However, one factor that I had not actively considered, but has come up in recent conversations, was if the service you used could help draw more attention to your site.

Specifically at issue is if using a free blog host, such as WordPress.com, BlogSpot or LiveJournal could draw attention to spammers that specifically targeted those sites. I have seen a handful of spam blog networks that seem to target one blog host specifically, but these occurrences have been seemingly rare.

I would like to get feedback on this issue to see if it is something I should look into more deeply. I would love feedback from those who run both self-hosted and freely-hosted blogs and their experiences with scraping on both.

It would seem logical to me that they would be greater targets for scraping given that it is known freely hosted bloggers have fewer tools for stopping RSS abuse and lack the server control to block scrapers. However, freely hosted blogs would also seem to be less reliable considering there is no penalty for bloggers walking away.

If this seems to be a factor I’ll plan on looking into it more deeply and seeing which services are most at risk and what can be done about it.

I look forward to your thoughts.

The response was very divided. Many supported Scoble for what he did while others accused him of being dishonest about the whole issue.

Personally, I feel ambivalent about the matter. Though I am not comfortable with data lock-ins, as they artificially pad a company’s customer retention, I do not support Scoble knowingly violating a TOS and then complaining when he is banned and working to obtain reinstatement.

However, Scoble-gate, as it is being called on some sites, highlights a larger, much more worrisome issue. What would happen if the data involved wasn’t the information for his Facebook contacts, but rather, his blog postings or photos?

That would be very different and it raises some difficult issues.

I did some looking around and it became clear that many sites are executing a form of reverse content theft, locking in your work to their site and making it hard, or even impossible, to get out.

No longer do we have to just worry about our content appearing where we don’t want it, but also getting it where we need it in the first place.

The Premise

The idea of content theft itself is pretty simple. When you post a work to the Web, you have a choice in what sites it appears on. You can make that choice explicitly, by posting it yourself or directly granting permission, or implicitly through a license, such as a Creative Commons License, or other broad transfer of rights.

Most of the time, we worry about our content appearing where we don’t want it it. Spammers, scrapers and plagiarists can take content almost instantly and post it all over the Web, often times confusing the market and diluting the search results.

However, what happens when we post content to the Web, want to move it or copy it to another site but are prevented from doing so? It is a form of content theft in that it is a loss of control over placement. However, it is not traditional content theft but it is still a limitation on the rights of a copyright holder, in this case the right to share his or her own work with whomever he/she pleases.

As we become more and more reliant on third-party services, many of which we use for free, this issue of “reverse” content theft becomes more and more serious. As we add data to our various presences on the Web, our ability to export and move it around becomes critical.

However, what I discovered when looking at many of the popular services is that most don’t offer much in the way of portability. Here is a wrap up of some of the better known services and what I found when trying to export my data.

Blog Hosts

Blogger: Blogger does not have any export functionality. However, you can modify your Blogger template to convert the site itself into an exportable format. However, that does nothing to help move images or videos, just text.
WordPress.com: WordPress.com has the same import/export functionality that stand-alone installs do. Though, once again, it doesn’t help with moving media, this is at least an example of how to do exporting correctly.
LiveJournal: Offers an easy Web export tool as well as downloadable clients to make the process easy. Does not appear to be able to export comments and no word on moving images.

Note: With blog hosts, you can do a great deal of importing and exporting through the RSS feed. However, RSS feeds typically only cover the past ten entries, don’t include comments and don’t help with obtaining media. In some cases it can help, but is not a viable solution for large blogs.

Social Networks

MySpace: Myspace is a member of OpenSocial and allows a high amount of data portability. However, no clear way to export blog entries or photos.
Facebook: As Scoble discovered, Facebook, despite having a robust API, places severe limits on the amount of data that can leave the service and bans users that attempt to take it by force.
LinkedIn: Also a member of OpenSocial, LinkedIn allows you to export your connections into a variety of formats. Another good example of making data portable. However, LinkedIn hosts very little content produced by the user and most exportable data deals with others on the service.

Image Hosts

Flickr: Exporting images from FLickr can easily be done via their API. Though it is not an ideal solution, it is easy enough to work around.
PhotoBucket: Has no documented API and Flock does not support downloading to the hard drive (at least in my tests). Pro users, however, can download their images via FTP and others can order a CD for ten dollars. Sadly, all export options come at a price.
ImageShack: No simple way of retrieving images in bulk. Their tools only put files onto the service, not pull them down.

Video Hosts

All: Pretty much all of the video hosts are in the same position. They do not offer a means to easily download your own videos but hacks exist, especially using the Download Helper Firefox Extension, to get around that obstruction. The video sharing sites do not seem to be hostile toward such downloading. However, there is currently no means to go from a Web video to the original work as originals are destroyed shortly after conversion. It is important to save your original videos after upload.

The Problem

The issue with this limited portability of data is simple. The more you invest into a service, the harder and harder it is to get all of your own content back out.

For example, if you run a blog on a service that does not allow easy extraction, the longer you run that blog, the harder it is to move. When it is just a few entries it is feasible to hand copy/paste the text, but after a few months or years, it grows to be a monumental task.

