Long-time reader and friend Holly Jahangiri reported to me about an important story I overlooked. Early last month, Hostgator, one of the largest Web hosts, began testing a major change in the way it handles DMCA notices, introducing a simple online form that those who wish to file complaints can fill out.

The change is a shift from Hostgator’s official policy of only accepting DMCA notices via either fax or snail mail, a controversial practice that more and more hosting companies are getting away from, most notably Google Blogspot, not only because such methods create slowdowns and hurdles for those filing DMCA notices, but also need extra processing time for the host.

Previously, one could email a DMCA notice to Hostgator but only through their datacenter, The Planet. Given that most Hostgator sites show up as being on ThePlanet’s servers, many have likely filed such notices without even realizing it however, ThePlanet has always forwarded on such complaints and they have been acted on if legitimate.

The new form itself is actually fairly straightforward, requiring you to fill in first your contact information, then details about the work being infringed, followed by details about the infringement and, after that, agreeing to the legal terms and signing the document. It should be very easy for someone to use, even if they do not have any experience filing takedown notices.

That being said, please remember that this form is considered live and that all DMCA notices sent through it are legally binding. Do not use this form unless you have a copyright infringement you wish to report.

Currently, the form is not linked anywhere on Hostgator’s site or TOS that I was able to find, however, I received permission from Hostgator to link to it here.

So, if you have a DMCA complaint to file against Hostgator, this is now probably the fastest and most direct way to send it. Though I haven’t had cause to use it yet, early reports are that response time is quick and fair.

If you have any experiences with this form, or Hostgator in general, please feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Having handled over 1000 cases of copyright infringement over the years, many of which required a DMCA notice to resolve, I’ve seen a great deal of variety in the way that hosts handle these procedures.

I see hosts that refuse to comply with takedown notices, even to the point of defending obvious spam blogs. I’ve seen hosts leap at the first sign of any trouble and quickly handle even minor infringements, at times going to unnecessary extremes. Usually though, hosts take a very balanced approach to these issues, working to both comply with the law and balance that with their customer’s rights. 99 times out of a hundred, the notice is handled and neither side is inconvenienced more than necessary or appropriate.

However, it is the 1% exception that gives me most of my headaches and I recently had one such case involving the domain host iPower.com.

It was a strange tale to say the least and, though it has a happy ending, it is a cautionary tale for both customer and copyright holder alike.

The Story

(Note: Since this is a case I handled for a client as part of my consulting practice, I am leaving names other specifics out of the case. I have the client’s permission to discuss this case with private information removed.)

I was working for a client who was preparing for a new wave of legal action against a repeat infringer. The individual had set up a new site using iPower and was using my client’s copyrighted works on it. After verifying the ownership of the works, including copyright registrations that predate the infringer’s claims, and that that the use was infringing, I was extremely sure of the validity of the notice but, knowing about this particular infringer, I expected trouble.

However, I didn’t realize that the trouble would come from the host.

I filed the notice on a Wednesday, via both email and fax. iPower confirmed receipt almost immediately and notified the client involved, giving them 48 hours to remove the content with a notice that, if it wasn’t removed, the account would be disconnected. Five days later, however, nothing had happened. I wrote again on Monday and again on Tuesday for an update with no luck. By this point, my client was wondering what was going on and I had no good answers.

The next day, Wednesday, I received a notice that the client had filed a counter-notice and that the content would not be removed. I explained that the DMCA specifies that the content is supposed to be restored after 10-14 days (see g) of downtime to allow the copyright holder time to seek an injunction, which my client was already preparing for. The content had never gone down and, to make matters worse, I had not been provided a copy of the counter-notice with the necessary information to seek the injunction.

When the counter-notice was provided, which you can see in thumbnail to the right, it was almost completely illegible. Much of the contact information, wording of the notice and even the relevant links were either horribly muddled or unreadable.

I requested a clear version of the notice and iPower said that they were going to request one from the client.

Then the waiting game began again. Over a week passed with no response, despite prodding.

Then, out of the blue, the site involved went down, replaced with a “suspended” page. iPower eventually confirmed that they had removed the site after the client had refused to provide a clear copy of their counter-notice.

The situation was puzzling but resolved. After several weeks of downtime, the site has not moved or reopened, making it a definite win, but one that has me scratching my head.

The Problems

To say that this case was out of the ordinary is putting it mildly. Since I am not a lawyer, I work with them on many cases and this was one of them, working to remove the site while other action was being prepared and taken.

The problem is that, whether you love or hate the DMCA takedown system, there is a rhythm to it and a procedure to follow and iPower’s system violated the protocol in many ways.

1. Failure to Remove Content: To be clear, a host does not have to remove content when given a DMCA notice. They can leave the content up but they risk being held liable for any infringement that is taking place. However, iPower did not remove the content, even after the 48-hour window had passed, despite obviously wanting to enjoy protection under the DMCA.
2. Improper Handling of Counter-Notice: With a counter-notice, the host is supposed to restore access to the content in 10-14 business days. This gives copyright holders time to seek an injunction in the event the counter-notice is false. Since the content never came down, there was no window of opportunity.
3. Accepting a Bad Counter-Notice: More to the point, the counter-notice itself was extremely flawed in that it was unreadable. I’ll agree that it was, most likely, a complete notice but there was no way to tell from what they received. Waiting until a legible notice had been filed and could be provided to the copyright holder would have been much better all around.

