With special guest Jason Calacanis, blog entrepreneur and former head of Weblogs Inc., the panel reaches roughly the same conclusion that I did back in August, that there is no implied license to scrape RSS feeds.

At nearly an hour and a half in length, it’s a long podcast but it’s a great discussion about all things copyright and RSS. It’s a must-listen for anyone interested in these issues, no matter what side you are on.

Though it’s definitely cute, humorous and entertaining, it’s also somewhat useful. As someone who spends a great deal of time pouring through the code, the short rhymes help make it easy to find certain passages.

While it shouldn’t be treated as a definitive guide by any stretch. It can greatly assist in remembering what section says what and the links it provides to the sections makes it easy to navigate the otherwise almost unreadable law.

It’s a great read for a quiet Friday. That much is sure.

Tags: Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Plagiarism

The link is interesting in that it talks about all of the ways scrapers can run into legal trouble including statutes covering computer fraud, trespass to chattels, breach of contract and copyright law.

It also offers some of the best legal advice I've seen for preventing scrapers, namely putting them on notice with a well-written terms of service that prohibits scraping.

This page relates directly to previous articles I've written about Scrapegoat, how Grokster might apply to scraping and a future article I am finishing off about Dapper.

Anyone who is dealing with scraping needs to take a look at this article as it offers several great alternatives to attack scrapers beyond simply using copyright law and the DMCA.

tags: Plagiarism, Content+Theft, Copyright+Infringement, DMCA, Copyright, Scraping, Scraper

However, there’s a new entrant to the list of unintentional plagiarism fighters, Scrapbook, the powerful Firefox Extension to allow saving and browsing of sites offline, is also one of the best ways to organize and record your fight against plagiarism.

In fact, if you’re someone that handles several cases of plagiarism at once, the extension is practically a must-have.

What Scrapbook Does

Scrapbook lets you save Web pages, entire sites or portions of a page to your hard drive for viewing offline. It also lets you organize your collection into folders, add notes to entries, highlight key passages and reference the original source.

Originally, I downloaded the extension in order to organize references for Plagiarism Today. However, lately, I’ve been using its “Capture Page” feature to cache and organize sites that plagiarize my work. It’s proved to be an invaluable tool and incredible time saver.

In fact, it’s already replaced my previous database system, Microsoft Access, as a better, faster and easier way of keeping track of plagiarism cases.

How It Helps

One of the great challenges in dealing with many different plagiarism cases is keeping track of the incidents and following up on them. Generally, once you start to handle over about five or six cases, it’s important to find some way to organize everything that you’re doing and ensure that nothing fell through the cracks.

Scrapbook lets you do exactly that but both more effectively and more efficiently than any other method. With one click you archive the page and place it into a folder. You can then add notes to the page, highlight key passages, search the pages that you’ve saved and even omit portions that you don’t need. All of this can be done instantly and within the confines of your browser.

Compare this with using a database or jotting notes down on paper. Either system requires you to leave your browser, write down a large volume of information and hope that things don’t get too disorganized.

Best of all though, with Scrapbook, you not only have a record of plagiarists and your actions against them, but you have a saved copy of the infringement on your hard drive. Thus, if the work is taken down or altered, you still have proof of what happened and, should you need to go back over your records, something to remind you of the incident.

In the end, if you use a Webmail system such as GMail, Hotmail or Yahoo!, you’ll never have to leave your browser over the course of your fight and you can keep the information conveniently displayed in the sidebar.

However, while it’s time saving capabilities are best targeted at Webmasters with a great deal of plagiarism to handle, even those who have only encountered a few instances will benefit from its record-keeping ability.

Still, even though it’s a very powerful tool for both general use and plagiarism fighting, it does have a few limitations that should be noted.

