It was a busy week for copyright news as members of the U.S. Congress has proposed legislation to drastically reform the DMCA, Aereo is trying for a big win against the TV studios suing it and Google is seeking to stop authors from suing them as a group.

However, there’s much more than that. We also have an important fair use ruling in the Righthaven saga and, most bizarrely, an argument from Prenda Law that tries to bring gay marriage into a copyright case.

All in all, this is one episode you do not want to miss!

This week’s stories include:

• Bi-Partisan Group Introduces DMCA Reform Bill
• Aereo Asks Judge to Dismiss Broadcasters’ Lawsuit
• Google Appeals Authors Guild Suit Class Action Status
• Fair Use Ruling Against Righthaven Vacated
• ISPs Fight for Users Against Prenda Law
• Prenda Argues California Ruling Shouldn’t Matter in Georgia
• French Report Seeks Softening of “Three Strikes”

You can download the MP3 file here (1:12:55, direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

Video

Audio

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Advocates Call for Legal Protections for Copyright Consumers

First off today, Grant Gross at Tech Hive reports that yesterday marked the first hearing before the intellectual property subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on a possible major overhaul of copyright in the United States.

The hearing involved members from a group called the Copyright Principles Project, which released a 2010 report about trying to find common ground in the middle of the copyright debates. The group repeatedly highlighted their desire to see a “safe harbor” that protects customers of copyrighted works ability to use legally-purchased works in the manner they choose.

Representatives on the subcommittee seemed to be more skeptical and worried that a major overhaul could weaken protections provided to artists. The witnesses, however, said that the nature of creation has changed and today nearly everyone is a content creator in some capacity.

2: NZ Supreme Court to Hear Megaupload Evidence Appeal

Next up today, Reuters is reporting that the New Zealand Supreme Court has decided that it will hear Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s appeal regarding the evidence that must be made available to him prior to his extradition hearing.

Dotcom, along with several employees, were arrested as part of a joint U.S. and New Zealand action that shut down his site, Megaupload in January 2012. The U.S. has been seeking Dotcom’s extradition over criminal copyright infringement and money laundering charges.

The two sides have squabbled over the extradition hearing, which has been repeatedly pushed back, with Dotcom claiming that the U.S. has not turned over all of the evidence against him, making a defense impossible. However, a lower court ruled the U.S. did not have to make all of the evidence available to him, just an index of it. Dotcom says this puts him at a disadvantage for his hearing, which is scheduled for August but will likely be pushed back.

3: Banking Privacy Trumps Copyright Claim, Dutch Court Rules

Finally today, Loek Essers at PC World reports that the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has suffered a defeat as a court in the Netherlands has refused to grant them information about a bank account that they hope will help them track down who operates a suspected piracy website.

However, the court ruled that banking privacy laws in the country trumped their need for the information. According to the court, BREIN was given the information on the owner of the account but BREIN suspects that person, a 90-year-old woman, is either fake or not the person behind the site. So they requested information on another person authorized to withdraw money from the account but were denied.

According to the court, BREIN needs to take additional steps, including possibly filing a criminal complaint, before it can request the information. However, BREIN has said that they will appeal the ruling, which was handed down by an Amsterdam district court.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

In short, MailChimp’s “Forward to a Friend” service was saving copies of forwarded messages on a public Web server and letting those copies be indexed by the search engines. In cases were webmasters were emailing out site content, such as blog posts from their RSS feed, this could result in duplicate content issues.

Today, I received an email from Neil at MailChimp, who says the company has addressed the issue and has added robots.txt files to all servers that host content for the Forward to a Friend feature.

Those links include:

• http://us1.forward-to-friend2.com/robots.txt
• http://us1.forward-to-friend1.com/robots.txt
• http://us1.forward-to-friend.com/robots.txt

As you can see, all three prohibit any indexing by the search engines.

Though Google still shows thousands of URLs on those domains, once the sites are recrawled, they should be removed.