There were other, minor problems, including the fact different email accounts kept handling information on iPower’s side, making it difficult to track the progress of the case, but these are the big issues that arose.

It’s a lot more frustration than what should have come from a legitimate filing, but it was the situation iPower created for me.

The Bitter Irony

This is actually iPower’s secont appearance on PT. You can find my first mention of them from back in 2005 here.

That article seems ironic in hindsight as it chastised iPower for being too aggressive in responding to notices, nuking an entire domain for one or two infringing works. I was actually relieved to see iPower giving the client a chance to ratify things by hand before taking that approach, however, their handling of the incident still leaves a lot to be desired and, clearly, in the past 4.5 years they really haven’t gotten the hang of handling takedown notices.

This is a big part of why I offer DMCA solutions to Web hosts, and why it is often necessary. Simply put, DMCA handling is not easy and very few hosts, especially smaller ones, have it completely right.

However, you certainly don’t need my help to get it right, considering there are good role models out there to emulate.

Bottom Line

This incident has left me with a lot of unanswered questions. Why was the work never removed? Why did iPower accept an unreadable counter-notice? Would they do that for other legal notices? And why did they change their mind after the client refused to provide a new one?

I don’t have good answers. Though I was happy to see iPower be more customer-oriented with their process, it seems as if they’ve taken it to a new extreme. Worse still, their procedure for handling such complaints now seems to be erratic and scattered. This makes me nervous both as someone who may have to file a notice and as someone with friends who host there.

Though I disagreed with their previous policy, at least it made sense. Now, the logic seems to have gone out the window and doesn’t seem to make any sense.

My hope is that this was a one-time event, a case caused by an inexperienced abuse/support team member unfamiliar with the procedure. However, given the history of the company, I’m worried that it could be indicative of a larger problem and one that isn’t going to go away.

The vast majority of hosts seem to take these issues seriously and pull down any spammy or infringing content quickly. Others seem to ignore any such requests and others reply with polite, but clearly stock, letters saying that they can’t help.

And then there is Joyent.

Joyent takes things to a new level. Not only does the site not help when someone is misusing your content, but they actually support scrapers and defend them in email responses.

Though many hosts have a policy of inaction against infringement, something that is legally dangerous and ethically dubious, none that I have seen have spent the time and energy Joyent’s representative did to protect them and defend them.

What Happened

Sunday, during some of my testing of FairShare, a system officially launched yesterday, I was notified about a site on a .info domain that had used nearly 100% of my recent article about U.S. Copyright Law.

I looked at the site in question and it appeared to either be a spam blog or a misguided aggregator. It was displaying the full content of dozens of entries on one page, using hotlinked images and the only original content was a pair of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons with each article that seemed to do nothing.

Though it linked to Plagiarism Today in the headline, it was not linking to or referencing my CC license nor was it referencing the “Share Alike” attribute. When combined with the hotlinked images, I decided to take action, filing a DMCA notice with their host, Joyent.

However, that was no simple process. Never having encountered this host, I searched their site for information about their DMCA agent. However, all I found was a postal address (Note: Link is to a privacy safe harbor, not copyright safe harbor). I checked for a registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, but found nothing. Since all other abuse requests seemed to be routed through their “Support” account, I emailed it and, since it was a weekend and they had limited support hours listed, I did not expect to hear back.

However, I heard back relatively quickly (within an hour), especially amazing considering it was also Super Bowl Sunday. The letter was from Linda Derezinski, who identified herself as the “Director of Support”. Her letter was short and said in part that:

“That is just a RSS feed aggregation site which is properly identifying as such, it is not taking your work and showing it as theirs…. If you do not wish them to show your RSS feed you of course are able to block them from reading it.”

In short, Derezinski was telling me that it was my responsibility as the provider of the RSS to “block” this site from republishing my feed wholesale on their site. Even though that is impossible with FeedBurner and impractical without knowing more about how the site is obtaining the feed.

I’m used to working with and educating hosts about copyright issues, but never have I had such a strong defense for a spam blogger. I responded back with some basic information about the DMCA and links to information on the law, including the Chilling Effects FAQ.

There was a slightly greater delay in this response but, after about an hour, Derezinski wrote back a second time saying the following:

“You have your site identified as creative commons…. They properly identify that the article is from your site. This is not DMCA issue.”

I wrote back a second time, this go around linking to my article about using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping, which includes a discussion with then-VP Mike Linksvayer. I pointed out that the site did not complete the license, neither linking to the license or mentioning the share-alike element.

That was the last I heard of the matter. As of this writing, the article in question is still up on the page in question (though it may cycle off any time now, after being up for a week) and dozens of other articles from different sources are still up, all with full text and hyperlinked images.

