The list includes dozens of other great blogs such as ReadWriteWeb, Boing Boing, Mashable and their number one on the list, The Inquisitr.

All in all, it’s a great list of blogs and I’m happy to be among such great names. A big thanks goes to the team at Regator for the honor and for compiling the list. There’s a lot of great blogs on there, including many on my RSS list and a few that I’m going to have to add.

Most importantly though, a big thanks to all the readers and supporters of Plagiarism Today. You helped make 2010 a banner year for the site and here’s to an even more exciting 2011!

1: Google Spent $100 Million Defending Against Viacom’s $1 Billion Lawsuit

First off today, on an earnings call Google stated that it had spend some $100 million to fend off Viacom’s recent $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit. The suit, which is under appeal after being dismissed before a trial, may still wind up costing Google even more as additional motions and other actions unfold. This news has raised questions about how much VIacom spent on the suit though that information is not known.

2: U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs

Next up today, the blog host Blogerty has been shut down by U.S. law enforcement officials, taking down some 73,000 blogs, though the reasons for the closure are not clear. Many suspect that it is due to copyright-related issues as the removal times out with an ongoing campaign against infringing websites but no proof of this has been presented and both law enforcement officials and the host are being quiet about the reason for the closure. The service, which lacked backups, is still down though linking to a forum threat about the closure.

3: Guns N’ Roses Uploader Laughs Last

Finally today, Kevin Cogill, who was convicted of leaking tracks from the latest Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy, has not had to fulfill at least one of the requirements of his plea deal. In the deal he was sentenced to home confinement and probation if he agreed to do a PSA on piracy. However, two years later, no PSA has been made and the court’s jurisdiction on the matter has ended. Citing “various elements” including production costs, the RIAA decided not to make a PSA using Cogill, effectively releasing him from that part of his deal.

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 6 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.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced its Kindle Publishing for Blogs service that lets bloggers put their sites on the Kindle and charge a small monthly subscription fee. Unfortunately though, it seems to come with a very serious weakness.

Late last night, TechCrunch reported that Josh Fraser, the co-founder of EventVue, had managed to set up a duplicate of TechCrunch’s blog in the Kindle store, allowing him to offer paid subscriptions to TechCrunch’s feed and profit from those subscriptions.

In short, anyone can offer paid subscriptions to just about any blog, even if that blog has already been registered for the Kindle earlier. This is, to put it modestly, a huge hole in the Kindle blog registration process and one that needs to be closed quickly.

How it Works

The process of registering your blog for the Kindle is fairly simple. You first create an account with Amazon specific to this service (Note: You can not use your current Amazon account) and provide it with your banking and other personal information (to enable payment). You then provide Amazon with an RSS feed to your blog, two images, one of the logo and one thumbnail of the site itself and then preivew/submit it.

Amazon will take a while to approve the blog, though it warns it takes 48-72 hours mine was approved in under 12, and it sets the price that is going to be charged. When it is all said and done, Amazon keeps 70% of the revenue from the blog subscriptions and bloggers get to keep 30%.

The problem with this, at least as far as content theft is concerned, is that Amazon does absolutely no checks to make sure the person registering the feed owns the site. No hidden files to upload, no meta tags to insert and no need to register from an @domain.com email. Anyone, anytime, anyplace can create a subscription for any site they please. All that is needed is a bank account, a tax ID and a few images of the site.

The only thing that would prevent this misuse is Amazon’s approval process. However, as TechCrunch pointed out, even when a blog was officially registered, the approval process sometimes let other versions slip through. The good news, however, is that Amazon has since gone through and removed the fake blogs, but it remains to be seen if and how they will handle the situation when lesser-known blogs become the victim.

What Can Be Done

The honest answer here is not a lot at the moment. I would definitely double check and make sure that your blog is not available for the Kindle and report it if your site appears without your permission.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like this problem is going to be very widespread. First off, the requirement to hand over so much personal information will likely scare off most scammers. Second, only the most popular blogs would generate anywhere near the traffic and subscribership to be worthwhile. Finally, Amazon seems to be shutting down these fake blogs fairly quickly, making them far less than profitable ventures.

That being said, the fact that it has happened and that the lacking security will allow it to happen again, that means it is only a matter of time before one slips through the cracks, doesn’t get removed and someone manages to make at least a small amount selling another’s work on the Kindle. It may not be the end of the world or even the largest content misuse problem, but it is very annoying and a worrisome possibility to those who might want to explore these avenues on their own.

