The web and social networks are evolving their own conventions of appropriate behavior.
People have learned to avoid cluttering mailboxes with broad cc’s. Flames are far fewer than in the old days. Most bloggers no longer feel they must blog every day. Most people know that it’s worthwhile to lurk when joining a new community to identify its standards before jumping into the fray.
One area that noobs fail to understand is that it is not cool to “scrape” other people’s blogs. By scrape, I mean taking an entire web post rather than taking an excerpt and linking to the original.
Google Alerts emails me when sites take my content lock, stock, and barrel. Every week I come upon sites that break one or more of these taboos:
- Do not re-post someone else’s blog posts in their entirety.
- Do not imply that you wrote a post if you did not.
- Do not strip out author names and links.
- Do not use frames to make it difficult to get to the original post.
- Do not remove links to the original material.
I’ve been happy to share my thoughts in blogs and free articles for more than a decade. I enjoy the exposure. But I don’t enjoy being abused.
One association takes my every post, puts it behind a members-only wall, and puts its copyright notice on the bottom of every page. A now-defunct university posted an entire white paper by Clark Quinn and me but stripped our names from it. Several automated blogs repost my work with ads alongside. My colleagues at Internet Time Alliance are experiencing the same phenomena.
What’s your take on this issue?
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
First off: it’s wrong wrong wrong
Secondly: Tumblr and Posterous practically bake the scraping in. Amplify has a neat approach to this by linking the quoting to 999 characters.
Thirdly: Google Alerts is good. FairShare is also pretty useful.
https://fairshare.attributor.com/fairshare/homepage
Anyone who blogs and has any sort of significant readership has this happen to them (indeed, not just blogs, but this happens to much web content). There are ways people do this that are more clueless than willfully wrong, and then there are ways people do this that are clearly meant to deceive and take credit for others work. Many of us, like you, use a CC license, and that along with an RSS feed, DOES beg for content to flow to other places. In the case where someone is doing that but in a clueless way that doesn’t respect one’s intent in sharing it, one step I’d suggest is to spell out more clearly the ways in which *you’d* like to see your work attributed (and if you use Share-alike or Non-commerical, tha to you these mean “Not locked behind a paywall” etc). The fact that there is indeed legitimate unclarity about some of these practices is attested to by the CC foundations numerous surveys over the last year clarifying what “Non-commercial” meant to users.
But for those re-uses that are outright “stealing,” where efforts have been made to take credit or make it very difficult to figure out where something came from, I usually just resort to an email, which oft-times is ignored. But at the end of the day, the only way to fully prevent this from happening is to not put it on the web at all. Which is not an option.
Jay,
You are the victim of a crime wave that I don’t see subsiding any time soon. The ease with which any web user can grab, copy, paste, repurpose, repost, or “scrape” content or other intellectual property is driven by the very technology that makes it possible to post your opinions far and wide in a matter of seconds. Far too many people, including some very well-educated professionals, truly believe that once something is on the Web (or is in any way digitized) it belongs to the world and should have no restrictions. That’s crap, of course, but until there are new draconian laws to stop it (which, frankly, will never happen) all you can do is send cranky emails to the offenders, although I doubt that the ’bots that are grabbing your posts will give a damn.
Hi – Thanks. Good post. It is sad that you must elaborate common sense. I’ve been writing on the Web since ’94 and on the Internet since ’81. These are the basics. There are others. I hope people follow them. I do sometimes make an exception for a standard press release (PR). If it is obvious pr and very brief then I may add the actual conent to other Web properties. Original links, format, authors, etc., are always intact, no exceptions. Remember, if origin is ever a problem there is always the WayBack Machine at achive.org… -j
What you bring up potentially creates a significant barrier to shared knowledge from leaders, such as yourself, that will detrimentally affect everyone. That you, or anyone with valuable information, research, and best practices, have unattributed works floating around will only diminish everyone’s opportunity to participate in real social learning. If SMEs and leaders in various domains have to moderate their knowledge sharing flow due to excessive scraping and theft, we all lose. The effect will be that social learning networks become impotent to generate real change and their will be a high social cost to be paid. In the end, those scraping and thieving now not only will lose their sites content trust, but be devoid of any useful and valuable information without dramatically increased budget to create their own valid content creation. Interestingly, everyone wins and gains credibility only when people like you are cited and your ideas are discussed, mulled over across the social learning web, and thoughts applied in different ways. For one, I want to thank you for your years of sharing, your amazing books, and your innovative ways…I hope and pray you can keep going in the direction you pioneered. Thank you.
Some of colleagues are experiencing the same phenomena. A couple companies take my posts, and put it behind a members-only wall as well.
http://www.IdiotsTrafficSchool.com http://www.FreeTryTrafficSchool.com http://www.DummiesTrafficSchool.com
Thanks for the commentary and support.
I don’t intend to stop sharing what I do. I’ve found it liberating. It’s the least I can do as payback for a wonderful world full of generous people. The net’s been very, very good to me.
The instances that lit my fuse were a professor at a German technical institute, some people I’ve met from a major airline, a large HR trade association, and a variety of sites chasing advertising revenue anyway they can. My post was for the first three. The latter are incorrigible; I have better things to do with my time than mess with them.
I’m all in favor of “fair use” doctrine, by the way. It’s generally good for me and for them. Use a representative piece; build on it. That’s constructive.
Actually, I may stop using Google Alert and other sites that bring the larceny to my attention.
I’m reminded of the Dalai Lama’s comment when asked if he didn’t hate the Chinese. “They have taken my country. Why should I give them my mind?”
Just looking for the links to the original images that you used in this post!
Seriously though, I do think that it would be impossible for you to capture the little value that the “thiefs” get out of it. So you lose nothing, they gain nearly nothing…
Go with the Dalai Lama.
I agree a person should give credit for a work that is not their original. What is the penalty for this violation other than violating academic integrity and ethical standards especially in blogging?