To recap what happened. I filed a DMCA notice in what seemed to be a straightforward scraping case, Joyent first defended the scraper saying that it was my responsibility to block them and then, after I showed that was not the case, then tried to tell me there wasn’t a copyright issue since I had a CC license. Once I showed that the site was in violation of my license, there was nothing but silence.

Needless to say this has me frustrated, but not defeated.

Offering a Defense

In the interest of fairness, I’m going to offer some potential defenses here.

1. Splitting Hairs: I’ll admit openly that the representative was correct that I do have a CC license and the site in question did link back to PT. Though the use was a violation of the license, something I feel very comfortable saying, it is understandable why someone unfamiliar with the details of CC might think that the use was compliant.
2. Questionable Spam Blog: There is room for debate if this site was a spam blog or an aggregator. Though it clearly violates the best practices for aggregation, it does seem to attempt to add some value. This doesn’t make it less of an infringement, for a host that specializes in applications, it might have been seen as a defense.
3. Incorrect Person: Though it was the only email address provided, it is clear that Derezinski is neither familiar with nor accustomed to DMCA complaints. I could have sent the complaint via postal mail (I find it stunning that they don’t even offer a fax) but it is likely that the article would have scrolled off or changed URLs in that time.

I have no doubt in my mind that this is not an appropriate way to handle a copyright complaint (as I said in the title, the worst that I had seen) and that this company violates many of the best practices of the DMCA (Not registering their agent with the USCO, not having an email address, not having a direct copyright policy, etc.) but I do want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I hope that this was a misunderstanding and nothing more.

Conclusions

One of the jobs that I do in my consulting practice is work with hosts on these kinds of issues. I’m often recruited to check for any flaws in their DMCA system and even do test runs of their takedown process. I have a lot of experience in this area.

This is the worst response that I have seen in seven plus years of handling DMCA issues. Though I applaud hosts for looking at DMCA notices and considering copyright issues, this was not a case where the notice was clearly false, the use raised fair use questions or had other common issues that arise with erroneous DMCA notices.

What makes it worse is that the host came down clearly on the side of wholesale RSS scraping and republishing. Meaning that, if you are a spam blogger reading this that engages in RSS scraping, Joyent is likely a natural choice for you as their staff, at least judging from this correspondence, feels that you are doing nothing wrong or illegal.

My hope is that this was just a miscommunication but it has been over 48 hours since my last correspondence with them and no action has been taken on my ticket. If I do not hear more within the next 24 hours, I will look at calling them or filing the notices with Google, provided that the work hasn’t scrolled off or naturally disappeared.

Update

At about 5 PM central time the day this story was posted, I was contacted by Peter Watridge, who said that Derezinski has “escalated” the ticket it to him and he had not been able to get it in a timely matter. He is going to work with the owner of the domain to get the work removed.

Though this is great news and certainly puts Joyent in a better light. The initial response was still not what I would characterize as appropriate. I will update again when/if the content is removed.

I will be attending and speaking at the European Journalism Centre’s Innovation Journalism event entitled “Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons”. I’ll be giving a talk about plagiarism and how it ties in with the CC movement and Web journalism. The talk will be recorded and a video will be available after it is done.

I’ll be returning to the states on Sunday and should be back to normal next week for the most part, though there will not be an episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show on Monday.

In the meantime, I plan on posting updates, pictures and whatever else comes up on my Twitter account as wifi access, battery life, etc. allow. If you’re interested in the part of the country I’ll be in, the Wikipedia entry actually has some great pictures and information.

I look forward to heading out and I will resume normal posting next week! Thank you all for your patience.

However, toward the end of the week, something strange happened, many of the blogs went down, including some that had been up for well over a year. Not all had been using Twitter and they did not appear to be on the same network, yet they were closed.

The spam blogs seemingly had only one thing in common: They had been using Hostgator.

The Perfect Spam Host

In my experience, Hostgator has always been quick to act on both abuse reports and DMCA notices. Unfortunately, this has not discouraged spammers from signing up.

The problem is that, from a service point of view, Hostgator is exactly the type of hosting spammers would want. For eight dollars per month, Hostgator offers high bandwidth caps and unlimited domains. This is very appealing to spammers, who put out thousands of domains and subdomains that get very little traffic each.

This has made Hostgator very popular with Internet marketers of all stripes, both legitimate and spammy. Though the abuse team at Hostgator is quick to act when notified it has always felt that the spammers have had the upper hand.

However, in an email to me, a security administrator at Hostgator said:

“We’ve been more actively fighting email-based spam and web-based phishing/splogs for quite some time now. Especially splogs since they are becoming one of the most prominent ways of spamming these days, along with spammy comments left on blogs and trackbacks.”

Apparently these efforts are now paying off as I’m seeing more pages where Hostgator has suspended the site than spam blogs currently hosted on the service.

Moving On

The bad news in the situation is that, no sooner had I grabbed the screenshots of the “suspended” page than I discovered that some of the domains were pointing to new hosts.