Limitations

First, though the ability to edit pages once they have been saved is a great feature most of the time, it limits the programs usefulness for storing evidence in any kind of court case. One should never count on anything archived on their hard drive in such matters, but that goes double for anything saved with Scrapbook. For that kind of evidence, one would be better off turning to the Web Archive rather than anything on their own computer.

Second, Scrapbook will not necessarily save all of the information that you need to pursue a case. If the information is not the page that you’re saving, it might not be saved at all. You can always save additional pages (and place them within their own folder if needed) or input the information into the notes. But the lack of custom fields might frustrate database users who are interested in powerful searches.

Finally, Scrapbook’s filing system can get very big. If you handle a large volume of cases, both the file tree and the archives can get very large and it might be necessary to purge out old cases after a certain period of time or at least trim all of the fat from them.

Final Thoughts

Of course, in the end, these are all minor complaints. Scrapbook is the best organizational system I’ve found for handling plagiarism cases and it’s an amazing fine considering that such a use was probably the farthest thing from its creators’ minds.

It’s a powerful program that almost no one can do without, especially those protecting their copyrights.

It’s just the fastest and easiest way to keep track and record everything surrounding your plagiarism fight and, when combined with a Webmail solution, can help create an all-in-one package that will be very difficult to beat.

ESBN 33952-060224-256661-40

[tags]Plagiarms, Scrapbook, Firefox, Copyright Infringement, Copyright, Extensions, Firefox Extensions[/tags]

While I loved the idea, I lamented the high price of the service, especially for larger collections of work, and the lack of accessibility. Without paying an additional fee, the only proof of ownership DN provides is in the form of a printable certificate that some would say could be easily forged.

However, Chris Matthieu, as if hearing my cries of frustration, came up with a solution to these challenges and is providing a free, simple to use and publicly accessible service that can be used to instantly protect any kind of copyrightable material. The service, hosted on his site ESBN.org, is so powerful that, even though it is only in its infancy (even once called a “concept site“), is practically a must-use.

ESBNs vs. ISBNs

ESBN stands for Electronic Standard Book Number and is a variation of the better-known abbreviation ISBN or International Standard Book Number. However, the two have more in common than just three quarters of their names.

ISBNs are ten-digit numbers designed to uniquely identify “books and book-like objects�. Nearly every book in print carries an ISBN, which is usually printed on the cover in both numerical and barcode format.

From an ISBN, you can find out when a book was published, who the author of the book is, who the publisher is and other information that’s unique to the book. This helps bookstores, libraries and distributors organize, track and sell large volumes of books and prevents confusion when a book is reprinted by a different publisher or another book with the same name appears. It also helps with copyright disputes as, generally, the book with earliest ISBN was printed first.

On the other hand, if an ISBN is like a social security number for a book, an ESBN is a social security number for a work published online. It stores similar information to an ISBN (publisher, creator, date published, etc.) but only for works in electronic format. ESBNs, like ISBNs, come in both numerical format, save that ESBNs use 19 digits) and barcorde format and can be printed on paper materials.

However, ESBNs are not just for printed materials or even for just textual works. According to Matthieu, nearly anything that is copyrightable can be tagged with an ESBN including audio, video and images. Also, while obtaining an ISBN is time consuming (up to 15 days) and costly, obtaining an ESBN is both immediate and completely free. Also, unlike ISBNs, the public at large has access to the database and can pull up the information stored in it with just the number.

In short, the ESBN makes it possible for even individuals publishing blogs to take advantage of the kind of standardization that was previously only available to the print and music industries.

It’s a powerful and simple system that, though just getting off the ground, has some great potential uses.

The Big Idea

More than just providing numbers for copyright holders to tag their works with, ESBNs provide several interesting advantages.

First, ESBNs help protect copyright. Since submissions to the ESBN database are timestamped, each entry displays what was submitted, when it was submitted and who submitted it. Thus, it’s safe to assume that any other versions of the work that come later, even under a different name, are just copies of the previous one. Though there’s nothing to prevent someone from filing for an ESBN on a work that they don’t own, if used by copyright holders for legitimate reasons, it can provide powerful proof of ownership that can quickly settle disputes.