Amazon, if it values this service and doesn’t want to spend all of its time and manpower filtering out bogus blog subscriptions (not to mention risking the wrath of angry customers who pay for subscriptions only to have them closed), they need to install some check to make sure the author or owner of the blog is the one submitting it. It is that simple.

Some Personal Thoughts

I actually see mistakes like this all of the time. Tech companies, including large ones like Amazon, for the most part, were founded on the idea of building products and services that help good people do great things. Whether they’re building an online office suite, the latest RSS reader or something else altogether, companies always think first and foremost about what good they can do and how great their product will be.

The problem is that some never stop to realize that not all of the people are good and not everyone approaches a product with benign intentions. This goes well beyond just copyright concerns but it leads companies to make absolutely stupid mistakes when it comes to security and to headaches like these. The worst part is that many products, in order to make them remotely safe, have to be completely crippled and made almost useless.

We can joke all we want about tech company CEOs being evil or vile, but the truth of the matter is they are usually just drunk off of their own product’s perceived potential and are oblivious to the pitfalls. Amazon is not the first company to make an obvious blunder like this and they will not be the last.

Let us hope that Amazon responds appropriately and takes some reasonable precautions to protect bloggers from having their content sold without their permission.

Bottom Line

In the end, it is important to be aware of this issue but also rest assured it probably will not affect you or your site unless you run a top-tier blog. However, that doesn’t make it any less annoying or potentially dangerous, especially if Amazon begins to slack off on its enforcement.

In the meantime, I think the more annoying things about the Kindle for Blogs system is that it can feel like a rip off, even to the authors who want their work to be there. Not only can they not choose their pricing, but Amazon keeps the lion’s share of the revenue. While I recognize that they have expenses in delivering the blog to their devices, they also don’t have the expenses in producing the content.

Still, since I am committed to making this site available on as many platforms as possible and have no real issue with it being on the Kindle, I did add Plagiarism Today to the site. You can subscribe to PT via Kindle here. For the site, Amazon chose a price of $1.99 per month. I wanted to make the site free but the option was not available. As such, in the unlikely event I see any revenue from the Kindle I’ll promise now to donate it to Creative Commons.

So, if anyone wants to spend $2 per month to read PT on a Kindle, have fun. Personally, I think most people would be much happier getting it for free via RSS as they do now…

There are specifically three changes worth noting:

1. New Page Order: I’ve gone through all of the pages and reordered them, basically moving “Press” and “Contact” to the end of the line. This groups the related pages, “DMCA Contacts“, “Stock Letters” and “Stopping Internet Plagiarism” together in the list. Hopefully this will make the list overall easier to navigate, though it might be confusing to those used to the old layout.
2. New “Other Sites” Page: I’ve added a brand new page under the “About” heading that links to all of the other pages and sites that host content related to this site including the other blogs, microblogs and social networks. It was an attempt to unify all of the different “announcement” posts I’ve made over the past few years.
3. Removed “Host Report”: The Host Report page had not been updated in far too long so I have unpublished it for right now. I plan on reintroducing it soon as something completely different but that project is likely a months off.

It is important to note that, other than the Host Report, everything is still there. I’m sorry for the shuffle but I wanted to make things easier on new readers and may make more adjustments based upon feedback I get.

Thank you for your feedback and your understanding, please keep the suggestions coming!

It was an admittedly slow week for WordPress news. However, there was still a few things to talk about as WordPress 2.5 entered a feature freeze and the creation of a new WordPress development blog.

Also, Charles interviews Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies about her book and all things WordPress

You can listen to the podcast by visiting here.

Also, be sure to email your questions in for next week’s episode, which will focus on copyright and plagiarism issues for bloggers. I’ll be sitting down for an interview, rather than a co-host for that one.

There was a great deal to go over this week including the release of WordPress 2.3.3 and other blog security issues. Also covered is the new Prologue theme for WordPress and the ability to convert WP into a contact manager.

You can listen to the podcast by visiting here.

You can also leave comments there or contact the show the be a part of it!

We had a lot to go over, well over one hour of content, but hopefully we are now caught up and will be able to return to an ordinary rhythm next week.

Please note that the podcast was recorded on Saturday, before the release of WordPress 2.3.3, so please note that we will be discussing that latest release next week.