This should put the issue to rest and prevent both future duplications and also eliminate any existing ones in the search engines.

In the end, while I certainly didn’t enjoy having to post about the issue, I’m glad that the matter has been resolved and that MailChimp’s feature will not be harming webmasters’ search engine presence in the future.

On a personal note, to everyone who shared, spread and helped get the word out about the original post (including those of you on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus): Thank you for your help! It made all of the difference in the world bringing this to a quick resolution. It meant a great deal to see so many of you take such an interest in this issue.

In short, I laid out the graveyard of companies that had come before Repost.Us, including noting that the “launch” of Repost.Us was actually a relaunch of the service, which actually began life under two other names.

Basically, though embedding media content, such as YouTube videos, has become mainstream, several companies have tried to do the same with text works but, so far, had failed.

Shortly after I posted the article, I received a message from the heads at Repost.Us who wanted to schedule a time to talk. They felt they could convince me otherwise and I happily talked with them about the subject.

While I can’t say that my mind has completely changed on the subject, I have to admit that they made a few points I had failed to consider.

So, let’s take a few more minutes to look at the issue and see if maybe article embedding really has a chance…

Where Article Reposting is Already Successful

While article embedding may not be widespread across the whole of the Web, there are at least a few places where it has found traction, Tumblr and WordPress.com.

Both of these services offer “Reblog” features that make it easy for others on the same network to repost content. These systems are done with permission and always include proper attribution with every reblog.

Though it’s easy to not think of these reblogs as being examples of article embedding, they are very similar to “retweets” in terms of functionality, they do at least inch webmasters closer to it. After all, reblogging has trained many to not copy and paste content they want to share, but rather, took for automated ways to integrate it.

Still, reblogging has the advantage of being easier than the manual alternative and that’s not something that can really be said of Repost.Us and article embedding in general. While it’s easy to streamline the process across a single service or platform, it’s much harder to do so across the entire Web.

However, that doesn’t mean embedding is pointless on the Web at large.

Carving Out Communities

Though Repost.Us has made its tools available for all that want to use it, the service has focused its energy into building targeted communities built on its service.

One example they highlighted for me was New Jersey News Commons, an effort by Montclair State University to bring several different New Jersey news outlets together in one place.

The idea is fairly simple, bring together sites that are in the same niche and make it easy for them to use content from one another through article embedding. Each site can fill holes in their coverage while the sites they pull from get revenue from embedded ads and, according to Repost.Us, a higher clickthru rate on embedded links (averaging 6% on embedded articles vers 1-2% on regular attribution links).

This also opens up the possibility of full-content aggregation sites that offer a real benefit to both readers and the content creators, giving something more compelling than a mere collection of links to visitors and, likely, a better deal for the original authors.

That, in the future, could make for some very interesting sites and raises the possibility of cross-site cooperation like never before seen.

Seeking a Broader Reach

So if reblogging and article embedding work well on a shared platform or across a dedicated community, can it become a default practice like embedding a YouTube clip?

Probably not.

Even Repost.Us acknowledges that this is going to be an uphill battle. There’s a lot of inertia there and, even if a site has article embedding enabled, which the vast majority don’t, it’s still easier and more common to copy relevant portions and place an attribution link.

Still, there are areas where article embedding could be very useful and more widely used. If Repost.Us is able to convince more mainstream media outlets to enable embedding, longer-tail sites, such as “hyperlocal” ones could use it to bring in relevant content they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.

Likewise, mainstream outlets might want to use embeds to bring up longer-tail content that, while might be worthy of inclusion, doesn’t make sense to write or report on themselves.

However, once again, these are relatively niche uses. Though YouTube and Soundcloud have definitely gotten webmasters used to the idea of embedding media on their site, it doesn’t seem that article embedding will reach that same level of commonality.

Even if it is what’s best for both the original author and the person wishing to use their content, there’s simply too much inertia to overcome right now.

Bottom Line

So do I still believe article embedding has an uphill battle? Absolutely.