Though only one or two of the sites are already back up, most just point to a default page, it is clear that the spammers are moving on and will likely have their sites back up within a few days or weeks.

While I don’t doubt these suspensions were a big deal for the spammers, it appears that they will recover and, while looking at the new hosts, they appear far less likely to cooperate in such matters than Hostgator.

Conclusions

There is a disturbing and frustrating trend among spammers in recent months. They have been seeking, and more regularly finding, safe harbor when it comes to hosting.

Though spam still thrives on some free blogging and free hosting services, much of it moved to domain hosts in recent years. However, spammers were not exactly welcomed with open arms there as well, many of the larger and cheaper domain hosts began to push back against the trend.

Spammers once again seem to be relocating. Though some are moving their sites into countries where reporting abuse will be next to impossible, most are staying within the United States still and are finding smaller hosts that are willing to look the other way.

The combination of less cooperative hosts and spammers getting smarter about copyright law is going to make it more and more difficult to get spam removed from the Web. If search engines don’t get more aggressive about punishing hosts that routinely provide shelter to spammers, this problem is only going to get worse.

Sadly, until spammers can’t profit any more from their activities, they’re going to continue both improving their craft and making things harder for those of us that want to put them out of business.

Though the presence of the Hostgator suspended page hampered my article a bit, it was still a welcome site. The service, despite reportedly acting quick against spammers, has earned a reputation as a spam haven due to the nature of its hosting.

It seems as if, just maybe, the Gator is biting back a bit and that could lead to a slightly cleaner Web for all of us.

Further Questions

What more can hosts do to battle spam?
Does an offer of unlimited domains encourage spammers?
Where do you think spammers will seek refuge?

If you have not seen the video, here it is:

If you want to take action, you can do so by contacting Photobucket and contacting Qoop to let them know about the video and express your displeasure at the feature.

Also, consider signing the original petition and making your voice heard that way.

Thank you for your continued support on this issue and, with luck, cooler heads will prevail in this matter.

When people find out that their content is being copied without permission, how they seek to handle it is often determined, in part, by whether or not the site is a spam blog.

Where many might be willing to forgive copying by a novice blogger, especially with the promise of a link back, most are not prepared to have their content used so a spammer can trick the search engines and sell questionable items.

This means that, very often, I am forced to make snap judgments about whether a site is a spam blog or not, something that is becoming increasingly difficult as spammers have improved their techniques.

So how does one tell if a blog is a spam blog? The answer is not as simple as it once was but there are still ways one can detect a spammy site.

The Spammer Dilemma

Spammers, over the years, have gotten better and better at making their blogs look human-edited. Though they still can not make their sites appear to be “good” blogs, they, in many cases, can pass off as the efforts of novice bloggers or of non-native English speakers.

This can create quite a problem when approaching a suspected spam blog. Is it a spammer using the default Blogspot template or is it someone new to blogging that doesn’t know how to change the template? Is the strange word choice the result of automated spinning or someone learning English? If the spam blog did its job, it can be difficult to say.

However, most would agree that being heavy-handed with humans who copy, especially those who make some attempt to provide attribution, is counter-productive. Especially when you consider that the person struggling with English may either grow into an important blogger or, worse yet, already be a major figure in their part of the world, it becomes clear why telling humans from machines is important.

But how to do it? There are several different ways, but unfortunately none of them seem to work 100% of the time.So it is important to take all of the methods below into account, look at how spammers beat them, and develop an informed opinion.

PageRank Check

One of my sneakier tricks was to check the site’s PageRank and see if Google had given it either a n/a or a 0. Either would indicate that the site was either very new or had been deemed spam by Google. Either way, it certainly warranted suspicion.

How Spammers Beat It: Tricking Google. This method has become less effective as Google seems to be assigning PageRank to more and more obvious spam blogs. That is a subject for another article.

Turning the Tide: PageRank is still a decent indicator of spamminess, but it is no longer as reliable as it was. It is best to ignore PageRank if you have other reasons to be suspicious of a blog.

“About” Page

Since spammers that use WordPress installs typically spend as little time as possible setting up their blogs, they routinely leave the “About” page, which is created as part of the install, with its default text. Very few human-generated sites have this problem.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have started either deleting or filling in the about page. However, those that fill in the page often use it as an opportunity to keyword stuff, often further tipping their hand as a spam blog.

Turning the Tide: If an about page does not have actual information about the site or the owner, it is very likely spam. Some spammers are starting to include fake information, but few seem to be able to resist the opportunity to keyword stuff and link.

Posting Rate

The goal of a spam blog is to get as much junk content into it as possible, as such, spammers routinely have extremely high posting frequency, often well over 100 posts per day. It would be physically impossible for a human to post so much content without the aid of a machine, creating a dead giveaway that the site is spam.

How Spammers Beat It: Some spammers have begun to show restraint, only having their blogs update a few times per day and at irregular intervals, to more closely mimic a human blogger.

Turning the Tide: The content is more telling than the frequency, unless the posting frequency is outrageous. Consider an extremely high posting volume to be a dead spam giveaway but don’t write off a site because it has a reasonable rate.