Also, ESBNs make it easy to find out who the author of a work is. Since ESBN entries can have both email and site information on a piece, if you find an article without attribution attached, but that contains and ESBN, it’s easy to look up the information. This can be especially useful in the battle against splogs, which will likely blindly copy the ESBN numbers, even as they hack off valuable attribution information.

It’s also possible that ESBNs could be useful when doing searches for plagiarized copies of one’s work. After all, since ESBNs are unique to individual works, any site containing the same number is almost certainly reusing the same material.

Finally, ESBNs make it possible to license out and sell copyrighted works. Since it only takes a couple of quick changes to the work’s ESBN entry to change ownership or to create a licensee, it’s possible to sell rights to a work and let the public know of such sales immediately. In fact, it may be possible to automate the entire process.

In short, the concept of an ESBN is already very powerful. However, as its users have already begun to develop new uses for the system, its power continues to grow. Though already a powerful means of verifying and proving ownership, ESBNs are already starting to grow into something greater than even Matthieu had originally imagined.

Best of all, it’s so simple to use, you don’t even have to be experienced with copyright or computers to get one.

Obtaining an ESBN

Registering an ESBN in a simple process that takes only a few seconds. First, you have to sign up for an account on the ESBN site, a matter of answering only seven questions. Then, you just log in to the site, click on “Generate ISBN� and then fill out the eight question form (of which only seven are ever required) and submit the information. You will then get your ESBN immediately and be able to either apply it to your work, print out a barcode for it or move on to another registration.

The whole process takes only a few seconds to complete.

However, as easy as that is, others have been working to make the process even easier. Already an extension is available for the Firefox Web Browser to generate ESBNs without the requirement of visiting the ESBN site and other plugins are in the works for Writely, Zohowriter and Typepad. Other blogging applications, such as WordPress, will hopefully be following the near future.

Because, as simple as creating an ESBN is, it can be a bit of a pain to have to hand create an ESBN for each blog entry and then go back and edit the entry to display the number. This is all something that can easily be handled by means of a plugin, but it does make ESBNs somewhat prohibitive when dealing with short, rapid fire works such as those seen in the blogging world.

Some Minor Problems

As with any static registration system, dynamic content, such as blogs, are difficult to register. Though Matthieu says that dynamic sites can be zipped up and submitted every so often, that eliminates much of the benefit of having an ESBN, especially the timestamp. Thus, he and other ESBN supporters, are pushing to have every entry assigned a unique number. While this is a simple and effective solution, it’s an added hassle for creators of dynamic content, especially those who post multiple times a day.

However, this is a problem that will likely go away as the plugins catch up with the ESBN community and can largely be attributed to the fact that ESBNs are still a relatively new concept, less than a full month old.

Of course, that newness comes with it a few other issues. First and foremost that, while ISBNs are recognized worldwide, ESBNs are still gaining familiarity. Most people, right now are not going to know what one is or what to do with it. Where people recognize and understand ISBNs on books, they won’t likely grasp ESBNs on blogs.

Also, since ESBNs are so easy to obtain and promote, the system is potentially vulnerable to abuse, not only by spammers trying to push large amounts of data through the system, but by plagiarists and thieves wanting to solidify their claim to another’s work. This could, feasibly, greatly hinder the credibility of ESBNs at large and damage its usefulness for copyright holders.

In addition to that, the ESBN site itself is a bare-bones set up at the moment. It certainly isn’t glitzy or glamorous, not that it has to be. However, if one is expecting an official-looking site with a professional layout, they will be disappointed.

Also, there are several minor bugs with the site’s various tools, including the ESBN lookup feature. Though most of these problems can be easily corrected, they can provide minor irritations and obstacles to those using ESBNs regularly.

