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In the last week, I’ve needed to file copyright complaints on two different spam blogs. Both were reprinting, in full, the entire content (full posts, pages, etc) of this blog without permission or a link back. Both had slapped ads all over the content so they were profiting off something that wasn’t even theirs and listed no credit so they were essentially claiming my work belonged to them. Now it’s happening again on another site and I can’t see to find a way to report them. (The other two were on Blogger so it was easy to report them to Google.)
I’m… annoyed. Especially since I think I know what the problem is.
See, a lot of bloggers set their RSS to just be a set number of word excerpt instead of the full blog post so that they get more traffic since the people who subscribe still have to click through and read the post on the site. I completely understand where they are coming from and why they do that but, personally, I don’t ever want to do that. My take on it is, if you are willing to commit to this site enough to subscribe to the RSS feed for every single post, you deserve to read the whole thing without the annoyance of clicking back to the blog. I’m not calling out anyone who does a limited feed, I’m just saying that’s how I feel about it. I will never do anything other then full feeds if I can help it.
But I noticed that on these spam sites, mine is the only content they have in full. Everyone else’s stolen content is truncated, Feedburner style. So they’re basically just pulling my RSS feed and using a plugin to auto-post it to their blog. If this was just the excerpt, I would be somewhat OK with it as people would still need to continue reading it on my site, but it’s the full post. I’m don’t make more then pennies on this site but, damn it, I worked hard to write that content and I don’t want someone else claiming it as their own or profiting off of it. This was never an issue before and suddenly it’s happening left and right.
The simple solution would be to change my RSS feed to just an excerpt but I really don’t want to do that. The other option is to just ignore the spam blogs and hope they go away but I afraid that not doing anything to protect my copyright sets a bad precedent.
What’s your take on full RSS feeds versus truncated ones? What do you recommend I do about the spam blogs? How would you handle this issue?
RSS - Posts
I would do like I do on my podcast; include links and mentions back to my original site, so folks can see where it was originally posted.
Hillary, I do full feeds because I absolutely agree, if you’re going to take the trouble to subscribe you should get all I have to give. Scraping is all too common with classic movies blogs. I do what Nobilis suggests below and take it a step further to includes some ads and affiliate links to my sales items so the content thief can at least make me a few dollars or promote my stuff along the way.
I totally agree with you re full feeds. We’ve had the same problem in the past but DMCA takedown notices to the website hosting company tend to work pretty fast 😉
You could also consider dual feeds – both a full feed and a summary feed. This give legitimate sites that want to promote your posts via RSS an option to use the summary feed whilst still offering your readers the full feed.
I’ve subscribed to rss feeds for about 10 years now. Mostly the readers I’ve used have displayed the feed in a sidebar with just a title, or a title and a hover popup of the first part of the post. As a personal consumer of rss feeds that has always been sufficient.
Now I’m considering adding a sidebar to my website that combines rss feeds from related sites. Unfortunately the plugin not only displays the titles and links, but will also display the entire contents of the rss feeds on a single page. If the feeds are snippets then, I think that would be fine, if they are full content posts, then I think not so fine and the rss can’t be used.
As a further development I have software that can take each rss feed item and convert it into archived elements within the site. These items can then be returned in searches, or collations within the site. So suppose someone comes to the site to read an entry on Van Gogh and then searches the site for Gauguin, I may have written nothing about him, but if you had written an article a year previously that had been picked up via rss then the entry would be returned in the search. Obviously to do that one would want agreement of the originator, but again I think that snippets would work a lot better for that type of application.
While I can’t speak to whatever you are using specifically, when it comes to sidebar widgets many of them give you the option to either truncate or show in full. The one I use even lets you specify how long an excerpt.
For me, it would depend on the case. If you were someone in my network and I felt that you were using my content with good intentions even if I didn’t like how you were using it, I’d probably be OK with it. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing it without permission of the content holder just to be safe.
If the thieves are on their own website, you will need to find their host first, and filled a dmca notice with their host. Also if they have amazon or adsense or any other type of ads, report them to amazon, adsense etc…. They will get the boot.
 I know, I report content theft all the time. You can also shut them down from google search. Here a good site with lots of information about what to do when your content is stolen: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/.
 For reporting to adsense: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=18386 (use copyrighted content option and fill the form), to shut them down from being visible on google search http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905 (use web search option). As for amazon, I never had to report so I don’t know.
Good luck in butt kicking 🙂
I actually filed with Google for two of the blogs (they were on blogger) and they just responded back on Friday saying they can’t do anything. I’m hoping a follow up email will be more fruitful but I will keep everyone posted.
good article mate…it sure is a big problem