Formulaic Posting

We’ve all seen the spam blogs that start out with something like “I saw an interesting post today about…” and then proceeds to inject a few keywords and quote from the scraped article. By themselves, these posts may appear semi-legitimate, especially with trackbacks, but are clearly spam when you look at them in group.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have started to use multiple post templates in the same blog. However, the limited set means that, if this method is chosen, it is still easily detected over the course of about ten posts.

Turning the Tide: Check and see if the posts have the same pattern, are roughly the same length or all contain quoted material. These are all signs of a spam blog.

Ugly Templates

Sometimes the first sign a blog is spam is the template that it is in. If the template is the default WordPress theme or a stock BlogSpot theme without modifications, it’s a likely tip off of spam content.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have been getting better about mixing up their themes. Most spam software applications come with a variety of themes that are rotated and, given the ease with which most blogs can be skinned, spam blogs can be amazingly varied.

Turning the Tide: Fortunately, spammer themes still don’t have any elements of hand-crafting. There are very rarely custom images (or contain only very crude ones), the CSS often looks off, the color scheme is often jarring and the elements many times do not fit together correctly. If you see a glaring mistake that would be caught by anyone looking at the site, it is likely spam.

Domain Names

Spam blogs are typically restricted to three types of domains, 1) .us, .info and other strange extensions 2) domains stuffed with keywords (and often hyphens) 3) Free blog hosts (primarily Blogspot still).

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers are participating in the domain aftermarket, snatching up expired domains that have had sites on them previously. This helps them carry both the PageRank of the old site, in some cases, and obtain a more “honest” name. Spammers are also spreading to other free blog services, including little-known ones, as well as social networking sites.

Turning the Tide: If you are unsure about a domain, use Domain Tools to investigate it. Look specifically for false whois information or other irregularities. Still, most spam blogs are hosted on spam domains. Better ones are too expensive for spammers to buy in bulk and are more profitable at auction than as spam tools.

Ad Excess/Spam Blogroll

Many spam blogs earn their money by framing the content in a slew of ads, generally from one of the public advertising networks. If not, then they often times use the blogroll to put out obviously spammy links in hopes of building PageRank and search engine position for those domains.

How Spammers Beat It: The formula is simple, fewer ads, fewer links, more spam blogs. Spammers have begun to show restraint with both their ads and their outbound links but are creating larger and larger spam farms to compensate. Spammers are also turning to alternate sources of revenue, such as Amazon afiiliate IDs, to better hide their activities. Others will mix “good” links with “spam” ones in their blogroll to further hide the nature of the site.

Turning the Tide: One spam link is too many. Hover over the URLs in the Blogroll and check for any that are suspicious or out of place. When checking for ads, look not so much as quantity, but for the appearance that they were simply “stuck in”. Spammers don’t have time to integrate ads with their site usually.

Conclusions

When looking through these elements, any one of these would make me suspicious of a site’s origin, save perhaps if the site were hosted on a free blog host. Two, in turn, would make it a likely spam blog and three or above would make it a virtual lock.

The bottom line is that, while spammers are not making it any easier to spot their handiwork, it can still be detected by a careful eye (or a not-so-careful eye in many cases).

Though the spammer’s survival depends on staying under the radar and fooling humans and search engines alike, the nature of creating tens of thousands of junk blogs means that sacrifices have to be made and the results will have limitations.

By exploiting those weaknesses, we can continue to detect and stop spam and separate the spammers from those who are just getting started.

This, in turn, inspired me to do my own keyword analysis to gauge if and how public interest in topics relevant to this site have changed over the years.

What I found was surprising and seemed to run counter to what I was seeing with my own traffic but was interesting nonetheless.

Plagiarism

Perhaps the most obvious keyword and definitely the most common one that leads visitors to this site, this keyword has seen surprisingly little change over the past few years.

Over all, the graph for it is flat with a few “ticks” upward when news stories, such as the Obama controversy and the Kaavya Viswanathan scandal, broke. There are also season downward ticks at the end of every year, likely due to the holidays.

In general, it appears that the overall interest in plagiarism, both academically and artistically, has remained consistent and unchanged.

Content Theft

Probably the most unusual graph, content theft as a search term spiked in mid-2005, around the time this site was founded, and then leveled off, only to become a regular search term again in recent months.

It is unclear to me what has caused these specific spikes but the latest one seems to be holding and showing some sustainable interest in the topic. Something that could indicate greater public interest in the issue and in the term itself.

Copyright

Copyright, on the other hand, has seen a marked decrease over the past few years, at least as a search term.

While this seems counter-intuitive, considering that stories about copyright, especially as it pertains to the RIAA/MPAA, seem to dominate social news sites, please are clearly not search for copyright information as much as they used to.

This is reflected even more strongly in the related graph for the RIAA and the DMCA, where the downward slope is even more pronounced and, in the case of the RIAA, seems to almost disappear completely.

Though it doesn’t appear that people have lost interest in copyright issues, it is clear that they are not searching for them as much as they once were.

