It is Friday again and that means that it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

This week’s a show about site blocking, specifically blocking pirate sites. Not only do we have an update on SOPA and PIPA, but we also have news of The Pirate Bay being blocked in both the Netherlands and Finland. However, once we’re done with that we take another look at the idea of selling “used” music tracks and even a glance at the overall opinion of file sharing in the U.S.

All in all, this is an episode you do not want to miss so start your (legal) downloads!

This week’s stories include:

• Netherlands Moves to Block The Pirate Bay
• Pirate Bay Block in Finland Spawns DDOS Attacks
• Reddit Plans Major SOPA Protest
• Capitol Records Sues ReDigi Over “Used” Audio Files
• NinjaVideo.net Admin Sentenced
• Much, Much More!

You can download the MP3 file here (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.

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

1: Dutch Court Orders Companies To Block Pirate Bay

First off today, a Dutch court has ordered two of the country’s biggest ISPs, Ziggo and XS4ALL, to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The action comes after a judge ruled that the reciprocal nature of Bittorrent makes it so that users can not merely download pirated content but must upload as well. In the Netherlands, downloading unlicensed content is legal but uploading it is not. The lawsuit, which was brought by the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, may be appealed though the ISPs will have to comply with the order as it goes through. BREIN has also said it will be taking similar action against other ISPs in the country.

2: AP, NYTimes, McClatchy, Others Launch NewsRight Online Rights Clearinghouse

Next up today, the AP, New York Times and 26 other news organizations have formed a company named NewsRight to track, monitor and enforce copyright in news-related content. The company, which opened formally last week, is composed of 11 people and is said to be using technology to track news content, understand how it’s being used and, eventually, seek licensing agreements for it. According to a representative for the company, the first year will be spent mostly learning the market for this service with a focus on selling the data its content tracking can generate.

3: Reddit Going Dark for a Day to Protest SOPA Online Censorship Bill

Finally today, the popular social news site Reddit is planning to shut down for a period of 12 hours on January 18 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. The act, which would make it possible for copyright holders to obtain court orders forcing ISPs to block access to “rogue” websites, has been the source of controversy online and the Reddit community has been instrumental in organizing opposition to it. Reddit is also attempting to get Google and other major sites to join them with the blackout.

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.

However, having DMCA notices a matter of public record does create a problem that I had not previously considered. As my good friend and co-host of the Copyright 2.0 Show Patrick O’Keefe found out, it can actually hinder the takedown process.

Because, when the goal is to remove a link to a potentially infringing work, making that link public can only cause more problems down the road.

An Example

In early December, O’Keefe noticed that a copy of his book was being made available for illegal download and was promoted on at least one likely spam blog. The spammer, as part of his promotion effort had also submitted the article to Digg, which not only propelled it toward the top of Google’s results for the book, but risked it reaching the front page.

Patrick took action and filed a DMCA notice with Digg. Since Digg is an “information location tool” as described in the DMCA, Digg was obligated to remove the link under the law (or be held potentially liable for the infringement) and did so.

However, Digg, as is their right, submitted the notice to Chilling Effects and then linked tot he notice when it was posted. The only problem was that the posting on Chilling Effects came with the complete URL for the infringing site. Though it was not a “live” link, one could easily copy and paste it into their browser.

The end result of this was that instead of Digg linking to a page with the book for download, Digg now links to a page on Chilling Effects that has the full URL to the download page. Clearly, this doesn’t achieve the goal of the takedown nor does it do much to discourage spam from appearing on Digg. After all, the spammer is getting traffic from the site, just indirectly.

It’s clear that the system has broken down here, fortunately though, it should be pretty simple to fix.

Simple Solutions

Given Digg’s history with the DMCA, it is understandable that they would be uneasy about responding to notices and want to do everything they can to protect themselves, including using Chilling Effects. As I’ve said earlier, I am very fond of what Chilling Effects is trying to do and wish the site were updated more often.

However, it defeats the purpose of filing a DMCA notice from the search engines if the infringing URL is placed in full in the notice, making it so that the content can be trivially found. I want to encourage Chilling Effects to post notices, hosts to use the site and for them to link to the notices, but not if doing so negates the purpose of filing a takedown.

The solution is fairly simple, since Chilling Effects already redacts large portions of the notices is posts, namely the private information of the filer, it makes sense to also remove all or part of the infringing URL. Though it is an important part of the notice, leaving it in negates the purpose of a section 512(d) takedown (information location tools) by simply redirecting the user to the allegedly infringing site.

This is true with all DMCA notices to social news and search engine sites, including Google.

As long as Chilling Effects posts the full URL, it will be very difficult for copyright holders to correctly apply the DMCA and it will likely hinder many hosts, search engines and news sites from submitting the notices they receive. After all, what is the point of them removing a link and submitting a notice when it will just result in the link being reposted, albeit in a roundabout way.