However, I do see a path for relevance for the idea. Rather than trying to change the behavior of the Web at large, Repost.Us, and any other service hoping to enter this field, may have better luck at finding relevance by building communities and enabling relationships between sites that couldn’t exist before.

While this is a niche use for the technology, it could be a very important use, enabling a new type of content aggregation and changing the way news is shared online.

So while I don’t see your average blogger seeking out an embed code to reference an outside article, article embedding could be an important part of the Web if Repost.Us is able to reach out to key sites and build communities around it.

It may still be something of a long shot, but at least this approach doesn’t have a graveyard of dead companies to warn me a way from the idea and Repost.Us has a working example community to showcase.

That’s already more success than other ventures in this area have had.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Copyright Owners Can’t Sue Google’s YouTube as a Group – Judge

First off today, Nate Raymond at Reuters is reporting that a district court in Manhattan has denied copyright owners attempt to certify a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google as a class action suit.

The lawsuit, which was filed at about the same time as the 2007 Viacom case, was filed by the English Premier League, the French Tennis Federation and other copyright holders that alleged YouTube, in particular in the early days of the site, failed to remove their content when notified. The copyright holders had sought to make their lawsuit a class action one, making it so that other rightsholders could join in, but the judge has denied that request.

According to the judge, copyright lawsuits are typically a bad candidate for class action cases as the facts of the case can vary wildly from work to work. The proposed class would have been broken up into two parts, one for rightsholders whose allegedly infringing videos were properly removed/blocked after a DMCA notice and those who had their works remain on the site after a proper notice.

2: German online copyright law to take effect in August

Next up today, Loek Essers at PC World reports that a controversial German copyright law will be taking effect on August 1st, following its publication in Germany’s Federal Law Gazette on Tuesday, thus clearing its final legal hurdle.

The rule is aimed at giving publishers tighter control over commercial use of their work online. The original draft included snippets and even short passages but that was removed after an outcry from the public and concern it could ban search engines from indexing and linking to content.

However, some publishers say that, even with the weakened law, the bill allows them to determine the conditions search engines can use their content. This could set the stage for a legal challenge in the near future.

3: Google Launches ‘All Access’ Music Subscription Service

Finally today, Benhy Eisen at Rolling Stone reports that Google unveiled a new music subscription service that aims to compete with Spotify, Rdio and similar services.

Entitled Google Play Music, the service allows users to stream millions of songs in Google’s library for $9.99 per month. It also works with Google Play’s music locker service, which allows users to upload their tracks for easy streaming to multiple devices. This lets users easily stream tracks that that they own but are not in Google’s library.

The service was announced at Google’s I/O developers’ conference in San Francisco and is available for a free 30-day trial. Also, those who register before June 30th get a discounted rate of $7.99 per month.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Aereo Asks Judge to Dismiss TV Networks’ Copyright Lawsuit

First off today, Don Jeffrey at Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Aereo has asked a Federal judge to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by the various TV broadcasters, claiming that the arguments put forth by the networks have no merit and should dismissed without a trial.

Aereo is a TV streaming service that uses a series of tiny antennas, one per customer, to stream and record over-the-air broadcast television and make it available to consumers on multiple devices. Both the lower court and an appeals court refused to grant injunctions against Aereo, prompting Aereo to push for the lawsuit to be dismissed entirely.

The networks, however, have re-appealed the injunction issue “en banc”, sending it back to the same court with the belief that the court ignored a contradictory verdict against a similar company, Aereokiller, in California.

2: Prenda Can’t Find That Darned “Salt Marsh” Signature

Next up today, Joe Mullin at Ars Technica reports that Prenda Law, the beleaguered copyright “troll” law firm that has made a reputation of attempting to sue BitTorrent users that allegedly pirated adult content, is having a tough time explaining a bizarre signature on some of its documents.