Speaking of which, the WordPress Podcast will likely be a regular job for me from here on out. We are hoping to do weekly episodes and I will be serving as co-host many of those weeks.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Finally, on a personal note, it is the day after Mardi Gras and I’m trying to slip back into my old schedule. Needless to say, it is an uphill battle and I’m very far behind at the moment. Please be patient with me as I work to get caught back up.

The system, in theory, is supposed to make registering your work with the USCO easier, faster and cheaper than the traditional “file by mail” system that the USCO has used for decades.

But how does the system compare with existing services, such as Godaddy’s c-Site and is it enough to save the USCO from becoming a complete dinosaur in the digital age?

Well, last week I received an invite to beta test the system and sought to answer those questions for myself. What I found was an inadequate system that never failed to disappoint.

Obtaining the Invite

Getting the invite to test the system was a relatively painless process. I was on the USCO site for unrelated business and filled out the brief form to request becoming a beta tester. Within 24 hours, I had an email inviting me to join the test and instructions for signing on.

The email gave me instructions to register for an account at a hidden page on the USCO site. The registration was spread across four screens. The first asked me for my name, time zone, username and password. The second asked me to fill in my personal contact information, address, phone, etc. The third had me agree to a terms of service and the fourth was a confirmation of the first three screens.

With the account registered, I could easily log in and see the interface, but I had to confirm the registration before I could actually do anything. Confirming the registration required me to reply to my acceptance email with my username and other information so they could activate the account.

After waiting another day, the account was activated. I was able to log back in and start the registration process. However, it was then that the chinks in the armor began to become very clear.

Going Through the Motions

Once your access to the system is confirmed, you can then begin to go through the motions of registering your work.

When you first log in to your account, you are greeted with the screen below (click for larger screen).

Once you click the “Start a New Registration” screen, you are taken to a page that provides you an overview of the three steps that will follow, filling out the application, making payment and submitting your deposits. You then click the “Start Registration” button and begin the application process.

The application process takes place over a series of eleven steps, starting with the type of work and ending with a review of the submission. The entire time you’re moving through the application process, a box, such as the one to the left, is displayed on the screen showing you where you are in the process.

Each step is relatively short and closely mirrors the information that is entered on the paper forms. Navigation between the steps is handled through a navigation bar displayed above each page’s form.

In addition to allowing you to move back and forward through the steps, the navigation bar allows you to save the registration at any time, letting you to access it through their account management tools. Also, in some sections, it has the ability to “Add Me”, which will fill in your provided information instead of having you retype it.

All totaled, the application process takes about thirty minutes the first time you go through it. Subsequent times, when you’re more comfortable with the format and the steps, can take as little as ten.

Once you have completed your application, you are then taken to a page on Pay.gov, which is a site operated by the United States Treasury. There you are given the opportunity to pay the $35 fee either via checking account or credit card.

Unfortunately, that is where I had to stop. Though my original intention was to register this site using the service, problems and concerns with the registration prevented me from spending the money on the registration.

Issues with the Service

Many of the problems with the eCO service are apparent just by looking at the few screenshots I provided. The submission process is clumsy, the layout is ugly and the language is, in places, very confusing.

It was clearly a system designed for people already very familiar with the copyright registration process and, even though I have successfully registered many things with the USCO, this system left me scratching my head at least a few times.

The system also suffers from some very severe technical issues. For one, the service is incompatible with some browsers. It has only been tested on IE and Netscape 7.2, requires modifications to Firefox settings for it to work in that browser, seems to work with Opera in my testing and completely chokes on Safari. This is unacceptable considering that the entire process is done using almost nothing but HTML and basic JavaScript.

But worse still is the extreme slowness of the service and regular error messages. Several times when I tried to sign on I was told that I was already logged into the system and couldn’t enter it again. Other times, I experienced random, and rather cryptic, server error messages.

Most frustrating of all was that clicking the “Add Me” button, as described above, took the system upwards of a minute to add my data in. Once, it took so long my session timed out before the data was put in.

However, the deal breaker, for me, was the complete and total lack of effective documentation for the service. When I reached the point where they were asking for my credit card number, I realized that I had no idea how to prepare my site for upload.

I knew from reading other reviews that the site would have to be uploaded in a zip file and that there had been hiccups with the upload process, but I had no clue what kind of files it would require me to reformat the site as an RTF, TXT or PDF file. In the past, I’ve submitted HTML documents burned to a disk with no problems, but this system seems to have changed many of the rules.

So, I left the eCO system at the altar, my registration complete save the payment and the upload.

