Taking the full content of an article and reposting it on your own site (even with a link back to the original) without permission from the author is wrong. Duplicate content penalties, control of distribution, and the appearance that the reposted material is your own all add up to it being a no-no.

If you contact the author and they give you the go-ahead then obviously it’s OK, otherwise just quote an excerpt of the article and link back to the full, original article.

There are other areas involving creative commons works but taking someones content and passing it off as your own or providing their entire sites worth of content on your own is just in bad taste.

I had an experience once prior to my blogging days where I would write articles for “syndication” as long as you followed the rules involved in posting the content.

An attorney no less used one of my articles on his site to promote his law practice without following the proper terms and I complained.

It took me a while to “convince” him that the article was my own, and he took the proper action to continue using the article.

However, to my own amusement he used the article of someone else as well without following the TOS either. The article was based on copyright infringement. Knowing what I do, I do not think he is probably a great attorney either.

One hundred percent syndication of someone else’s work could very cause that persons website to get a higher ranking and leave your site without a valid rank.

I recently shut down a site due to my own ignorance on the socialized rules around this. If a blog offers up an RSS feed, it does so at it’s own risk as far as I’m concerned. If you didn’t want people to take your content and republish it, why would you offer an RSS feed?

Yes, you may say it is there for the RSS readers of the world, and only them, but it’s a technology that you don’t control like that. An RSS feed can be used by the RSS readers, perhaps their intended purpose, but they can also be republished by blogging packages like Community Server. If the feed is put out to the world as full text, guess what? It will be full text where it is republished (most likely).

I don’t think that blame should fall on the republishers, after all, you provided it for them to use. To some extent, it’s like putting a candy bar in front of a sugar-hungry kid and telling him not to eat it. The world isn’t the utopia you thought it was, everyone is here for themselves these days (I blame overpopulation).

You can also say that, well, they should ask first or only republish the first xx characters of each post. Again, it’s there for the taking, and it will be taken, history teaches us that.

If you don’t want the full post to be republished, don’t allow your RSS feed to provide that. YOU need to control that. If you don’t want people republishing at all, don’t provide an RSS feed. You can control it in this manner, but most probably don’t and then complain about it.

All this “it’s a no-no so please don’t do it” is only asking for people to police themselves, which may work a bit, but in the end, it’s not 100% effective.

Here is an idea, what if RSS feeds required authentication? Hmm…problem solved? This would put the onus squarely on the bloggers lap to control who gets access to the feed. Now think about that a bit. If there WAS a security mechanism in place, you then would now have to manage and maintain all your subscribers..adding another level of administration to your duties of running a blog. Is that what we want?

I’m playing devil’s advocate here a bit, and hopefully I don’t sound overly obtuse. IMOHO, it’s the bloggers responsibility, after all, it’s their content. If you don’t control it, someone else will.

Welcome to Earth, enjoying your stay?

It is a win-win for both of us. It gives my site the flavor of local voices, and while some aren’t “article quality” it is very clear that they are blog posts from individuals. The bloggers have the advantage of added exposure for their site that they wouldn’t otherwise have and they are identified as a local. People like to follow who they know.

I’ve been adding the feeds very slowly because first I have to find them. Most of the people just blog to blog and do no other site promotion or networking.

Second, I have to determine if they are writing the types of posts I would want to promote on my site. I’m not going to give exposure to some obnoxious idiot.

If I think a blog would be a good fit, then I contact the owner and ask if they would like to participate.

If you quote a part of something and attribute it, whether yuou discuss it or just link to it, that’s a review. (In the last case, the review consists of the fact that you like it enough to have the link on your blog.) If you take an entire article, you need to ask permission first.

If you take an entire article, don’t attribute it, don’t link, and don’t ask permission, that’s plagiarism. And yes, it is against the law, at least in the U.S. Once a person creates a work, they have automatic copyright, even if they don’t post the copyright notice or register.

If there is no link back to the permalink, then its a big no-no.

Intentionally linking to someone else who has written something you like and that you want to share is something entirely different, which we’ve all done, hopefully. The intentions are entirely different from someone who has no intention of ever creating any new content.

I have nothing against syndication per-se, but as a publisher I avoid it, because the quality of available content is so very low. In my experience, people keep all the best articles for their own sites, and shovel their not-so-great stuff onto article repositories as a link-building tactic.