Specifically, the judge in one of the cases now-dropped by Prenda is asking to see the original signature of a “Salt Marsh”, a person (or entity) that signed a certification on behalf of AF Holdings, one of Prenda’s supposed clients. Prenda explained that was the name of an entity owned by Mark Lutz, an official owner of a separate shell company, but Prenda has filed papers saying that it is unable to locate the original, likely in violation of signature preservation rules.

Prenda’s lawsuits, at least in California, came to a halt after it was revealed that at least some of the “clients” Prenda was representing were likely shell companies for the lawyers themselves, a violation of court rules.

3: MRC, Philip K. Dick Estate Resolve ‘Adjustment Bureau’ Dispute

Finally today, Dave McNary at Variety reports that Media Rights Capital (MRC) and the PHilip K. Dick Estate have settled their dispute over the recent movie “The Adjustment Bureau”, which was based on a 1954 story by Dick.

According to the estate, MRC had agreed to license the rights to the story for a portion of the revenue of the film. However, MRC claims that it learned the story was actually in the public domain and didn’t have to pay anything. This prompted the Dick estate to sue, first in Federal Court, where the judge dismissed most claims due to lack of jurisdiction, and then in state court over contract and related issues.

However, that lawsuit has now been settled though the terms were not disclosed. In a statement, both sides said that they look forward to working with each other in the future.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Even if you just write a blog post twice a week, that still results in you having over 100 entries by the time you reach your one-year anniversary. If each blog post is just 500 words long, which is fairly short, that means you have 50,000 words of content to track, monitor and enforce if you want to catch it all.

As a result, most bloggers, if they track their content at all, look primarily at their static content (the pages that don’t change), the most recent posts and, sometimes, the most popular ones historically. While this can still be a great deal of content, it’s a much more manageable amount.

However, a new plugin for WordPress aims to address that issue. It’s called BlogAvenger and it aims to make it so that you can track all, or nearly all, of your blog’s content.

I was given the opportunity to test out BlogAvenger during its beta phase and am continuing to use it now on this site.

Does it work and is it worth the money? I’ve got a thorough overview and review for you below….

What is BlogAvenger

BlogAvenger is a plugin for self-hosted WordPress installations (version 3.5 and later) that does four separate things:

1. Disables text selection on the site.
2. Automatically watermarks images so, if they’re reused, they will carry your site’s information.
3. Scans for matches of your blog’s content and, when found, automatically generates DMCA notices that you can send.
4. Bans IP addresses of known scrapers, either blocking them or feeding them a promotional ad for your site.

BlogAvenger is installed pretty much like any other plugin. Though it’s not available from the WordPress plugin repository, you can easily download the zip file and upload it to your installation. However, it’s important to note that your server needs to have IonCube installed. Many shared hosts have Ioncube already installed but, in my case, I had to install it on my hosting account before I could get the plugin to work.

Once installed and running, you’ll need to enter your license ID Number. You can either get a paid “Pro” version, which is currently $29.00 for a lifetime license, or use the free version. The main difference is that the free version will not generate/send DMCA notices nor will it let you hide the “Protected By” footer.

Once you have entered your license number, you’ll then be able to play with the options as you see fit, including whether or not to watermark your images and what content to look for. Specifically, you can tell it the threshold for alerting you to infringements and when to stop tracking old posts (BlogAvenger can look at up to 3 years of posts).

From there, the plugin is pretty much “set and forget”. You’ll receive emails as BlogAvenger finds new content. You can exclude posts from BlogAvenger checks by simply ticking a box in the “Add New Post” screen and you can also exempt images from watermarking by adding “nowater” to the filename.

The question though, is does it work? The answer seems to be well enough.

Thoughts on BlogAvenger

Overall, after over a month of testing, I’m pleasantly surprised by BlogAvenger. Having used and tried many “content protection” plugins, this appears to be one of the first that actually does a good deal to help.

To be clear, some of the features aren’t particularly impressive. For example, the feature that lets you disable text selection is, more or less, a waste of time that will just frustrated legitimate users.