Similarly, it is easy to save and download a few dozen images by hand, but what happens if you have hundreds, or even thousands, in your account? Should the service close down or a newer, better option come along, you may be stuck.

With paid hosting, you can always download your databases and grab all of your files via FTP. Moving to a new host is never a fun process, but it can be done without losing any data.

However, that is not the case for many of these free services. Many times, you are at their mercy. Unfortunately, as these services play a larger role both on the Web and in our lives, that lock in could be especially dangerous.

The good news is that there are ways to mitigate against this problem and prevent it from being the death of your content.

Mitigation

If you are worried about your content being locked in to a service there are several steps that you can take to prevent that from happening.

Granted, most of this is purely common sense, but it pays to think about these issues before you are setting up a new account or before you delve too deeply into it.

After all, most people don’t think create an exit strategy for an account when they are creating it. As with other things in life, when something is new, most of us are one only thinking about the potential while assuming it will last forever.

Sadly, on the Web, that never seems to be the case.

Conclusions

The idea of a lock-in is nothing new. Companies have been throwing up obstacles to leaving for centuries.

However, one thing that history has shown us is that companies do not lock in users because it is difficult to allow them to leave or burdensome to create features that make transitioning easy, but because it is better for their bottom line if they don’t.

The problem with this is, unlike cell phone contracts that simply hold our plan hostage, Web services are holding our content, something we spent a great deal of time and energy to create, to their whims.

Whether it is family photos, a blog or a collection of witty videos, the content we upload to these services is a part of who we are and the fact that companies would withhold it from us as part of their business model is offensive.

This is especially true since our uploading of content is exactly what makes their business model possible in the first place. Though these sites are a symbiotic relationship where we receive a free service and they get content to advertise against, one has to wonder about any partnership where one half tries to trap the other.

To be fair, none of these sites use technology to actively prevent you from moving your content elsewhere. They all leave open the possibility of hand copying/saving and don’t prevent you from doing that.

However, without automated tools to speed the process up, doing so is impractical to the point of being impossible. Considering that many of these sites prohibit users from creating their own tools for the purpose, such as what Facebook did, there is no practical way to escape these services.

This can be a big problem for content creators and, in some cases, can actually be a much bigger issue than traditional content theft. This will be something to discuss and follow in the weeks and months to come.

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.

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.

Six Apart was one of the first rock stars of the blogging world. Propelled to fame on the back of its Movable Type blogging platform, it quickly became one of the most recognized names in the blogging world.

Though Movable Type has largely been replaced by newer blogging applications, including WordPress, Six Apart has remained very active in the blogging world, not only offering Typepad, a popular blogging service, but also purchasing several other blogging comapnies, including LiveJournal and Rojo.

However, some of these subsidaries have begun engaging in practices that many bloggers consider unethical. One of the sites under Six Apart’s control even engages in behavior akin to Bitacle.

This has left some to wonder why Six Apart, a company largely respected in the Blogging world, has begun to play fast and loose with RSS feeds and copyrighted content. Worse still, why have they begun using tactics largely reserved for spam bloggers?

Sadly, the answers are not very clear.

LiveJournal Syndication

The least worrisome of Six Apart’s scraping activities revolves around their LiveJournal service. There, paid members can take advantage of their “Syndication” feature. It allows users to select an RSS feed and LiveJournal then creates a specialized page for the feed. The feed can then be added as a “friend”, the same as if it were an actual LiveJournal member, and can appear in friend lists.

The Syndication feature is worrisome because it creates an “account” with duplicate content from the feed. The site displays the entire contents of the feed (see sample using Neil Gaiman’s Journal) and allows users to post comments without returning to the original site.

However, with the LiveJournal Syndication service, attribution is very clear and all synidcated accounts are on a separate subdomain (syndicated.livejournal.com). Also, the LiveJournal team has, historically, been very responsive about removing feeds that their owners don’t want to be scraped. Furthermore, results from the Syndication service do not appear in Google eliminating most of the major concers one has with scraping.

Still, many bloggers are likely to be concerned that a duplicate of their blog exists, that users can and do comment to it and that LiveJournal users no longer need to subscribde to the feed directly or visit their site.

Rojo Front Page

When Six Apart aquired RSS reader Rojo in September 2006, it also aquired some of Rojo’s bad habits.

Rojo’s home page functions almost exactly like a rapidly-updating spam blog. It features the full content of the most popular feed items of the day, all next to Google Adsense ads (see screenshot above). The site is then further sub-divided into new categories, including “politics” “Web 2.0″, etc., it is also possible to view the original feed on Rojo without visiting the original site (see PTs feed on Rojo) and those feeds are also surrounded by ads.

Attribution on Rojo is prominent and the headlines do link back to the original story. However a “Rojolink” feature encourages others to use the Rojo permalink for the article rather than link to the original site.

At the very least, Jason Calacanis will likely be upset by this. He has repeatedly stated that he will not allow his full feeds to be placed next to ads, something that Rojo does.

