At Lutrov Communications there’s a response in the comments from Bitacle about the recent splogging spate.
Apparently, the victims of this service are wrong to complain about their work being republished for someone else’s profit. The sploggers are saying, “why do you publish an RSS feed, then?” It’s a bit like saying that if you write a book, then I have the right to republish it and keep the profits because you let me obtain it.
This is what Bitacle says:
Hi, my name is David Martin and i’m working in Bitacle.
I have just read the article and your comments about our service.
1 — There aren’t a norm that forces us to obey the robots.txt. We index and archive the whole content of any XML. We never steal because always we link the original source and the original feed that you provide. When they have seen a spammer that links the original source? I haven’t seen anybody.
2 — “They publish entire articles on their website, instead of article summaries, like proper blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster and Blogdigger do.â€
The reason it’s that we don’t be only a blog search engine we are a “archive blog search engine†that it’s different concept.
One question: why you don’t ban Goolge, Yahoo or MSN? That search engines cache all your pages.
In the help page (It’s possible that before it was more hidden) you can find a contact email (bitacle (@) gmail (dot) com) but also you can write me to seo.bitacle (@) gmail (dot) com and I reply you without any problem.
And yes, we are very busy fixing our crawler, we work hard on it :)
I’ve also had an email response from the web2.0stores person that republished my content without attribution or even linking back:
Sorry, not a noob. There is nothing illegal about what I do.
Most people publishing content via RSS support republication of feeds. Because the technology is fairly new, the laws and legalities are still murky. It is assumed that content in RSS is protected by copyright laws but let us not forget the Internet is global and their is not a centralized body governing what is right or what is wrong. Not only does law and technology collide the laws of different countries, those creating the feed and those displaying the contents of the feed may contradict each other. It is for this reason, I would advise that publishers using RSS to assume that the contents of their RSS feeds will be syndicated and replicated.
Sorry I didn’t ask first, I stopped syndicating it.
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The issue that Bitacle seems to be glossing over is the fact that they are using our content to spawn Adsense advertising.
I’ve already filed my complaint with Google
Ian,
I recently discovered I had been splogged myself, but only after I found a link to the splogger (bitacle in my case as well) in the comment section of my last post. See “Some public service may be no service at all” on September 21. When I reached the bitacle site, I discovered they’ve been doing it for quite some time. I found quite a few posts there. As it happens, however, since Creative Weblogging, the network to which I belong, publishes only a partial RSS feed (this issue came up once before with another outfit that wanted to syndicate me, but asked permission first in that case)only a few sentences from each post appear on the splogger site with a link back to me. In this case, though I’m kind of ashamed to admit it given the trouble other bloggers are having, it has worked as pretty much a promotion for me and has probably increased traffic to my site. I can see that this would not be the case if entire texts are being used. Though I am sure you would rather not, perhaps the only answer is to syndicate a partial feed, thus making the splogger serve as a teaser for your site. Just a thought and probably not a perfect solution. One other thing. I was confused by the .org on bitacle’s URL which I thought was limited to non-profits. Any thoughts on this?
And, of course, that they are actively violating copyright protection as well as many creative common licenses.
The argument that anything published by feed is free to republish without permission is totally fallacious. Simply because you *can* syndicate content from a feed to a new site does not mean it’s always ok, or legal.
Seems to me that this is ust another splogger. An aggressive one, to boot.
- Amy Gahran
Shawn, looks like short feeds have a considerable attraction in this context. However, I actually hate short feeds and I’m damned if I’ll let the sploggers ruin the distribution of thoughts in the most convenient way possible for readers.
I think anyone can register and run a .org site, whatever the original intentions for the naming. After all, this is a .com site, but I’m not really commercial.
The sploggers are playing on the likelihood that copyright cases will not be actionable by victims because they cost too much and involve conflicts in interntational law. Illegal or not, though, what they are doing is certainly *wrong*.
Well, you should be able to write up a DMCA notice without taking serious legal action and send it to their ISP who then MUST take action. They will then have to prove that they have a write to distribute the content.
Thanks for the advice, darkarmani.
I found a sample letter here for victims to copy and paste:
http://jenjen.typepad.com/stoppiracy/2005/11/sample_of_corre.html
Sure waste time sending a DMCA notice. Then the website owner can simply show that he’s NOT actually circumventing ANY mechanism for restricting access to your public feed, and then he can merrily continue on his way, while simultaneously getting to “one-up” you.
And just so theres no confusion… robots.txt is NOT a mechanism for restricting access. It’s simply a REQUEST for exclusion, and is not legally recognized. It’s not even observed by some search engines. Use an .htaccess file to block access to something that you don’t want accessed.
When I don’t want something of mine plastered all over the web, you know what I do?…
I either restrict access to it or I LEAVE IT OFF THE WEB.
Would I ever bother taking content from someone elses blog or website? Hell no. But thats because I don’t want alot of duplicate content mucking up my nice websites.
But do I cry and throw a temper tantrum when I see that someone has copied something from one of my sites or blogs? Absolutely not.
In fact, most of the people complaining, should really be using this to their advantage. The fact that your content is being found and “redistributed” is a great advantage for you. First of all, stop publishing your entire articles in your feeds. It’s very possible that the search engines are seeing this (and penalizing your site for it) as you trying to push duplicate content, since both the page on your blog and the feed will contain the same full article. Secondly, if you publish a feed of just article summaries and NOT whole articles and then let “everyone and his brother” come and grab your feed, you will end up with a lot of links to your website (since many people who use other feeds do include a link back to the source website), and a lot of free traffic, which you can then turn into good ole’ money. In fact if you include links in the first part of your articles (the are to be used as the summary) , then very often, even THOSE links will appear whereever your feed is being used, thus giving you even MORE links to your website, and likely even MORE traffic for you to turn into even MORE money.
Or I guess we could just sit here, and keep complaining about other people… I mean who needs more money anyway right?.…
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law which criminalizes production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself. It also heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.
»Quoting Ian Delaney: “I’m damned if I’ll let »the sploggers ruin the distribution of
»thoughts in the most convenient way possible ”
A person distributes your content at his various websites and you get mad, yell “splogger!”, and then want to know how to stop the person from using your feed? Doesn’t sound like the “splogger” is the one trying to stop the distribution of ideas. Or are you really made because your name and/or ads arn’t all over it at all times?
Is this all just an Ego thing?
Funny, but I’d think that if your message was so important, you’d want it out there no matter what.