Also, I didn’t test the watermarking feature in BlogAvenger. Though I was promised the process was reversible, I didn’t want to tax my server by having it watermark the thousands of images that have appeared on the site, especially since I only own a tiny fraction of them (most pulled from stock photo sites).

Basically, the watermarking feature is only useful for either new sites that can start out using the “nowater” indicator or sites almost entirely made up of original images.

However, those features aren’t the real star of the show. The content tracking, DMCA preparation and anti-scraping tools are the real reasons to be interested in BlogAvenger.

Those features, for the most part seem to work well enough. Shortly after I got set up, I started receiving alerts on posts of mine that were appearing elsewhere. Though many of these alerts were unnecessary, simply telling me about people who have used my content in compliance with my Creative Commons License, it did alert me to other problems, including the recently reported issue with MailChimp making my content available in Google.

Still, there were a few quirks with it. For one, BlogAvenger sent me alerts on comments posted to the site, not blog posts. Second, some of the pages reported were not working, even though I checked them almost immediately after discovery and, finally, the content matching wasn’t always perfect as, even though I specified only matches larger than 50%, I couldn’t always find the infringing material.

The latter is because BlogAvenger does not do any content highlighting on the matching pages, meaning it can be something of a hide and seek game to find the allegedly infringing material, depending on the site.

Moving on to the DMCA notice service, the generated notices are legally sound. It’s very convenient to have the notice automatically created for you (with your information already filled int) and BlogAvenger does offer to send them for you directly in the plugin (Note: It will only send notices you approve).

However, this feature falls down a bit when trying to decide where to send the notice. As you see on the “Finding the Host” page here, the process of finding a good DMCA contact is often difficult. BlogAvenger seems to pull its information from the DNS information from the site and, as a result, makes a lot of mistakes.

For example, once BlogAvenger correctly identified a site as being on Softlayer but suggested I send the notice to their abuse@ account even though Softlayer’s DMCA agent is copyright@. Though the former likely would have been fine, I would expect many of the notices sent to BlogAvenger’s generated email addresses to fail due to these kinds of errors.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the feature to block known scrapers does not work particularly well. It functions by banning the IP addresses of known infringing sites but the IP address of the scraper bot is often different than the IP of where the content appears, making the ban ineffective. While it likely stopped some simple scrapers, many sites that were “banned” were able to continue with immunity.

But while this might seem like a very negative review, the truth is that BlogAvenger did a decent job tracking a volume of content I could never hope to do by hand and, in the process, alerted me to problems that I was not aware of. Even if it wasn’t 100% accurate in finding the content or pointing out who to send the notices to, it still did more than I (or any human) could have hoped to have done by traditional means.

BlogAvenger Recommendations

So is BlogAvenger right for you and, if so, which version should you use?

First off, you should make sure you meet the requirements. As mentioned above, you’ll need a self-hosted WordPress blog and support for IonCube. If you are unsure if you have support for IonCube, you’ll likely want to ask your host before downloading the plugin.

If you can install it and you are interested in tracking your content, whether for enforcement or just to see where it winds up, BlogAvenger is a very powerful tool. It makes tracking nearly all of your blog content very easy, more or less set-and-forget, and, aside from a few bugs, works extremely well.

I would not trust the DMCA service blindly. I would encourage you to find the DMCA contact on your own and copy/paste the notice into your email client to ensure delivery. I also wouldn’t encourage you to rely on scraper blocking but it is a nice addition and it may help catch some.

As far as which version you will want. Both the free and the paid offer the content tracking. So, if you don’t want help sending DMCA notices and don’t mind the badge at the bottom of your site, then the free one should be fine. On the other hand, $30 for a lifetime license per blog is a very good deal, considering similar services charge monthly, it’s probably worth the upgrade costs for most bloggers.

Still, I would recommend most bloggers who are interested to try the free version first (unless they absolutely can’t stand having the badge on their site). If it works well for you, it’s trivial to upgrade later and, if it doesn’t, it’s easy to uninstall.

