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Blog scraping or using RSS as intended?
There’s been some discussion this weekend about sites ’scraping’ Wordpress users blogs and stealing their content. This is something that seems quite common and effects most bloggers at one time or another, but this weekend all the complaints seem to be for sites hosted by unix-fu.org.
Various bloggers, including myself, have complained to the email address given in this entry and have had the offending posts removed. However, in a response post the hosting owner, Kris, has raised an issue about RSS syndication and what the expected use of an RSS feed is.
Kris contends that by publishing an RSS feed for your blog (as is automatically done when you have a Wordpress.com blog) you are granting the right for anyone to use that material on their own sites because “When your blog has an RSS feed active, that is saying to the public ‘feel free to syndicate my works’.” It is his opinion that, provided credit is given in some way, the other site is not breaching any rules.
I must admit that this line of reasoning had not occurred to me. In my mind, and I suspect this is true for many other bloggers, the RSS feed is a convenience to allow people to read your content without needing to visit your site all the time. They load your feed URL into something like Shrook or Google Reader and when you publish something new, it automatically gets delivered to them. An RSS feed is a convenience; I don’t believe that most bloggers are tacitly granting people permission to re-publish their work.
It seems that Kris has been rather snowed under with complaining emails recently and not all of them have been polite in their requests, so you can understand why he’s a little ticked off. But does he have a point about RSS feeds, or is he wrong? Also, are you bothered when a site uses your content in this way - republishing your content, with Adsenses blocks all round it - or are you happy that they use your material, as long as they credit you in some way?
This issue is not going to go away, with more and more bloggers signing up every hour and with more and more opportunities for people to earn money off their blogs encouraging content to be re-published elsewhere, so who is right?
Comments
5 Responses to “Blog scraping or using RSS as intended?”
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
This is a timely and thought provoking post. Her are my observations and opinions.
On one hand, I’m not bothered by a blogger who takes an excerpt from one of my posts and gives the reader a link back to my blog to read the entire post. This is consistent with my copyright policy stated on my blog as well as being consistent with common practice quoting and citing the works of other authors.
“A brief excerpt of content may be quoted as long as a link is provided back to the source page on this blog.” http://wpbloggingtips.wordpress.com/about-2/copyright/
One the other hand, I become extremely annoyed when I find someone has published my entire post on his or her site. And I also become extremely annoyed when I see either an excerpt of a post that I wrote or an entire post that I wrote incorrectly attributed to someone other than myself.
IMO the reason that we have problems with this start with bad attitudes, lack of ethics and greed. There are those on the internet that think they are above the law and they believe that they may help themselves to whatever they want because they think either they won’t be caught or that they won’t be sued for theft of intellectual property. When that is combined with the opportunity to make an income from advertising revenue derived from posting stolen materials on their sites –greed overrules any ethics they may have had.
IMO what it will take to stop this illegal practice is a combination of intense pressure on the web host administrators of sites like the one you linked to above and successful lawsuits. Unless or until we bloggers unite and sue the ass off these amoral, opportunistic parasites the situation will simply grow worse and worse.
Thanks for the opportunity for dialog.
I take the same position as you, Timethief; an excerpt and a link back is fine. Taking the whole post is a no-no - even if you do provide a link back.
It seems from what I’ve seen on the forums that there has been a lot of derision for the opinion that publishing an RSS feed is granting permission to re-use the material. I think that Kris and the other Unix-Fu users were trying to justify theft with a minority viewpoint.
I’m sure, though, that this is one of those issues that’s going to run and run…
(BTW, thanks for the link!)
You’re welcome and thanks for your help on the forum.
Hey, this rip off coming from unix-fu.org… I’m one of the sites this piece of garbage is leaching off of. Can you send me the contact info for this hack?
There’s suggestions in this thread about who you can contact, if you haven’t already checked it out.