Many of these hosts have been copyright headaches for Webmasters. They are prime targets for spam blogs and scrapers and some have played a huge role in rise of the “splogosphere”.

Without the help of these hosts, the copyrights of bloggers will be almost impossible to protect, especially for smaller rightsholders that can not afford attorneys to go after plagiarists. That makes the DMCA/copyright policies of these hosts a matter of critical importance to the rest of us on the Web.

So how do they mneasure up? Let’s take a look at seven of the leaders and find out.

Format: Email
Email Address: amac at google dot com
Location of Policy: Google’s DMCA Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: Every time I do one of these articles, it seems that Google owns one of the seven leading properties and I’m forced to cover them again and rehash the same complaints. To summarize, their requirement of a handwritten signature needlessly complicates the process of filing a DMCA complaint and, most likely, does not comply with the law, in particular the ESIGN Act. Until they are able to accept email complaints without PDF trickery, they will be a major thorn in Webmaster’s sides and, in this case, a great target for spam bloggers/scrapers.
Grade: D

Format: Email
Email Address: jkweston at microsoft dot com
Location of Policy: Microsoft’s Copyright Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: Be grateful you read this site and be sure to bookmark this article. Otherwise, the odds of you quickly finding the copyright policy for MSN Live Spaces are slim to one. Their report abuse page gives you a drop down to report copyright infringement. However, sending a report there, even with a full DMCA notice, only results in an autoreply directing you to follow the guide above (as reported by visitors of this site). You can also find a mention of the policy on their legal page, but the link to the actual policy isn’t even clickable. You have to literally copy and paste the URL to use it. The policy itself is fairly complete, containing all of the necessary information, but finding it is a pain. You can’t even do a Google search for it. It is as if Microsoft is deliberately hiding this page. It may not be illegal, but it is some of the worst service I have ever seen.
Grade: C-

Format: Form/Email
Email Address: aolcopyright at aol dot com
Location of Policy: AOL’s Copyright Infringement Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: AOL may be considered a dinosaur on the Web, but they do exhibit some forward thinking in this area. They provide a very convinient from (linked above) for filing complaints of copyright infringement that takes care of most of the dirty work for you. It’s definitely one of the easiest ways to report an infringement I’ve seen. The only problem with AOL’s policy is that it is also very hard to find. To get to that form you have to find a link buried in their terms of use to get to their infringement policy and, from there, click their “Copyright Notice” link to get to the form itself. They also don’t provide an email address, save on their USCO registration but otherwise is complete, giving all of the necessary information to file a notice. Though I am irked by the location of the policy and the roadblocks in finding it, it is overall a solid way to handle such matters.
Grade: B+

Format: Email
Email Address: dmca at automattic dot com
Location of Policy: Automattic’s DMCA Policy
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: Though Automattic is definitely on the offensive against spam, their DMCA policy leaves a lot to be desired. While the actual policy is very complete, though omitting a fax number, finding it is a pain. The link to it is buried in the terms of service and they have not registered with the USCO meaning that there is no alternative way to look up the information. Though they have a great reputation for handling such issues once notified, their front end and user-friendliness could definitely use some work. Though the policy is likely within the bounds of the law, the lack of USCO registration and the difficult location discourage me greatly and raise some potential legal issues.
Grade: D+

Format: Email
Email Address: copyright at typepad dot com
Location of Policy: Typepad’s Copyright Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: One of two SixApart services we’re going to cover, Typepad is a breath of fresh air when stacked up to its competitors. The copyright policy is well-written, robust and complete. It is linked at the bottom of most SixApart-controlled pages, including the home page, and is very easy to find. They are also registered with the USCO and their information there is up to date. Though some issues exist on the backend, in particular with other SixApart services, they definitely understand how to comply with the DMCA and make the process as painless as possible for the end user.
Grade: B+

Format: Email
Email Address: copyright at livejournal dot com
Location of Policy: LiveJournalal’s Copyright Policy
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: The other SixApart service shares its policy with its brother. In fact, at first glance, the text of the two policies appear to be identical. As with TypePad, the copyright policy is linked at the footer of nearly every LiveJournal-controlled page, including the home page, and offers the same level of completeness. Though I would prefer the policy, along with other abuse information, be available on all pages, including individual blogs, the benefit of that would be minimal as most people will simply visit the home page.
Grade: B+