My Thoughts

I’ve been very critical of the USCO over the years I’ve run this site and repeatedly called for its closure or, at the very least, the elimination of the registration requirement.

However, I held out a glimmer of hope that the eCO system might modernize the USCO enough to be practical in the Internet age. Unfortunately, those hopes have been dashed pretty thoroughly.

This is not an update to the USCO, it is just a means for them to accept and process copyright applications more quickly. It only brings the USCO up to date if you assume that the date is 1995.

The eCO system does not take advantage of new technologies such as RSS or AJAX. It is not user-friendly or significantly more cost-effecient. It is not approachable to anyone who has never filed a registration before and, worst of all, it does nothing to make the process of registering a Web site more clear.

In short, it is nothing but fast lane for traditional copyright holders. The RIAA types will enjoy this system greatly and will forgive its flaws because it speeds up the process and saves them money. But bloggers, Webmasters and smaller rightsholders will miss out on the revolution.

This system held so much promise when it was announced. However, it is now just another government failure when trying to adapt copyright law to the Web.

Conclusions

To be fair, we must remember that this system is just a beta. However, as my own experiences in government work tells me, the powers that be don’t beta test until they feel they are very close to a final product. If that is the case, then this is nothing but a colossal failure.

What makes it so embarrassing is that online copyright registration services have existed for years. These services, which have charged a premium to process postal copyright registrations, are, by in large, fast, user-friendly and easy.

Even non-repudiation systems such as Registered Commons and Numly provide a much higher level of convenience, speed and effectiveness. The only thing they lack is any legal authority.

However, it is that legal authority that causes most of the major problems with the eCO. By having to comply with a set of laws that don’t fit neatly with the Internet, the eCO system goes from a painless registration to a cumbersome application of antiquated laws.

The eCO system is an attempt to shoehorn 1978 copyright law into a 2008 copyright reality. It just doesn’t work.

Rating

Out of a ten I have to give the system a three. It is better than no electronic copyright registration system at all, but that is not saying much.

However, when she followed the link, she found something else. Rather than a properly attributed article, complete with bio and proper links, she found a scraped copy of it on a spam blog. The attribution tag was missing and her name was only affixed due to the fact it was on the article itself.

But what made the case exceptional was not that her free article had been scraped within an hour of going live, but that it appeared in German and her original work was written in English.

A scraper had not only taken the content, but passed it through an automated translation service, producing both a poor translation of the piece, but also a completely different work in the eyes of the search engines.

Though Goetsch was not the first person to encounter this problem, her case does illustrate the changing face of scraping on the Web. As the Internet becomes more international and the technology used to steal content grows more advanced, this type of content theft can only become more common.

Reasons to Worry

The problem with this type of scraping is that it is almost impossible to detect. Since the text is stripped out for translation, any markers or images placed in the feed to track usage will likely be removed. Second, because the text looks completely different from the original, traditional searching will be to no avail. Finally, since these crude translations are done instantly, they can beat a more effective human translation to the Web by a matter of hours or days.

What it all amounts to is a detection nightmare. To a search engine, the translated work bears no resemblance to the original. No search engine can easily detect this kind of abuse. That works out great for the scraper, who gets what the search engines will identify as truly unique content, but bad for content creators who can’t easily locate such infringements.

This can hit larger sites especially hard. They often offer human-translated copies of the work, usually on localized sites, and these automated scraped copies can actually beat the legitimate ones to the market, thus improving their chance of fooling humans and search engines alike into believing they are original works.

Fortunately, the likelihood of such a situation is very slim. Such automated scraping and translating has some very severe limitations that limit its potential impact on a blogger or other writer.

Reasons Not to Worry

Though this type of scraping is still definitely copyright infringement, translation and derivative works rights go to the copyright holder, there are several reasons why it is less worrisome than more traditional scraping.

The good news and the bad news are one and the same: Search engines can’t detect this kind of plagiarism.

Though that fact makes transcraping harder to detect and follow up on, it also means that you won’t be competing with the scraped copies for search engine attention. There is no way you can be bit by a duplicate content penalty, no way that you can be replaced in the search engine results and no real fear of a human confusing the scraper site as the original.

Furthermore, even if a human is able to make the connection, meaning he or she saw both sites, spoke both languages and made the connection, the automatic translation is too rough to fool anyone. Given how bad and unprofessional automated translation tends to be, the likelihood of anyone thinking that the scraped version is the original is slim to none.