Bottom Line

When it comes to blog protection schemes, BlogAvenger is something of a rare bird. It’s a content protection system that actually helps protect content.

While it may not find every infringement out there, it will alert you to ones you did not and could not have known about otherwise.

The only real issue I have with BlogAvenger, other than the features that don’t work as well as advertised due to technical limitations (there isn’t much of a way they can work), is the design of it.

BlogAvenger is, in a word, extremely utilitarian and is neither nice to look at nor extremely easy to use. While most options are self-explanatory and help is nearby, many bloggers are going to feel intimidated by the current look and feel, even if they shouldn’t.

But if you can get past the technical requirements and the interface, BlogAvenger is a plugin well worth trying.

Disclosure: For help in beta testing, I was given a free BlogAvenger Pro account, I used that account as the basis of this review.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: France Should Soften Internet ‘three Strikes’ Law, Says Gov’t Report

First off today, Peter Sayer at CIO repots that the French government-commissioned report has made several suggestions on how to reform the nation’s copyright laws, one of the biggest being a proposed weakening of the nation’s “three strikes” system.

The system, which is managed by an independent organization HADOPI, sends out warning letters to suspected infringers and, after two warnings, can result in Internet access being severed and fines of up to 1,500 Euros ($1,947). Thew proposal would scrap HADOPI, turn over the enforcement to a government agency. It would also reduce the maximum fine to 60 euros and eliminate the potential penalty of having your Internet access cut.

Other proposals in the report include imposing a copyright levy on smartphones, tablets and similar devices, forcing publishers to allow the lending of ebooks and forcing collection societies to allow non-commercial remixing of music and film.

2: Composer Accuses Famed Atlanta Rapper Young Jeezy of Copyright Infringement in Misappropriating Lyrics to Song Provided to Rapper in 2009

Next up today, Kirk Watkins writes for the National Law Review that producer Brian Smith has sued Atlanta Rapper Young Jeezy, real name Jay W. Jenkins, and several of the companies and labels that are involved with him.

According to Smith, he copyrighted lyrics to a song named “Jizzle”, registering them with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2008, and submitted them through his manager to Young Jeezy in July 2010. According to Smith, in October of that year, Island Def Jam Music Group registered a copyright of a sound recording of Jizzle, as sung by Young Jeezy.

The complaint alleges that Smith lost revenue, goodwill and relationships with future clients due to the misappropriation of his copyrighted works. The suit is seeking both an injunction and damages.

3: Aereo Expands Cord-Cutting Online TV Service to Atlanta

Finally today, Samantha Murphy at Mashable reports that Aereo, the controversial TV streaming and recording startup, is expanding to Atlanta, opening up pre-registration starting on June 17.

Aereo allows users to stream broadcast television to multiple devices and record shows on a remote DVR. Broadcasters filed a lawsuit against Aereo but both a lower court and an appeals court refused to grant an injunction, saying that Aereo’s system of using multiple, tiny antennas (one per customer) made it similar to remote DVR systems used by many cable companies.

Aereo currently operates New York City and Boston and it also has plans to further expand to 22 more cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and Philadelphia.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

MailChimp is one of the most respected companies online and it is widely used by many bloggers, including myself, to help distribute newsletters to readers who subscribe.

The basics of the service are fairly simple, for a fee Internet marketers can have MailChip handle all of the elements of their email newsletter including collecting signups, sending out newsletters, tracking results and removing unsubscriptions.

MailChimp also has tools for converting your RSS feed into a daily newsletter, so all of the posts on your site (or a particular category) are sent to readers that want them. This is what I currently use for my newsletter, which can be found in the sidebar.

However, it’s one of MailChimp’s lesser-known features that seems to have gone awry.

MailChimp’s “Forward to a Friend” feature, a tool that makes it easy for subscribers to forward emails they get to people they know, creates duplicate copies of the pages that are forwarded and places them on a server that is not only public, but also indexed by Google.