Simply put, there has to be some middle ground that can display enough information in the URL, without hindering the DMCA process.

Conclusions

I’ve written before about the need for greater DMCA transparency and I think that Chilling Effects can be a large part of the solution. Howver, being part of the solution means observing and reporting on the DMCA process, not hindering it, even by accident.

I certainly don’t feel that Chilling Effects is malicious in this nor do I think they did any serious harm in this case. In the end, O’Keefe was able to get the PDF file removed from the file server it was stored on through another DMCA process, thus ensuring that it couldn’t be downloaded even if the spam blog remained up, which it has.

Though this story has a happy ending, it does highlight a strange problem with the DMCA process when it is move into the public light.

Note: I contacted Wendy Seltzer, the project leader at Chilling Effects on 12/23/08 but have not heard back from her. I will update this post if I receive a response.

The site, according to Klug, was getting about 2,000 visits per day when it was forgotten but is almost certainly doing much better now as it has taken off, attracting countless Twitter Tweets and other social news attention. Librarians and teachers are especially captivated by this site.

But is “The Plagiarism Checker” worth using? Is it as powerful of a tool as some, although not the site itself, have made it to be? The sad answer is no, but it could, with a few simple tweaks, become a much more useful service for teachers and bloggers alike.

How it Works

The basic premise of the minimalist site can be summed up by its instructions:

Cut & paste your students paper or homework assignment into the box below, and click the “check” button. This free plagiarism detector will find plagiarized text in homework and other essays/reports.

In short, you take an essay, article or other lengthy prose work, paste it into a textbox and hit “check”. From there, the site extracts several strings of text, runs them through Google and compiles the result, determining whether plagiarism is probable.

In that regard, the idea is actually very similar to Copyscape, which also uses Google via their API, to process results. However, where Copyscape’s keeps the “magic” hidden from the user, the “Dustball” plagiarism checker includes links to the Google results, encouraging users to click through and research the case for themselves.

That alone is a big part of the problem Webmasters, and many teachers, will have with the service. Where Copyscape, as well as academic tools such as TurnItIn, provide very simple and colorful results, The Plagiarism Checker is a very bare-bones approach, requiring the user to perform a large amount of research on their own.

Still, a bit of research will be welcomed if the service produces great results, unfortunately, it seems that the service performs only lukewarm, at best.

My Tests

To test the service, I decided to run it through a similar battery of tests that I had run Copyscape through and then watched as they improved upon the initial results.

The first test was to run an old poem of mine through the system, one that allegedly has over 300 matches in Google. However, that test was thwarted as The Plagiarism Checker refused to even look at the work, saying that it could not function with such short text strings.

I then shifted gears and started using prose works, the first being one that had 36 matches in Google at the time I did the search. The result was stunning.

Despite the fact Google had reported three dozen matches on test snippets from the work itself, the “Dustball” checker was unable to find anything. To make matters worse, using some of the sample quotes from the test, I was able to locate other copies of the work, such as with the first quote.

Clearly, The Plagiarism Checker was missing results that Google was finding, meaning it was discarding them for whatever reason.

A similar test for another prose work only returned one sentence that was matched against anything and the results for it were all false positives. This work, in Google, has six results.

The only search using the service that seemed to work remotely well was when I ran the Declaration of Independence through it. Every search term, in this test, came back positive.

It appears that text that is not widely distributed around the Web may or may not show up as plagiarized in this work, something that has me very worried as many are starting to rely on this plagiarism checker as their main tool for detecting both copyright infringement and the plagiarism of students.

The Sad Truth

Simply put, any and all of these search results should have come back as being plagiarized. Even if there were no other matches of the content, these works existed on my site and are available through Google there. There is no reason that any of these works should have come back as anything short of 100% plagiarized since this site can not know I was the one submitting them.

For teachers, this is not good news. Is a student plagiarizes material from obscure sources, they are likely to escape detection. Likewise, Webmasters and those that might want to use this tool to track their own content, will likely be disappointed that it doesn’t seem to pick up when the infringement is only a few dozen sites.

This can most likely be fixed through tweaks in the algorithm, but as it sits right now, it doesn’t appear that it has much to offer teachers or Webmasters, especially when Copyscape is relatively effective and cheap to use.

Simply put, at this moment, Copyscape is easier, more effective and faster than The Plagiarism Checker and, at only five cents a search, is affordable too.

However, the best technique still appears to be taking the time to select good phrases from a work and manually searching for those. It returns the most results and seems to work well nearly all of the time.

The Big Picture

My issue with The Plagiarism Checker has less to do with the service itself and more to do with how others have been promoting it. The site itself is actually fairly humble about what it can do, but bloggers and Twitter users have been advertising it as if it were a silver bullet to detect plagiarism. Clearly, that is not the case.

