Proposal: Feed Republishing List

By Jonathan Bailey • Apr 18th, 2008 • Category: Articles, Housekeeping
To Do List
Creative Commons License photo credit: Florian

With my recent article about search engines republishing feed content and news that TechTribe is republishing full articles on their site, I’ve been wondering if there may be a need for a list of sites that, though not actually spam blogs, do republish the full content of articles they use.

The goal of this list would not be to condemn the sites, but to make others aware of places their content are likely appearing so they can investigate and take action if they see fit.

Even those who are comfortable with this type of republication would likely benefit from such a list as they may still want to know where their work is appearing.

The idea right now would be to create a list, one similar to the DMCA Contact List, where sites that routinely republish full RSS feeds are listed as well as information about the site and a contact location to request removal.

Such a list would have to be regularly updated, perhaps once every two weeks, and would require a great deal of user participation.

Also, just to make it clear, this list would NOT contain simple spam blogs, but rather services that are republishing full content as part of their site.

On that note, let me know what you think of this idea and, if you think it is a good one and know of a site I might have missed, definitely drop me a line.

I look forward to hearing what you think.

Short URL to this Post: http://copybyte.com/z/cd

Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
Email this author | All posts by Jonathan Bailey

  • Jim: Thanks for the input and, if I do do this, rest assured I won't be giving any search engine juice to the scrapers. I'm going to work with my SEO buddies to make sure that doesn't happen, perhaps using a redirect system or something else to ensure that no search engine ranking is passed on.

    Thanks for the link. I think I talked about it some in last week's Blog Herald column, my brain is fried so I can't remember, it was a great post that Raoul wrote!
  • I think this is a good idea as long as you're not giving them links on your blog. no reason to help them out with search engine optimization with a link from a highly trafficed web sites. The last interesting case I heard in relation to this was via Raoul Pop's web site

    http://www.raoulpop.com/2008/04/12/shyftr-equal...
  • Joan: I see where you're headed with that. The problem is that I'm not sure how many of these sites there are. Is the number in the hundreds, dozens or just a handful. I'm personally aware of about six but these types of sites don't get discovered that regularly and usually result in a big stink when they do. It might be something to experiment with and see if it is practical and then kill off or transfer elsewhere if it isn't.

    Spamboy: I like that idea. Since the Codex is licensed for it, I can use the text both here and there so both WP users and PT readers can manipulate and contribute. This is something that would probably be best served by not being centralized. I might talk to some of my friends in the WP community about that.

    Voyagerfan: Thanks for the input, it might be interesting to see what happens though if we put this page in multiple locations and see if it can be crowdsourced, I think there is a possibility of it working, we'll just have to see.
  • As they say, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however..." (Or whatever the words are.) Joan makes a good point. I too think this would be a good idea, kind of like the spam domain lists we have now for email. User participation might be harder to get, though.
  • Since it is something that may require a high-degree of maintenance, perhaps placing it on the Wordpress Codex might not be a bad location (barring that it meets criteria to go there).
  • A central repository sounds like a good idea, in theory, but reality is usually far-removed from theory. The fact that it would require a lot of user participation is probably why it won't fly. I'm like most authors in that I abhor the idea of someone scraping my prose or stealing it outright, but how I'd find time to add another task to my daily duties is the problem. I'm over-scheduled as it is, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

    So this may be a great opportunity for someone to start this repository and for a moderate subscriber fee do the checking for those who subscribe.
blog comments powered by Disqus