{"id":133,"date":"2005-12-28T13:52:34","date_gmt":"2005-12-28T18:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2005\/12\/28\/blog-plagiarism-steal-this-blog\/"},"modified":"2005-12-28T13:52:34","modified_gmt":"2005-12-28T18:52:34","slug":"blog-plagiarism-steal-this-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/12\/28\/blog-plagiarism-steal-this-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog plagiarism — Steal this blog!"},"content":{"rendered":"

As usual, Mike over at TechDirt has what I think is a nice take<\/a> on the blog plagiarism (or ‘splog’) problem that has afflicted some top bloggers, including Om Malik<\/a> and TechCrunch<\/a>. Mike’s response boils down to this: Ignore it (and it’s worth reading his reply to some of the comments his post got too).<\/p>\n

Is wholesale blog-copying wrong? Obviously. Is Google making money from the AdSense ads that run on such sites? Yes. But I don’t think that means Google needs to police the problem, as Jeff Jarvis<\/a> and some others believe. Do we really want Google to become a de facto website-content policeman? I would argue that we don’t. <\/p>\n

Even Om isn’t sure what kind of response<\/a> he wants to see. I have a hunch that Mike is right — anyone who matters will quickly realize that such sites aren’t adding any value, and therefore any AdSense revenue they gain will be fleeting at best. Maybe there’s a touch of Pollyanna<\/a> in that, but I think the “reputation economy” — or whatever you want to call what we’re all doing here<\/a> — should be more of a self-regulating mechanism. <\/p>\n

As James Robertson notes<\/a>, the issue of “fair use” is definitely a very grey area, since it covers feed aggregators<\/a> as well as plogs. So what should be done? By all means, send the splogger a threatening note mentioning the DMCA (although be aware that you are using a badly-formed law that plenty of people dislike for plenty of very good reasons<\/a>), but leave Google out of it. <\/p>\n

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As usual, Mike over at TechDirt has what I think is a nice take on the blog plagiarism (or ‘splog’) problem that has afflicted some top bloggers, including Om Malik and TechCrunch. Mike’s response boils down to this: Ignore it (and it’s worth reading his reply to some of the comments his post got too). … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Blog plagiarism — Steal this blog!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}