With a few tweaks and fixes to the algorithm, I don’t doubt that this service, much like Copyscape, could become a very powerful tool. However, even if the results were on par with Copyscape, the latter remains faster and easier to use, meaning that there will not be much reason to use the “Dustball” checker.

To make matters worse, most teachers and professors have access to services such as TurnItIn that are far more accurate and covers a much larger breadth of sources than “The Plagiarism Checker”. Considering the ease of us and added features, there is not much that can be gleaned from a Google-only search, that can’t be gleaned from the more automated service (Though Copyscape did top Turnitin in a recent plagiarism detection study).

In short, I don’t see much usefulness for this tool, even if its accuracy improves, and I and more than a little confused as to why so many seem to have promoted it so heavily.

Conclusions

More than anything, this is a case against the reliance on any one plagiarism checking service. Even the best services will let results slip through the cracks. Furthermore, just because a service is popular does not mean that it should be trusted above all.

However, I find it very difficult to fault The Plagiarism Checker for this confusion and these problems. It is clear that the service was as much an experiment as anything, it is promoted humbly and was actually abandoned for approximately six years. It was others, perhaps desperate for some way to more effectively detect plagiarism, that gave it an unjustified reputation.

If anything, this case shows the need and the potential market for such services and illustrates why some companies have made millions in this field. People are eager for a solution and are excited by any promise of one.

Sadly though, this site is not the one people are looking for.

Some, including Eric Berlin, were very opposed to this while still others, including Louis Gray, saw this as a natural evolution.

But while it is clear that bloggers are interested in reading what others have to say about their content and many work to actively encourage comments on their site, it is unclear where that conversation is going to take place in the next few years.

As more RSS readers, including those that do not republish content publicly, offer users the ability to comment to feeds, the dialog is spreading out.

However, this may not be a bad thing entirely, but rather, an opportunity for someone to help solve a very complicated problem.

How Fractured Conversations Hurt

The problem with fractured comments is that, most likely, there is only a finite number of people interested in a specific post.

If a post does well, it draw a dozen commenters. However, while a dozen people talking about a post in one place makes for a robust conversation, if they comment at twelve different places, then they are just twelve people shouting into deep space.

Though more commenting opportunities may actually draw more people to the dialog, since people typically do not like repeating themselves, it is unlikely that the number will offset how fragmented the conversation has become.

For example, even if the conversation with a dozen people draws in three times as many commenters, that will only leave an average of three people per location, hardly a robust dialog.

Worse, a fragmented conversation is much harder for the blog author to follow and participate in. If a conversation takes place on six different sites, the blog author has to check all of them and then, if interested, respond to each of them.

While certainly a possibility, it assumes that the blogger is even aware of all the conversations, something that is unlikely given how large the Web is. The result is that these conversations almost always exclude the actual author of the entry, just because they are unaware of the existence of the exchange.

For bloggers hungry for feedback, this is very frustrating and very worrisome. In many cases, the conversation is the reward for the post and having it taken away, understandably, very upsetting.

The problem, however, is not new and has been battled, quite literally, for centuries.

An Ongoing Issue

The problem of fragmented conversations, however, is almost as old as marketing itself.

If you’ve ever talked about a product with a friend, had a water cooler conversation about a TV show or called someone to talk about a movie, you’ve helped fragment a conversation.

The companies involved, almost certainly, would rather be able to hear what you had to say, both good and bad, but instead have to deal with millions of conversations taking place beyond their ears. This was a problem before the Web and it continues to be one afterward.

Likewise, with blogs, if you’ve written about a site on a message board, told a friend in person about something you read or email someone an interesting link, you’ve fragmented the conversation there as well. The owner of the site would love to know that you think their content is good enough to recommend or bad enough to hate, but they have little to no way of knowing what you said.

Conversations about your site have always been fragmented and this includes both public and private dialogs. Message boards, chat rooms, newsgroups and even Twitter have long offered a means for people to talk about content away from eye of the author.

What is new about these services is not that they are fragmenting the conversation, but that they are codifying the process. Rather than encouraging people to talk about a certain topic or general area of interest, they are encouraging people to talk specifically about your post and to do it away from your site.

To date, this process has not had a major impact on bloggers as the networks involved have not obtained enough traction. For example, even Shyftr, despite all of the attention, only has a few viable conversations taking place.

However, there are at least a few places that both fragment a conversation and have a strong community behind them. However, they are sites that people actively encourage their sites to appear on and many dream about getting attention from.

The Digg and Reddit Problem

Having been the survivor of two Diggs, I can say safely that, in both cases, more comments appeared on Digg than did my own site. The same is true for Slashdot and any other major social news “bumps” I’ve had here.

