Video: Let’s Talk Copyright

By Jonathan Bailey • Jun 20th, 2008 • Category: Articles, Videos

Inquisitr LogoDuncan Riley, in an entry on The Inquisitr, posted a screencast and video opinion piece dealing with RSS scraping and republishing and why it is not acceptable.

The screencast is nothing short of brilliant and, in just under 20 minutes, manages to express what I have been trying to say in several articles on this site.

Perhaps the greatest indication of how effective the screencast is that Robert Scoble, formerly one of the staunchest supporters of RSS republishing, has said via FriendFeed that the video convinced him that he was wrong.

Also, Plagiarism Today does make an appearance in the screencast, at about the 12 minute mark, with reference to the Why RSS Scraping is Not OK column.

The video is embedded below so please enjoy. My thanks goes to Duncan for the effort he put into the video. I can imagine many bloggers will use this video as a tool to convince spam bloggers and other services that, perhaps, they don’t have the legal right to republish whatever they find in an RSS feed.

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

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.
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  • @Christina Warren -
    Thank you very much for the praise and for the encouragement, it means a great deal. I can also understand the frustrations experienced by companies such as AOL when dealing with this issue. It is almost a game of Whack-A-Mole with two new sites popping up for every one taken down. Very frustrating.

    What we need to do is start hitting the advertising and profit centers harder. That will be more effective than just reporting the sites. Since one account will have multiple sites and it is much harder to create a new advertiising account than find a new host. It is the easiest way to go.

    Thank you very much for your comment and please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!
  • As someone who writes for TUAW (one of the sites that had content scraped that Duncan featured in his screencast), I couldn't be happier that Duncan (and your site) are drawing more attention to this issue.

    As a freelance writer, I don't like having my words and my byline splashed all over splogs or splogs that try to get around the fact that they are splogs by claiming to be a legitimate business. I don't want any misunderstanding that I'm somehow associated with those places or any of the ancillary content they republish. An excerpt -- fine. A full feed that includes our permalinks and category links (which doesn't make the thing any better to me, if anything, it makes it that much more pathetic), images (images we oftentimes create ourselves) and other site-specific information is not

    I will note that AOL legal is pretty proactive about shutting down sites that are using more than just excerpts of our content -- the problem is that there are just too many sites and now "services" cropping up every day to be able to attack them all.
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