Excellent feedback. Some of your points are very clever and I have not heard before. I am sure that all of us can employ the use of many of your suggestions to protect our content.

Interestingly enough, Leo Babauta, of Zen Habits, went the completely opposite direction and chose to “Uncopyright” as he calls it. He has an entire page, “Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal My Content”, that explains the reasons why he has decided to go this route.

-Philip Nowak

I enjoyed your post. I’ve always said that it is important to have fun and don’t take yourself too seriously. Not only does it reduce your own stress level, but people are drawn to others when they show an ability to make a serious topic more lighthearted. Ultimately, your levelheadedness benefits your popularity tremendously.

-Philip Nowak

You (and most other people in the comments) have focused on “people are taking your content” as the problem.

But the real problem is that you’re not benefitting when these people take your content.

If you think I just said something self-evident, then you missed my point.

I’ll start with a premise: the internet is a success when information flows freely. And a failure when information flow is prevented.

Let’s look back at Napster & RIAA in 1999. The music industry saw millions of people stealing their music, and therefore sent their lawyers after all of them.

But if the RIAA had seen Napster as an opportunity, rather than a threat, had the RIAA put their faith in the free flow of information, rather than preventing that flow, I believe that the music industry today would NOT be in the shambles it’s in.

To bring this back to successful bloggers like you, if you look at this whole situation from the perspective of “free flow of information is a good thing”, then you can realize that there’s a simple set of steps you can take to BENEFIT from the many, many people who will continue to take your content and publish it as their own.

I will list a few steps here:

1) Watermark Your Content:
Embed links within your RSS feeds, pointing back to your site. And by “within” I mean in parentheses, in the middle of a paragraph

Sure, some content scrapers will disable these links, but most of them will republish your content on their sites, linking back to you.

This benefits you by Google seeing more backlinks to your site, and visitors to those sites clicking over to you.

2) To catch the people who remove the links,insert text every so often in the content “brought to you by Darren Rowe”. Important that the text is separate from the link, because the people who automatically remove links will remove anchor text as well.

3) Regarding your duplicate content fear, first Google’s algorithm knows who is the original writer and who is the scraper.

A blog like yours, you’re usually indexed in Google with 5-10 minutes after posting.

So any site that republishes your content will do so AFTER Google already knows about your new post.

Additionally, Google looks at sites, not just content. From Google’s perspective, it’s easy to see that all the articles on your site are original, while all the articles on the other sites are scraped (because guess what? Those sites usually scrape from multiple sources at once).

3a) But if you REALLY want to be “safe” on this point, set your RSS to wait to put new content in it until that new content has been indexed by Google. That way you can be absolutely sure that Google knew about you first.

Ok there are more things that can be done to benefit from people reprinting your content, but I’ll leave it at that. I’m sure people will have a lot of “buts”, but it all comes down to one thing: information is flowing freely like a river. You can never stop a river. Better to use it, have it generate energy for you, use it for transport. Treat information flow like a river and you’ll benefit from all those people you previously thought were stealing from you

I point other bloggers to check out your site all the time, but I do it with a link ;)

You’ve got to give them credit for honesty in their replies if nothing else!

I get it a lot with scraper sites but also have noticed one blog copying the format of several posts (headings, title etc but rewritten the actual paragraphs) – so close to our posts but un-provable. I keep being told to think of it as flattering but it isn’t, it’s downright theft (and uncreative to boot!) Pah.

I can’t tell you how pissed I am. It just happened to me. First time. Probably not the last. Someone lifted my post completely. With no link back, no nothing. A post I submitted to you for your List Project. It was my “4 ways to more romance.” The guy changed it to “4 ways to more romance in my life.” Do you ever get use to it?

It’s not in a search engines interest to have to index the same material 40 times. I for one get frustrated when you can still find useful material on the 30th page of a google search, and everytime you click a result you get the same content. It used to be that any good results were on the first page, now its clone clone clone…

And surely feed aggregators would have a better, more effective service should they cut the crap.

How could this be done? I wouldn’t have a clue. Any private group that makes a list of “original content posters” and “cloners” would no doubt get it wrong sometimes, and like email servers, suddenly good clean servers get listed as spam relays and can’t send email to anyone using their safe list, and then have to prove they were innocent. Mabe blogging software makers? Maybe ISP’s (dreamhost.com are the only large ISP that I think would do something cool like boot users for copyblogging)? Maybe google?

Until someone figures out a way, it seems that the besy thing to do is ignore it, as even shaming them publically sends them more traffic.

1. RSS – there is debate over this and as far as I can see I’m entitled to put a copyright notice on my feeds. I am the author of them, I spent many hours writing them – I can do what I like with them.

I’m sure the argument over whether content can be used by others happens every time there is a new medium (books, newspapers, websites, CDs etc). In most cases that I can think of the author of content is protected.

I use feeds so that people can read my content in a way that suits them via a news aggregator and not so they can randomly republish every word I write on their own sites. I don’t like them doing this for two reasons.

Firstly it’s an issue of duplicate content. Google treats content appearing in multiple places in the exact same form badly. I don’t want to risk it. If I were to let everyone repost my content there would be many copies of every post I write around the web.

Secondly when a publisher allows people to reprint their content they run the risk of that content being used in ways that they might not wish it to be used. I’ve seen my feeds stripped of acknowledgments to authorship, put into ebooks to be sold and twisted to be used to promote products that I’m dead against.

Saying that just because I use a technology that allows people to republish and therefore it’s legal is a crazy argument. Virtually any way of presenting information can be republished but its not always legal to do so.

2. there is a difference between what I do on my blogs and what I’m complaining about in this post.

- On my blogs I manually search for content that is relevant to the topic I’m writing about (those I’m referring to above simply republish everything from a feed).
- I use short quotes from sites that I find (others republish full feeds)
- I always link back and acknowledge a source (many others don’t)
- I have a working relationship with many of the sites that I use content from. They actively pitch their stories to me on a daily basis and ask me to quote them (others don’t seek permission and sheepishly make excuses when confronted)
- Many of the sites I link to link back to my blogs and use quotes from what I write in a similar fashion when I write reviews
- I’ve had interactions with people from mainstream search engines and have shown them my sites – they’ve not seen them as spammy sites. Many other scraper type blogs do get banned from search engines.
- If you look deeper in my blogs you’ll find that we don’t just use the quotes once. Without giving all my competitors a complete outline of how I run my blogs I will say that I do add value to the quotes I use by collating them together in a way that my readers do find useful.
- My sites are read by 30-40,000 people a day and have close to 20,000 email subscribers. Obviously someone’s finding them useful.
- Most of the sites that I see republishing content do nothing of real use with that content. They randomly scrape everything a site writes – in fact many of the operations I’ve seen are scraping the feeds from hundreds of blogs at a time and are producing hundreds of thousands of useless content every year.

I’m not sure what else I can say Chris.

I’m a little confused though because the email address that you use is from a network of sites that seem to be doing almost an identical thing to what I am.