Format: Email?
Email Address: legal at blogsome dot com?
Location of Policy: Blogsome Terms of Service
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: Blogsome talks one of the toughest games when it comes to copyright infringement. Their modest-lengthed terms of service uses the word “copyright” ten times. However, there’s no teeth to this policy. There is no address given to contact about copyright infringement. Though they are an Irish site and do not have to follow the DMCA, there are EU regulations at play and, without a clear means of contact for reporting abuses, I am very worried about how this site might be misused. Hopefully, they will update their policies soon to make it more clear where they should take such matters, the address above is the only account I could find used in relation to the terms of service in any way, shape or form.
Grade: F

Wrap Up

It is an Alice in Wonderland moment for me. SixApart, who has drawn criticism for their copyright polices elsewhere, has the best public DMCA policies of all the services listed. WordPress, the dedicated spam fighter, has one of the worst.

Equally strange, the big companies, Microsoft and Google, both have obstructionist policies while the dinosaur AOL and small business SixApart have much more effective and open ones.

Over all though, I was very disappointed in the policies of the major blog hosts. Most have shown little interest working with rightsholders and some are downright uncooperative. With one F, two Ds, a C- and three B+s, two belonging to SixApart, this is easily one of the worst genres I have reviewed.

Conclusions

In the end, none of the blogging companies earned an A. They all had at least some issues with their policy and, despite being some of the largest, most important hosts on the Web, only one showed any kind of evolution or forward-thinking in this area.

When stacked against the video sharing sites, it becomes clear what a difference the threat of lawsuits has on a company. Where the video sharing sites have taken great care in crafting their policies, the blog hosts have largely just thrown theirs together, working only to meet the minimum standards they feel they should be held up to.

Looking at these policies and going back over my personal experiences with many of these hosts, there is no wonder why and how the spam blog problem grew to the proportions that it did.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s WordPress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, WordPress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

Though there have been spam attacks in the past, the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as Typepad also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what WordPress.com does is very rare for a free service.

To find out how WordPress.com achieved this, I emailed Automatic’s founder, Matthew Mullenweg. The answer was very surprising.

A Technological Edge

Automattic, in addition to creating WordPress.com, created the anti-comment spam plugin Akismet.

Akismet works by taking comments submitted to a site and forwarding them to Akismet’s servers. Akismet then, using a series of tests and filters, determines if the comment is legitimate, spam or something in between. Spam comments are filtered out, gray comments are held for moderation and legitimate comments are posted.

Akismet is available for free for personal use on any WordPress blog with an API key, not just those hosted by WordPress.com. To date, Akismet has stopped over one billion spam comments and is used on thousands of blogs, including this one.

Both the WordPress.com site and Mullenweg hint that Akismet is one of their tools for keeping spam blogs off of WordPress.com. Though both are vague with their descriptions as to how it works, one likelihood is that any caught comment spam originating or pointing to a WordPress.com flags the site for inspection.

If true, this effectively turns comment spamming, one of the most popular means of promoting a spam blog, against the person doing it. Comment spamming goes from being a tool to help search engines find a blog to a means for administrators to easily identify the blogs that are likely junk.

That would be an interesting reversal of fortune for spammers and a very intelligent use of a seemingly unrelated technology.

Goodbye, Adsense

In late 2005, WordPress.com took what some considered an extreme step and banned Google Adsense as well as other advertising networks from its service. As of this writing, there is no way to add any advertisements to a WordPress.com hosted blog, other than “discreet” links, without a paid VIP membership.

This is obviously a tremendous deterrent to spam blogs, many of which rely upon Google Adsense to make money. This is in stark contrast to Blogspot, which makes it very easy to add Adsense ads to your blog and encourages members to do so.

Though Google’s reasons for doing this are clear, it is how they make money from the service, the prevalence of Adsense has undoubdtedly been a major contributor to the deluge of spam that has befallen the service. That is also why Mullenweg, in a comment on TechCrunch, said the following:

We’re considering ad options for the future, but for now disallowing adsense has been a huge help in keeping splogs off the system and hasn’t gotten much pushback from regular folks, only aspiring pro-bloggers. (Who should probably be on WordPress.org anyway.)