Still, even with these minor drawbacks, ESBNs are too powerful to ignore and are very likely to become a de facto standard for copyright holders on the Web.

Conclusions

In the end, when dealing with plagiarism, there are very few products I would consider using myself, this is one of them.

It’s powerful, simple and free. It fills a void for which no solution exists currently and solves many of the problems I’ve talked about before. It can be a powerful tool for battling splogging, plagiarism in general and nearly any kind of content theft.

So while it’s not the silver bullet to the problem, which no one solution ever will be, it certainly is a huge step and something that anyone concerned with their copyright online should jump on immediately.

It’s just that good.

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, ISBN, ESBN, Copyright, Copyright Law[/tags]

Clearly, this site doesn’t encompass all incidents of music plagiarism discovered. Many incidents are not actionable in court, including those involving public domain works, since not all plagiarism is copyright infringement. Also it doesn’t cover the cases that were arbitrated out of court or otherwise settled without a lawsuit.

Though the site is there targeted at lawyers and legal scholars needing help with their cases and/or analysis, it’s a very simple and easy read for just about anyone and comes with audio/video samples from most of the cases. This way, in addition to reading about the supposed plagiarism and the outcome of the case, you can listen to it and judge for yourself.

In going through it, I did notice that the bulk of the cases, especially in the modern era, deal with lesser-known artists accusing famous ones of plagiarism. A classic example of this being Madonna’s recent loss in a French court for alleged plagiarism in her song “Frozen”. Another common theme was companies and movie studios being accused of illegally using significant portions of popular music in their commercials and movies.

All in all, it’s a fascinating site that I can’t recommend highly enough.

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright Law, Copyright, Music, Record Industry[/tags]

What I like about the site is how it takes a very honest and balanced approach to the issue. Unlike most academic plagiarism sites that simply try to sell a product, this one actually dismisses plagiarism detection services and encourages more realistic solutions such as better assignment design and honest research into the paper’s origins. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Also, I’m very happy that Plagiarized.com has several sections that talk directly to parents in getting their help in stopping plagiarism. Obviously, most academic plagiarism is perpetrated by students, but also, in my experience, most Internet plagiarism for personal use is done by students as well. Out of the hundreds of incidents of plagiarism I’ve handled, only a handful have involved individuals older than 25.

Of course, my site tends to draw a younger crowd to it. Needless to say, your experiences may differ.

What I find missing from the site is any general information about plagiarism for personal use. Though it has a great deal of good information for students, parents and instructors on academic plagiarism, it never even pays lip service to the other side of plagiarism, personal use, and never addresses copyright holders directly.

As I’ve said many times before, cooperation between academics and copyright holders is going to be the most effective means of stopping plagiarism in both the public and academic sector. It’s sad to see the distinction still being made, but it’s definitely nice to have a good ally in the war against plagiarism and to see someone taking a realistic stance on the issue.

I only wish more people would do that rather than trying to make a quick buck selling easy, but largely ineffective, solutions.

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement[/tags]

FamousPlagiarists.com is a site dedicated to “celebrating” the great plagiarists in history. From Shakespeare to Melanie Grobler, this site covers nearly every great plagiarism controversy history has known.

But while it’s interesting to see how many famous faces have been caught with their hands in the metaphorical cookie jar, it’s the depth of information that’s really impressive. Even if the site’s layout and “threat level” feature turn you off, the wealth of knowledge and level-headed reporting will keep you hooked. I’m especially addicted to the “Hall of Shame” section which deals with the biggest and worst plagiarists known to man, a “most wanted” list of sorts.

Even more exciting is the fact that the makers of the site will be launching a new academic journal called “Plagiary“. The journal, which promises “To bring together the various strands of scholarship which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion across disciplinary boundaries”, will be launched in January 2006.

These are both great sites for anyone interested in plagiarism and must-reads for any scholars on the subject.

[tags]Plagiarism, History, Shakespeare[/tags]