Duplicate Content

One of the greater concerns people have about plagiarism is the issue of duplicate content. As we can see on the graph above, the term rocketed onto the chart in early 2007, stabilized and seems to be slowly marching upward.

Duplicate content, of course, covers more than just plagiarism and scraping, but a wide variety of SEO concerns. However, it is clear that this is a topic being talked about more and more. It is unclear in what capacity this term is being searched for.

Plagiarism Detection Tools

Looking at the chart for Copyscape (shown above) shows a steady increase in the number of searches over the past year and a half. This seems to mesh with my own experience, which has shown a great increase in content protection over the past 18 months.

Other Plagiarism detection tools, such as Bitscan and Attributor, did not have enough information for Google Trends to draw any conclusions. Academic plagiarism detection tools, such as Turnitin, have shown a steady increase with seasonal dips as school lets out.

Long Tail Keywords

Unfortunately, a lot of the keywords most specific to this site such as “spam blogs”, “splogs”, “RSS scraping”, etc. did not have enough data to produce results. Many of these terms are fairly new, created since I started Plagiarism Today, and are not widely used.

It will be interesting to see in a year or two if these keywords start to register then.

Caveats

In doing this “study” I realize that Google Trends is both limited and a largely invalid source of data. Not only is the data proprietary, meaning it can not be vetted, but the information is relative and contains little hard data.

Also, many of the keywords looked at are not keywords that are searched for by typical searchers and instead would only be searched for by bloggers. Others, however, were likely searched by both. This means that we may not have an accurate picture of how just content creators feel about these issues.

The goal of this check was just to get a quick idea of what was going on and what the potential attitudes were.

Conclusions

When I personally look at these charts, I draw three conclusions.

First, I see that there is a sharp decrease in the interest of searchers in the legal aspects of copyright. This could be due to greater understanding about copyright, and thus less need to search about it, or just that that users have just moved on from the early copyright controversies of the late nineties.

Second, there is a clear, if slow, increase in interest in tracking one’s own content and the non-legal penalties that come from infringing or being infringed. This could be a sign that creators are not thinking about these issues in the light of a legal paradigm, but rather, in a more practical framework.

Finally, it is clear that the interest in plagiarism, both academically and artistically, remains fairly steady and that it remains an issue of interest even after the scandals fade from the headlines.

Personally, this site has seen an explosive growth over the past year, both doubling in traffic and enabling me to leave my day job to work full-time as a consultant. Clearly, things are changing in this area.

I look forward to following these changes closely over the coming years.

Note: All of the graphs in this post are used with permission from Google.

photo credit: buggolo

Spammers, much like a force of nature, are always seeking the path of least resistance and higher profit. Typically, they find it but not without speedbumps and dead ends along the way.

While this is frustrating in that it means that the spam situation is constantly changing, it does make it possible to predict, with at least a modest degree of certainty, what is coming next and what kinds of bloggers/Webmasters need to be on alert.

Though nearly every blog is subject to being scraped and republished at some point, especially as they gain traction and popularity, many bloggers attract more attention to themselves with their topics and keywords.

So what topics will spammers likely be targeting over the coming months? We are going to analyze seven key spam areas and look at their future, especially over the next couple of months.

Pharmaceuticals: Steady

The Viagra and Cialis spam in our inbox hasn’t slowed down one bit and it doesn’t seem likely to on the Web. Though there are very few bloggers that deal with these topics to scrape from, those who do will face a steady increase in the amount of scraping that they will see, not that they likely are not already inundated.

This is an area where the spam competition is the highest so the spammers have already begun to use a variety of techniques, something else that is likely to continue.

Gambling: Decline

It has been almost two years since the Internet gambling ban was passed in the United States but much of the effect is just now being felt. Affiliate cash is drying up and, with the negotiations to end the ban failing to produce results, spammers are increasingly walking away from this area.

The money simply is not there anymore and spammers know that. They’ve been shifting away for some time but now finally appear to be abandoning this area altogether.

Adult Content: Increase

The adult entertainment industry has been a constantly growing beast on the Web. With offline sales dropping many of the larger online players have been scrambling to get a foothold on the Web and are forced to compete with much smaller companies on the Internet.

The result is a lot of money up for grabs and stiff competition for it. This has given rise to very lucrative affiliate programs for everything from subscriptions to dating sites and many of those program managers are willing to turn a blind eye to spam if it results in sales.

As a result, sex bloggers and others in the adult field will likely be looking at a shaper increase in scraping than the rest of the Web.

Technology: Sharp Increase

Technology has always been one of the favorite topics of spammers, content to fill spam blogs can be found everywhere and tech sites are among those most likely to have full RSS feeds.

However, the tech industry itself is growing more lucrative. Spammers are starting to use Amazon and other affiliate programs as a means to profit from spam blogs and targeting on technology keywords is becoming more and more profitable.

Already sites that have previously ignored scraping are starting to take action and I expect this to be one of the largest areas of growth in the coming months.