Finally, this type of scraping is still fairly rare according to best guesses available. Though the technology exists, the primary target language for most scrapers and spammers is still English. If you write primarily in a foreign language, especially one that is easily translated to English, the concern might be greater but, even then, it isn’t a likely event.

For most scrapers, there is still plenty of content available in their native language to avoid having to translate anything. Since spammers tend to favor the path of least resistance, only a handful will ever opt to take this route.

Detecting Transcraping

But even though this type of scraping is not as dangerous as the more traditional variety, many Webmasters may still want to monitor this type of abuse, especially those who charge for commercial use or offer their own translations.

Though traditional detection methods may not provide much help in finding translated plagiarism, other methods can.

The key is to focus on words that will not be modified in a translation. The most obvious example of this is a name or a site address, both of which will go unmodfied. But another option includes using digital fingerprints, which should be nonsense to a translation program, and will also remain unchanged.

Thus, the best step you can take to detect transcraping is to take advantage of exisiting digital fingerprint plugins such as MaxPower’s or Copyfeed and then track those fingerprints either using Google Alerts or through the plugin’s internal search tools.

This type of automated scraping is exactly what digital fingerprints are designed to catch and, as long as a nonsense word is chosen and it is embedded in the actual text of the article, it should appear just fine in any translated version of the work.

Fortunately, the scraper bots are not yet smart enough to weed out nonsense from actual content. Once that happens, new technologies will have to be developed to detect scraping and put a stop to it.

Conclusions

In the end, there is little reason to worry specifically about translated scraping. Not only is it less likely to harm you but, if you’re using digital fingerprints correctly, odds are that you are already fairly well protected against it.

Still, it is an interesting form of content theft, at least from an academic viewpoint, and it is a symbol of how things are progressing in this field. The tools are growing more sophisticated, spammers are broadening their scope and new techniques are constantly being developed.

Though this particular method is unlikely to have a major impact in the long run, it is clear that staying on top of these issues and the advancements scrapers make will not only be more difficult, but also more important in the months and years to come.

According to Dash, the LiveJournal service, though having a larger user base than WordPress.com and being equally free to use, is also relatively free of spam blogs. He attributes this to both a similar kind of vigilance that WordPress.com exhibits in fighting spam blogs but also lists an unusual ally, the social networking element.

It turns out, LJ’s best defense may be the Myspace-like features.

Friends Have Benefits

According to Dash, spam blogs and spam accounts don’t have friends other than spam blogs in the same network. No one, in their right mind, would knowingly befriend a spam blog.

This knowledge makes it easy for LiveJournal to not just crush individual spam blogs, but entire networks. This works very similar to Microsoft’s proposal for dealing with Internet spam, but in a much more controlled environment.

In short, by detecting one spam blog and then looking at that blog’s friends, you can detect others and, by looking at their friends you can eventually fan out until you’ve detected the entire network with relative certainty.

This is hugely powerful in that, rather than dealing with spam blogs one at a time, LiveJournal can stop large groups of them with relative ease, once again preventing them from ever gaining a foothold on the service.

An Interesting Solution

Using the social network against spammers is definitely a very powerful technique, however, it isn’t one that will work for sites without that kind of functionality. It might work well for Myspace or Xanga, but not so much for WordPress.com, Blogspot or other services that don’t emphasize those elements.

It will be interesting to see if social networks take advantage of the human element to aid them in stopping spam and what, if anything, spammers to do to counter that. Already on some networks, like MyBlogLog and Myspace, there is a great deal of “friend spam” being sent out. If humans can be duped into linking to spam profiles and spam blogs, then such a technique would become much less effective as filtering out the legitimate users would become more time consuming.

Still, at the moment at least, it seems to be working well for LiveJournal as Dash reports that they are regularly targeted by spammers but have little trouble keeping them at bay. I hope that is how it remains.

Conclusions

Personally, I am still very concerned about LiveJournal’s other copyright and splogging issues and I am working with Dash as well as others at Six Apart to address them. In the meantime though, many will consider the syndicated LiveJournal accounts to be a form of sanctioned spam blogging on the service as they effectively scrap content from other sites without permission.

Hopefully those issues will be resolved soon.

Regardless, Six Apart’s ability to keep spammers off of their service is very impressive. Hopefully others services, especially those who have been inundated with spam, will learn from their techniques and be able to better control their own servers.

If that happens, then perhaps the Internet can become a much more spam-free place.