Yet I only received about 10% of the traffic. And they pay nothing for the privilege. Pretty nice deal, huh?

For them, maybe. Use my photos and my bandwidth to boost their site. It’s the American way, right?

Hey, even more fine repast results in said website – must be nice building your site off the sweat and hard work of others, huh? I’m sure I’ll be accused of stealing their content by some core model moron by posting these search results.

In my website control panel, I have a tool for controlling hotlinking. I can prevent all other sites from doing this or I can permit specific sites to hotlink. I wish I’d known about it sooner.

Of course, this doesn’t stop another website from downloading my photos and then uploading them onto their server.

Sites that do hotlink run a huge risk. At any time, I can change the photos that they show on their website by simply uploading a photo and giving it the same file name as the one that’s being hotlinked to. I did this with both the websites above. And let’s just say, I got medieval on ‘em. They probably never realized it either. What’s that you say? Do I hear the wrongdoer crying that they were wronged? You’ve got to be kidding me.

If you want to use photos from another site, you may want to ask the site owner first or you may find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit or you may find some very interesting photos on your site.

How are other sites responding to “content aggregators” stealing content and adding it to their own pages?

I’m seeing more and more of sites requiring a subscription to their articles either paid or via a free membership where you login and provide a password. Of course, this is making the web more user unfriendly but appears to be a necessary evil given the amount of people who are out there cutting and pasting content. Some of their justifications are hilarious. If you provide a RSS feed then, in their eyes, you are providing them a license to use your content on their sites. Wow! I don’t remember making that agreement! They may not realize that papers like the Columbus Dispatch actually pay for a subscription to AP wire reports or news feeds. As a result, I’ve added copyright information to my newsfeed and stripped the feed down to bare essentials.

My question is what are these content aggregators going to do when (partly as a result of their actions in copying material) the source sites go out of business. The newspaper industry is on a huge decline right now. What happens when the Dispatch goes out of business? Where will they get their information from next?

If I distribute information from my blog through an RSS feed does that mean that others can take the content from the RSS feed and post it directly to their site?

Really Simple Stealing – absolutely brilliant! Hey Cu.com, you were full of shit!

This page suggests that an RSS feed is copyrightable.

Nice post on how to protect your blog’s rss feed from unscrupulous aggregators.

Here’s a wordpress plugin which adds a copyright message to your RSS and Atom Feeds.

Nice story on AP filing takedown requests against infringers who used anywhere from 10 to 83 words from AP stories. I wonder what Andrew Miller would say to this? Perhaps that the AP doesn’t get it and that all their work should be done without compensation in the name of free knowledge and information. Or perhaps that those taking the AP’s content without permission are doing it a favor by publicizing the AP’s stories. After all, yahoo and google do the same thing don’t they? Not really. But even if they did, yahoo and google actually refer traffic to the content owner’s site. Content aggregators (as seen above) refer little if any traffic.

I can see the point that facts should be free to all to use as they see fit but facts are often tied to creative content and hard work, sometimes inseparably. If I put in the work to dig up facts that never existed before or would not have been made public but for my efforts then someone else shouldn’t have the right to lift my facts to promote their website. If I imbue my creative content to a set of facts, then another shouldn’t be able to lift my work without permission.

If you espouse the free trade of information then I’ll be happy to come over to your house and spend a couple weeks rent-free. You don’t mind if I eat the food in your fridge, do you? Can I go out to your garage and run some errands in your car? If your wallet is on the counter, can I use a few bucks? Oh wait, you paid for those things and don’t want to share? But you’re taking my property and using it without compensation? Why can’t I do the same with yours? Or will you simply respond, that I just don’t get it?

This may be the most damning of all to those who claim they can copy RSS and Atom feeds. and for those who claim that content is set out into the public domain merely by using such feeds.

AP sues US news aggregator who distributes AP content without a license and guess what they sent a CEASE AND DESIST LETTER. I had a bunch of morons on cu.com questioning that term because they had never heard of it before. I guess they wanted a takedown letter. I should have just served them with a lawsuit aka complaint aka civil action. Take your pick.

Great Article on Online Aggregators as Potential Thieves

Is it right to steal content via an RSS feed?

Another good resource on copyrights and RSS feeds

After just a little study, it appears that claims made that RSS feeds are public domain may not be very supportable especially if the site that is stealing the content is a commercial website. To drive home the point, bloggers should put a copyright message on their RSS and Atom feeds – see wordpress plugin above. Also of interest is the AP’s vigilant enforcement of their copyrights. 10 copied words gets you a takedown letter. That’s got to worry some bloggers out there.

Future topics – who owns the copyright in messages posted on a public message board/forum?

I find this to be an interesting topic because isn’t a forum or message board a public forum? And just because you operate a message board where the general public can offer their insight on topics, does that mean that you as the forum operator automatically own the copyright to all the message board posts? I bring this up because a message board operating may have been charging me with copyright infringement for using portions of comments on my website. I would think it would be antithetical to the whole purpose of a forum or message board (a place set up so that the public can engage in debate) for the forum operator to own the copyright to all material submitted. This seems a bit dictatorial. If the users of the forum were aware of this would they continue to post?

Here’s the start of a discussion on the topic.

More discussion on the issue here. Comments to the effect that the poster holds the copyright and depending on the terms of service grants a license to the operator to use the comments. But can the poster later withdraw this license or revoke it? Another interesting thought is if the operator owns the copyright or a license to use the comments, is the operator responsible for any damage resulting from the comments to third parties? For instance, if a poster decides to post the name, address and phone number of another forum member that results in harassing phone calls or worse?

Not sure if this is a US case but copyright was ruled held by the forum owner.

Another good discussion is here and part of it makes the point that fair use would allow for the republication of small portions of comments on that forum elsewhere.