Finance: Mixed

With the recent credit crisis and housing market collapse, the market for finance-related spam seems to have taken a sharp hit. Already, much of the annoying “refinance” ads are all-but gone and the spate of spam blogs that seemed to come with the craze are disappearing.

However, there appears to be a renewed push in other areas of finance. Spam blogs and sites that offer to improve your credit score, provide bankruptcy services or other tools commonly used during a credit crunch.

Spammers, in their extreme flexibility, seem prepared to make money from both sides of the financial crisis, something few actually in the finance industry will ever be able to do.

Political: Increase and Decrease

As one might expect, with the political campaigns in full swing in the United States, there will likely be a steep increase in the amount of scraping of political blogs and articles.

The reason is not to sell a specific product or service but because the search terms will be heavily favored and can be used to draw traffic for other reasons.

Once the interest has passed in November, the spam will likely start to decrease but the effect will not be immediate as many spam blogs will continue operation until they are shut down by other means.

Scams: Unclear

Though scams are routinely delivered to our inboxes via email, the scammers have not yet taken to the Web in full force. Though we’ve seen some lottery spam blogs and a few make money online sites that promote clearly untrustworthy services, the worst of the scammers seem to have remain email-online.

Any shift in this area in terms of content scraping is going to depend upon the scammers becoming more technically advanced and branching into new operations. This seems inevitable but has not happened yet, likely due to the fact most scammers operate out of countries without reliable Internet access.

It is unclear what, if anything, will happen on this front but it may be an area of spamming to watch out for.

Overall: Increase

The overall outlook for spam, barring some kind of major shift in the situation, is one of increased scraping and splogging with a greater diversification.

I fully expect to see more scraping in general and it to take place more broadly. Spammers are going to continue to grab new sites and target new topics in a bid to avoid search engine competition.

From the resolution standpoint, spammers will continue to move away from free hosts and into paid ones where they are better protected and will also move more and more overseas as practical.

For the most part, he climate is going to get more difficult for Webmasters and bloggers, at least for the foreseeable future.

Conclusions

It is kind of a strange twist that, when ever an industry starts to thrive, it then has to seriously worry about scraping and other content theft. Whenever it is going wrong, it becomes a problem they can worry less about.

In that regard, scraping may be a good worry to have as it might speak highly of the future of the blog. However, it is still one that has to be dealt with, lest it harm your ability to exploit the positive market.

This will be something to keep an eye on, especially as spam continues to evolve and grow, at least until counter-measures become more effective.

Credit: Spam stop sign (from home page) also by buggolo from Flickr and is used under a Creative Commons License.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t bought music over the past few years, but all of those purchases have been online, either through the iTunes store or by purchasing MP3s straight from the band’s site. However, even then my purchases have been relatively few and far between.

However, yesterday was a special day for my wife and I. Local H came out with their first album in several years, entitled “Twelve Angry Months” and we were very eager to get our hands on it.

Furthermore, we wanted to buy the physical CD. Not only did we want the case and the liner notes, but we wanted it DRM free. While DRM music is fine if you are just going to listen to the tracks a few times, if something is going to be a part of your life, as the other albums have been, we want something that travels better.

So, after my wife got home at the end of the day, we headed out to grab a copy. What followed taught us a great deal about the struggles of the music industry and why I don’t buy that much music anymore.

Background

Admittedly, Local H is not a nationally-recognized name. From Zion, Illinois, they are much better known in the Chicago area than other parts of the country, including here in New Orleans.

That being said the have been around for well over a decade and have had several “hit” songs. Many people know their music without realizing that they were behind it.

The “As Good As Dead” album is typically very easy to find in store while others are usually dicier. Still, with a new release we figured that there would be no issue in tracking down a copy.

We were very wrong.

Getting the Album

Before we got into the car, we did some research and tried to locate an actual music store in the area. Not having been on such a run in several years, we had little idea where to begin, especially since Hurricane Katrina.

We jumped on the Internet and got names of stores and called them only to find that every single one was closed. It was disappointing, but we moved on to considering alternatives.

It was then that we remembered that Best Buy carried the band and decided to bite the bullet and head there to pick it up. This was in spite of the fact that Best Buy was not exactly along the beaten path for us to start with and is hardly our favorite place to go for anything.

However, after arriving and searching for the CD unsuccessfully, a very nice floor rep told us that they had sold out of the disk. At first we were happy that the CD was selling so well but then found out that they had only received a small number of CDs on the release date to “test how it sold” and that they “might get a larger order in next week.”

The rep then checked other stores in the area and found a copy of the disk at the Harahan store, which was across the river and across town from where we were. It would have taken at least 20 minutes to get there, probably more considering traffic was still bad.

Worried that we would drive over there to find the copy gone, we decided to chance it with stores closer to us.

We next hit a Circuit City and a Target, neither of which carried any of the band’s CDs. We debated stopping by Wal-Mart but broke into a debate about whether or not any copy we bought there would be censored. Though the CD hadn’t earned an “advisory” sticker, Local H is not exactly known as family-friendly either.