This has the potential to create serious duplicate content issues for your site as it has already resulted in thousands of duplicate pages appearing in Google for the sites that use it.

Most worrisome, after contacting MailChip, they’ve said that the feature is designed to work this way and that they have no plans on changing it. Meaning that there is little hope that MailChimp will rectify this problem any time soon.

How the Problem Works

If you’re a MailChimp user, if it is in your template, your email newsletter will likely include a feature called “Forward to a Friend” that enables your readers to send your newsletters to their friends (without using the forward button in their email client).

When that link is clicked it opens up a form that the reader can use to enter their friend’s information. The idea is that, if you customize your email newsletter at all, such as adding your reader’s names to it, this will allow the version forwarded to be customized as well.

This process then creates an HTML version of your newsletter that’s put on the domains forward-to-friend.com, forward-to-friend1.com and forward-to-friend2.com. You can find an example of one of those pages using Plagiarism Today’s content here. You can also find examples from Gawker, Jezebel, Boing Boing (truncated feed) Side Income Blogging and, yes, MailChimp’s own blog.

This, in and of itself, isn’t a problem. When I signed up to use MailChimp, I agreed to let it create such duplicates a means of helping me send out my newsletters.

However, the issue is that is that MailChimp is being reckless with the content. All of the domains listed are visible to the search engines and many of the pages that MailChimp creates appear in Google.

This can create a series of problems for bloggers and webmasters, the biggest being duplicate content issues. The URLs not only can appear spammy and cause Google to trust the content less, but it also risks Google selecting the forward-to-friend.com versions over the original, ranking them ahead of your site (this is especially possible with new sites that don’t have a great deal of search engine trust).

In short, if you use MailChimp to email out your content, it’s Forward-to-Friend feature is acting like a spam blog, scraping your content and republishing it for the search engines every time someone forwards your newsletter.

To make matters worse, MailChimp actually gets the issue right with the other cached copy it creates, namely the “View Email in Browser” version.

Though MailChimp saves copies of all of your Web pages on their server, this time using variants of the campaign-archive.com domain (see example), the service has uses a robots.txt file to ensure that the search engines do not access content on it.

The results in Google speak for themselves.

So why was MailChimp being so reckless with the pages that were forwarded when it was so careful with the archive pages? I was certain that it was a simple oversight and wrote them to correct it.

However, I was surprised by the response I received.

MailChimp’s Response

Having had great support from MailChimp in the past, I contacted them via their support form. A few hours later, I heard back from “Zachary” in MailChimp’s client services.

However, Zachary told me that the indexing of content was very much intentional, saying that:

While the main archive page is not indexed, as it has a robots.txt attached to it, those forward to a friend archive pages are in fact indexed. This is due to the public facing nature of these shared pages. Campaigns are intended to bring in new customers or followers, as is the nature of marketing, so these pages when shared either via the forward to a friend link, facebook, twitter, etc, once they are made publicly available, Google does index those. And unfortunately there is not a way to turn of this functionality.

As far as removing these pages, he suggested that it was something I need to “discuss with Google directly” and, in the future, remove the option for readers to use the “Forward to a Friend” feature.

The only bright spot was a promise to “keep this feature in our discussion internally” moving forward.

In short though, MailChimp is aware that their Forward to a Friend feature is creating duplicate content in Google and has no plans to fix at this time.

Fixing the Problem

The simplest solution to the problem is for MailChimp to add a robots.txt file to the domains in question, or use meta tags to block search engines from indexing pages.

In fact, with meta tags, they could be applied on a per-page or per-customer basis, making it easy for those who want to opt out of Google indexing to do so while leaving in those who want to be in there.

In the meantime, however, it’s up to MailChimp’s customers to ensure that this doesn’t happen and the only way to do so, as per MailChimp’s suggestion, is to remove the feature from your template, which can be done with MailChimp’s template editor.

That won’t remove the copies that are already up, but it will prevent future ones from being made.