As a reader and subscriber, I avoid syndicated feeds like the plague. I certainly don’t want to tarnish my name/brand/reputation by inflicting them on others!

We’re not talkng about straight-up copying a whole post and repasting it on your blog as if it’s you wrote it…

I agree with you about Flickr. I am always careful to use only CC licensed photos, unless I can’t find any. Then there are two alternatives: one is using the Blog This feature on most of the images, or, asking for permission to use the photo. I’ve never been denied that permission, btw.

One thing a lot of people forget when using the photos, no matter what the license is, is that there has to be a notice of the license, along with attribution. I hope and think I’m doing it properly.

Another site I will use is Webshots. Those allow for direct posting also.

But to get back on topic, once again, scrapers, splogs, pingbacks and trackbacks are NOT syndicating. People need to make that distinction.

@Flabuless: If you’re syndicating the way mentioned in this or my other post, I think it sounds kosher. Are you using one of the widgets or Google Alerts to do this? It almost sounds like you’re doing a blogroll, slightly enhanced. As long as it goes to the original post, then it’s really only known as linking, which is what the world wide web is all about. Good luck, and it’s great of you to highlight and give link love to other, lesser known blogs.

I *have* on occasion plopped a post onto one of my blogs fully intending to go and edit it to fit my blog’s content and have gotten distracted by some other late breaking thing or another, and so syndicated it sits until I delete it.

What I _try_ to do is take other people’s great ideas for stories, or breaking news or whatever happens to be going on out there and relate it to one of my blogs somehow — i.e. when the “Emergency Party Button” was posted by Lifehacker Australia (http://lifehacker.com.au/) then syndicated by LifeHacker, I dugg it, and put it on my Musicology Site and talked about the choice of Haddaway’s “What is Love” as the “Emergency Party Song” which I thought was interesting and fit what I am talking about on that blog.

That’s my tusense.

The main difference is that one blog is just as available as the next, whereas radio only broadcasts to a geographic area, and papers only distribute to a geographic area. Still, some sites have a sort of geographic presence because of the volume and mix of their content, think MSN.com, etc…

@Flabuless, hi, it sounds like you’ve also got a situation where you have the permission of the blogger. If you don’t I personally would not repost another blogger’s full post (I wouldn’t want to do that even if I had permission, but if you have permission then you’re all set) but again it’s just the process of linking out when you post one or two sentences from the other blogger’s post and then write your own post about it with your opinions and comments about what they wrote.

Another idea to showcase other bloggers would be offering them to guest post on your blog – then the content would be unique and you’d still be showcasing the other blogger.

When a blog owner wants to showcase a post that is geared toward a certain subject, and properly links and names the source, I am all for it. It can be a great way to find new readers.

Or a site that you join allows syndicating of your feed you submit – This too is a great way to find new readers.

I use feedburner so I make sure now to add an attribution notice of where the content is from and the copyright, via feedburner’s “feedflare” on my outgoing feeds. This helps a little to appease my anxiety about content theft.

In most people’s opinions all content on the web is at their disposal for use as they please. This unfortunately is a huge problem – and it spans across language barriers too, because copyright notices become lost in translation.

I have noticed since being a flickr.com member, since the very begining, people assume all images on flickr are approved for use via creative commons. This is a common misconception and a very false one. In cases like flickr or bigger corporations that syndicate blogger content, I think it could be of value to the Internet as a whole to be more vocal about copyright and try educating people on it’s importance.

It is also unfortunate that the same copyright laws that we as content creators are trying to uphold – do not always protect our beloved content, due to gray areas associated with the Internet itself. Countless court cases have sided with the copyright holder – but due to the international laws not meshing with US laws, an offender ends up getting away, leaving the copyright owner with fees and lost money from over published images and content.

There is now a way to copyright mass images and digital files online – but you must pay to have it done. For allot of us this can be too costly – and if people are not upholding copyright in the first place, a waste of time.

I think that this subject will continue to be a hot circulating subject via the blogosphere.

A way of copyrighting content that is universal , is a must. Once that is settled then maybe we can discuss “syndicating” other people’s content – because we will all understand the complications involved.

I don’t mind as I have ended up accessing people from different communities that I feel would not have without this ‘partnership’.

I feel as long as both parties aim for a win win and nobody is cheating the other then it is cool.