We passed on Wal-Mart on principle but did a quick check on our phones of Walmart.com, we found that they carried only two albums and both were “online only”.

During all of this driving, Crystal, using her phone, located an open CD shop on Bourbon St. She called only to find that they didn’t have the album in stock, however, they could easily order it and have it to us on Thursday.

We promised to call them back.

Frustrated and ready to give up, we decided to make the drive to Harahan. There, we finally found a copy of the CD buried in the actual Local H section, not in the new releases, and walked out with it.

We were fifteen dollars poorer and had spent over two hours trying to find it, but at least we had it and we had a long drive home with which we could listen to it.

A Better Understanding

The reason I am frustrated is because I did exactly what the music industry says it wants me to do. I didn’t fire up Bittorrent and download the CD illegally, I didn’t stream it off of Internet radio and I even avoided going the cheap route and downloading it off of iTunes. No, I paid full price for a brand new CD from a major retailer.

To thank me for my loyalty, the music industry made it almost impossible to buy their product. The problem isn’t Local H nor even their label, but a music sales system that virtually crushes any hope of variety.

At every store we visited, my wife and I could have easily snatched up a dozen copies of either the latest Madonna or Jordin Sparks album. While I am sure that these are great albums, they were languishing on the shelves while the product we wanted was nowhere to be seen.

If you’re not a fan of whatever the record labels are promoting that week, you’re forced into doing one of three things.

1. Download the music illegally and not support the artist while risking being hauled into court.


2. You can download a DRM-crippled copy of the album from any major online retailer and pray that the DRM doesn’t stop working.


3. Spend hours of your life driving all over town in hopes of finding a copy and spending extra money for it.

The first option cheats the band and the second two cheat the customers. Though it doesn’t make it right, when you’re spending nearly 30 minutes in traffic heading to a store across town that might, just might, have a single copy of the CD you want, you begin to understand the temptation of Bittorrent.

In the time it took me to obtain a legitimate copy, I could have pirated the CD, listened to it twice and have written a short review. It would have been both legally and ethically wrong, but I would have had a lot more time in my evening for other things.

Why I Talk About This

The reason I talk about this is simple. The average reader of this site is a small copyright holder. We are bloggers, photographers, artists and musicians. We use the Web to distribute our works freely, or at least make them freely accessible.

Still, we have real copyright issues that need to be addressed. We have spammers that scrape our feeds and use our content to game the search engines. We have plagiarists using our works to pad their portfolios. We have eBayers that sell illegal prints from our freely-available photographs.

Every day small artists are ripped off in significant ways both on and offline and they turn to copyright law to protect them. However, there is a backlash against copyright law, in no small part due to the actions of the movie and music industries.

There are many good people who are calling for the abolition of copyright law not because they feel artists don’t deserve to be rewarded for their work, but because the current system feels broken and, in some cases, is being used to force customers into a business model that is inefficient and ineffective.

Even those who aren’t calling for the outright abolition of copyright law view it with a very wary eye. To many, the “C” inside of the circle might as well stand for any one of a number of four-letter words.

This makes it very difficult for those of us with with copyright issues that go beyond mere copying to protect our works. Hosts are unresponsive, readers are slow to assist and artists are scared to act when all they are trying to do is stop people from unfairly exploiting their work.

This is the climate that we operate in and the music industry is a large part of why it is so hostile against many of us.

Copyright is a tool and, like any tool, its inherent good or evil lies in its application. Sadly, the best known one use currently is as a stick to beat customers into following a business model that simply does not work.

Though many of the calls for the end of copyright are clear cases of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the receptiveness of the audience grows in lock step with the increase in frustration.

That should give all artists a reason to pause and think about how the RIAA and other major copyright holders could be destroying not just existing models, but future ones as well.

Conclusions

As artists who are interested in copyright, we have to keep our eye on the larger picture. Though it is easy to dismiss my afternoon yesterday is a strange person seeking out a CD from a relatively unknown band, the fact is that most music buyers have no interest in purchasing the new Madonna CD, or any other individual CD for that matter.

Everyone has their own taste in music and many people will have far more obscure preferences than me and my wife. This means that, every week when new releases come out, hundreds of thousands of people are forced into similar predicaments.

This isn’t about just one bad incident trying to find a CD any more than piracy is just about getting free music. This is about a much larger problem and how the music industry’s response to it is hurting all copyright holders.

Hopefully a solution will be found before the damage becomes irreversible.

Personal Note: Just to clarify, I am not trying to say anything bad about Local H or the album. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The album is great and well worth both the money and time. I am very glad that I have a physical, DRM-free copy of the CD as I plan to enjoy it for many years to come, as I have with the other albums.

If you are curious about the band you can check out their site or listen to samples of the album on their Myspace page. Specifically, listen to “24 Hour Break Up Session” and “Machine Shed Wrestling” as they are the previews off the new record. Also, if you don’t mind the DRM, you can buy it off of iTunes as well.

The problem is much larger with Local H and is with the music industry as a whole. However, as Local H proves, there is still some good music to be found, no matter how broken the system is.