As for the previous ones, if you want them removed you may need to file a DMCA notice with Google. However, that might be impossible as the MailChimp terms of service give them permission to make such copies of your content.

So while they might have the legal right to do this, it’s a shame they aren’t being more responsible with their customer’s work.

Bottom Line

Simply put, there’s no reason why the “Forward to a Friend” pages need to be treated any differently than the regular archives on MailChimp. Though MailChimp claims it’s about increasingly publicity, given how popular RSS-based subscriptions are, it’s publicity that could hurt many of the people using the site.

Further, if it truly were about publicity, it would make sense to make the archives themselves open to the search engines, not just the posts that happen to get forwarded via their feature (which will only be a small percent).

In the end though, this is a difficult column to write. I have had a good experience with MailChimp over the years but part of that relationship is that they’re a company I felt comfortable trusting my content to. Now, however, it’s clear that they don’t take my work and the decisions I make about it as seriously as I do.

This has me torn on how to handle the matter. I’m going to start looking at alternatives and may transition away soon. In the meantime though, I’m going to keep that particular feature off and see if MailChimp changes its mind about this issue in the near future.

Update: May 16, 2013

Today I received an email from Neil at MailChimp confirming that they have addressed the problem and have added robots.txt to all relevant domains.

All of the following robots.txt files are now active and are blocking search engine access…

http://us1.forward-to-friend2.com/robots.txt
http://us1.forward-to-friend1.com/robots.txt
http://us1.forward-to-friend.com/robots.txt

Once Google reindexes the domains, all content should be removed from the search index, eliminating the duplicate content issue.

In short, the issue has been resolved.

Thank you MailChimp for your swift response to this issue…

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Deutsche Boerse Unit Spurned by Court on Index Options

First off today, Greg Storh at Bloomberg reports that The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal filed by Deutsche Boerse’s International Securities Exchange LLC against McGraw-Hill Cos., who controls the index options for various stock exchanges in the U.S.

Deutsche Boerse had sought to publish their own index-options market without a license from McGraw Hill but McGraw won an Illinois court ruling barring them from doing so. However, Deutsche Boerse appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that Federal copyright law barred McGraw’s claims.

However, by refusing to hear the case, the court allows the state court ruling to stand, continuing to grant McGraw Hill exclusive rights to license and market the relevant options.

2: ISPs Fight For Subscribers Accused of Illegal Porn Downloads

Next up today, Emma Woollacott at Forbes reports that a group of U.S. ISPs, including Verizon, AT&T, Bright House and Cox, are jointly appealing a District of Columbia ruling that oreded them to turn over subscriber information for some 1,058 IP addresses.

The IP addresses were sued as “John Doe” defendants by AF Holdings, a company based on the island of Nevis that is known for suing suspected pirates of their owned films in a bid to obtain their information and attempt to procure quick settlements.

The ISPs are arguing that there is no way to know if the account holder is the person who actually committed the piracy and this could result in the company obtaining coerced settlements from people who are either unable or unwilling to fight back.

3: Prenda: Georgia Court Should Ignore Wright Ruling Because of Gay Marriage

Finally today, Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica reports that Prenda Law is back to filing motions, this time in Georgia where it is hoping to move forward one of its cases there despite a scathing ruling in California against them. Their logic is that the laws in the two states are different and, to prove that, they point that California allows gay marriage and Georgia does not.

Prenda Law is a now-infamous copyright “troll” organization that became famous for attempting to mass-sue (and procure quick settlements with) those who they accused of pirating pornographic films. However, a judge in California has issued a ruling against them, saying that many of their purported clients were just shell companies for the lawyers themselves, a violation of both the law and attorney ethics.

According to Prenda, that ruling should be ignored in Georgia because California has “different laws”, noting that California recognizes gay marriages and eased rules on immigration. According to Prenda, if the Georgia court accepts the California court ruling, Georgia could be forced to accept other California policies.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

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