Though most people expect RSS readers to make money off of other people’s content, generally it is also expected that they will add value to the feed by making it easier for people to subscribe. Instead, Rojo has just created a valueless duplicate of the feeds, and surrounded the content with ads.

All The Nooz

Worst of all Six Apart’s properties though is the Rojo-owned site Nooz.com. Nooz is designed to function like Digg for Myspace. Nooz users pick articles from the Web, vote on them and add them to their special Nooz widgets that they they place on their Myspace profiles.

The problem with Nooz, however, is not the widgets but the way the content is obtained. Rather than letting users select their own articles from the Web, like Digg or Reddit, Nooz forces users to select from versions of the blog that it has scraped and reposted on its own site (see Plagiarism Today on Nooz). Once again, as with Rojo itself, Nooz offers “Noozlinks” to encourage people to link to Nooz’s scraped copy, rather than the original.

Though no ads appear on Nooz at this time, Nooz.com is accessible by the search engines, Google estimates that about 150,000 pages have been indexed already. Even worse, all of the contact addresses for Nooz, including the copyright agent, all bounced back.

Nooz is not only scraping and reposting feeds without permission, but it is being irresponsible in doing so. There is no means to ask Nooz to stop reusing the content.

If you don’t like the way Nooz uses your content, quite frankly, you are out of luck at the moment.

A Murmured Outcry

Six Apart is no stranger to blogging, as discussed above, they helped ignite the blogging movement with their software. They are not unfamiliar with the ettiquite of blogging and should realize, at least on some level, that some bloggers will not ba happy to see their feeds scraped and republished on someone else’s site, all the while surrounded by ads.

The reasons Six Apart allows this to continue are dubious at best. Legal scholars have already agreed that there is no implied license with RSS feeds, this use, as long as it is executed without permission, is basically copyright infringement. Unless a CC license or a direct agreements permits the use, what Six Apart is doing in all three cases is, most likely, illegal.

To my knowledge, no one has complained about these three uses for the following reasons. Why is a mystery, but the reasons may include the following:

1. Very few people seem to be affected by the LiveJournal Syndication feature. Since only paid members can take advantage of it, severely limiting the pool, only very large blogs are scraped. Also, LiveJournal has been very cooperative in removing people that don’t want to participate. Furthermore, since the Syndicated blogs are not picked up by search engines, it’s unlikely most bloggers know that they exist.
2. Few bloggers want to upset Rojo since many readers use the feed reader service to subscribe to blogs. Currently, about 5% of all Plagiarsim Today subscribers use Rojo.
3. Nooz seems to have flown under the radar, targeted mostly at Myspace users, generally a separate group from bloggers, and still a relatively new creation (its current incarnation starting some time this year).

No matter the reasons though, these issues are not going away. RSS scraping and reuse issues will likely be around for a very long time, that is, until a licensing scheme emerges that resolves the issue once and for all.

Conclusions

What Six Apart is doing is wrong. Though I have no major issues with their use of my content, save perhaps on Rojo where the use is more commercial (and thus a violation of my Creative Commons License), Six Apart is taking content from thousands of blogs, without permission, and reposting them on various sites. That is copyright infringement and there is little way around that.

Though some might argue that Six Apart’s scraping would qualify for protection under the DMCA (section 512(b)) protection for caching services. However, as discussed earlier, that is not likely the case.

All of Sixapart’s sites modify the content and create permanent files, both violations of the caching provision. It also does not follow accepted practices (as there are no accepted practices for scraping and republishing RSS feeds) and it is not automated, seemingly relying at every step on users to submit the original feed.

It is unlikely, at best, that Six Apart would obtain the same kind of protection that was afforded the Google Cache, especially considering both the commercial nature of the use and the apparent intent of setting up the copy as a substitute for the original. The latter is shown by the new permalinks and location of cached material (placed before the link to the original).

Six Apart desperately needs to look at its policy for reusing others content. In that regard, it should look toward sites such as Digg and Reddit that have built great communities without infringing on copyright.

In short, there’s no reason for a social news site to scrape and repost content like Rojo and Nooz currently do. Links and snippets are perfectly adequate.

When it’s all said and done, Six Apart seems to have nothing to gain by scraping and reposting content as it does. Successful news sites have, for a very long time, worked well with content creators and there seems to be no reason for Six Apart to try and change that, especially in a way that is both legally dubious and likely to cause outrage.

Hopefully they will reevaluate their policies soon and come up with a more fair approach to its sites. In the meantime, they are treading on very thin legal ice and dealing with a very wary public.

Hat tip: Thanks to Cybele of Typetive for the heads up about Nooz.com

Note: During the course of writing this article, which started Thursday, I made several attempts to contact Six Apart by both email and phone. I was able to get in touch with Jane Anderson, Six Apart’s press contact. We scheduled a time for an interview on Monday but, when I called in there was no answer. Subsequent attempts to contact Six Apart via both office phone and cell phone have produced no answer. I will update this article when and if I get further information from them.

Update: I’ve gotten back in touch with Jane Anderson, she is speaking with her counterparts at Six Apart and will be back in touch with me soon. They have scheduled a meeting for tomorrow to discuss these issues. I will report back after I hear from them.