While it is true that this has no impact on the spam bloggers that are solely interested in using the splogs to gain search engine ranking via outbound liks, this missing functionality does a great deal to deter many of the laziest and least sophisticated spam bloggers out there.

All in all, while the lack of simple monetization might be a hurdle for some would-be WordPress.com users, it has played a critical role in keeping the service free of spam blogs.

The Real Difference

But while Mullenweg was clearly pleased with the role that Akismet and other tools played in stopping spam, he put the greatest difference on the human element.

According to him, Automattic takes spam very seriously and always has and that, in his view, makes the greatest difference of all. In his email to me he said the following:

If you ever come across something we host that’s spam just drop the link there and someone will look at it within an hour or so.

Akismet and a few other internal tools help, but I think it’s mostly that we take splogs pretty seriously and respond accordingly..

Mullenweg encourages people to use the “Report as Spam” feature in the dashboard across the top of all WordPress.com blogs to report any instance of spam. He says that all reports of spam are tracked and followed up on swiftly.

This is much simpler and more effective than Google’s complicated and practically useless reporting procedure.

This, in Mullenweg’s view, has kept spam from establishing a foothold on the service and kept WordPress.com relatively spam-free when compared to its competitors. Hopefully, it will be enough to keep it that way.

Conclusions

The good news in all of this is that it is possible to run a large-scale, popular and free blogging service that is relatively free of spam. The bad news is that there is no magic bullet in any of this.

Running such a service requires a great deal of commitment both from the people who run the service and from the community that uses it. It requires investing both resources and manpower into combating spam while having a genuine dislike for it. It even requires, in some cases, sacrificing features that legitimate users may want in order to make the service less appealing to the spam blogging community.

It also means that it may be far too late for Blogspot and similar services to turn the tide against spam. Though WordPress.com seems to easily be able to keep up with new spam that comes in, it appears that, if over three quarters of your results are junk, that the reversing the tide is all-but-impossible.

However, if Google were to take the simple, but drastic, step of banning Adsense on Blogspot, the effect on spam blogs would be drastic. However, the effect on their legitimate bloggers would be equally dramatic, causing many of them to turn away from the service.

This puts Google, and the other free blogging services, in a very tough bind. In order to effectively combat spam, they need to make sacrifices that will, most likely, cause them to lose legitimate customers as well as spammers. It almost comes down to a choice between being a spam haven and having their entire business model destroyed.

In that regard, spam blogs are like a cancer, often easily treated if caught and attacked early, but incurable if allowed to go on to long. Sadly, Blogger, AOL Hometown and MSN Spaces may be beyond any hope of recovery.

This is an issue I will be revisiting some time later this week.

Update: This article has really taken off. An appearance on Techmeme as well as Matt Mullenweg’s blog have really drawn a great deal of attention to this. So welcome to everyone who is visiting this site for the first time. Feel free to look around some and subscribe to the feed if you wish.

I did want to take a moment and respond to one very astute commenter who pointed out that all is not what it seems with the Blogspot study. As it turns out, the methodology of the study is both buried and confusing. It turns out that 77% of Blogspot blogs are spam for spam-friendly keywords. It is not a reference to the number of spam blogs on the service over all.

However, after thinking about it, I realized that a study of the blogs on Blogspot would be almost useless as Blogspot, in addition to splogs, is choked down with with inactive and abandoned blogs, the same as with any free blogging service or free Web service in general.

A better study would be to look at the percentage of active blogs on the service, something that can be determined, at least with some distinction, but the number of outgoing pings. A study from February of this year looked at exactly that and found that 51% of all pings from Blogspot were spam (Note: According to Pete, this study was taken before Blogspot began pinging new entries by default, it may show bias to spammers as they might be more likely to switch on the pinging feature. We will have to wait and see when a new study comes out.).

This means that over half of all new posts created and pinged out over Blogspot are junk. Though not the 77% mentioned earlier, that is still a tremendous problem. The fact remains that Blogger is, quite clearly, overrun with spam blogs and is unlikely to recover any time soon, not without making drastic changes.

My thanks to Pete for pointing out the error.