This is understandable as these sites all have strong communities within them that like to talk among themselves, but they are still the classic example of a fragmented conversation. After all, the people who commented to Digg did not, for the most part, comment here and if I had not followed the conversations there, I never would have been able to read their thoughts.

Yet, even Webmasters that dislike Shyftr for fragmenting the dialog encourage the use of Digg and Reddit on their site. The reason is that these sites provide a great deal of traffic to bloggers. Digg and Reddit both use content from the sites they link responsibly and encourage their readers to visit the site before commenting, often leading to the dreaded Digg Effect.

The problem with sites such as Shyftr is not that they fragment the conversation, but that they fragment the conversation and the audience. By displaying the full feed publicly and offering a means to comment they encourage their members to both read and comment on the feed in one place.

However, it is easy to imagine a situation where a feed reader, such as Google Reader, allows users to comment on a story from within their site and have it displayed only to other subscribers. This would be less of an audience fragmentation, since all of the readers would be tracked and still getting the content from the original source, but would be fragmenting the conversation.

This creates a problem for bloggers. Where Digg and Reddit fragment a conversation in exchange for increased exposure, this would not increase the audience but would still divide the conversation in two. The would hurt both the conversation itself and the original author.

That could, in the long run, hurt the site itself as many blogs thrive in large part to their conversations.

However, for readers, the convenience of commenting where they land is far too tempting. We can and should expect that RSS readers, as well as other kinds of sites, will attempt to fragment the conversation in order to provide a feature to their users and that many of those sites will not raise copyright red flags, like Shyftr did.

Solving the Problem

What we’re left with is a disjunct. Readers, the few who do regularly comment, want to do so in the easiest way possible while bloggers want to be sure that the conversation leads back to their site.

There have been many attempts to fix this problem, services such as Disqus have attempted to take local conversations and make them global. However, the solutions have focused primarily on the commenter, not the blogger, and solving the issue of unifying the many sites the visitor has participated in.

But while that is important, it does little to help the conversations themselves.

This is an area ripe for a technological solution, a means to take a conversation that is happening in multiple places and unify it, preferably on the original site itself.

However, the barriers to this are obvious. Spam would likely be one of the first problems, along with obtaining a broad enough user-base to be viable. But the more long-term threat would be copyright issues involved in porting over one’s comments from one site to another. After all, a commenter owns the rights in his or her comments and, though an implied license is granted to use the work on the site it was posted, it does not cover moving it to another page.

A real solution to this problem would require a very high level of cooperation both technologically and legally. Ensuring that comment licenses allow cross-posting and that different interfaces work together, including with spam protection systems, is a big challenge.

Still, if such a system could be developed and bloggers could retain control over comments posted to their site, including both editorial control over what appears on their site and export control (in the event that a different system came along), it would likely be something that bloggers would jump upon.

After all, it would theoretically mean more comments and a chance to participate in conversations that never would have been available before.

Conclusions

The bitter truth is that, despite how fragmented conversations are on the Web, they are still more unified here than they ever have been in history.

Though we may think we’re sharing our thoughts with just a few readers on an obscure forum, they are almost instantly searchable and a blogger who is looking at their referrers or doing vanity searches has a good chance at finding these conversations.

Furthermore, though hundreds of sites attempt to fragment the conversation, only a few have enough of an audience to do so in a meaningful way. This means that, currently, dialog fragmentation is very predictable for the most part.

The bottom line is that while our conversations may be fragmented, bloggers have far less of a problem than television networks, newspapers and other businesses do. There is a reason why millions are spent every year on market research, it’s because companies want to know what people are thinking and what they are saying.

As bad as we have it, we are the lucky ones in this area. Furthermore, the problem of fragmented conversations is still nowhere near as severe as the problem of audience fragmentation, the problem created by plagiarism and widespread scraping.

Despite that, one does have to hope that a solution can be found. Just imagine the conversations that we can have if we can actually talk across our self-imposed borders and outside of our communities.

On second thought, given what I’ve seen on Usenet, that may not be such a great idea after all…

This has proved to be a boon for small Webmasters and bloggers. Where previously including multimedia on one’s site required a large amount of bandwidth and storage space, those services can now be offloaded and embedded after the fact using custom HTML.

However, it has had a secondary, unforeseen benefit. By making works easy to legitimately embed, it has reduced the amount of plagiarism while helping content creators keep their work at a central location, even as it is being viewed at dozens of sites across the Web.

More than just a great tool for webmasters, embedding has proved to be useful for multimedia content creators as well, providing their work with a high level of exposure while maintaining a resiliency against plagiarism that textual works simply do not enjoy.

Path of Least Resistance

If you found a video and wanted to get it on your site, which of the two following methods would you choose?

1. Extract/Download the video, edit it for size, format and possibly to remove credit/title slides. Then re-upload it to your server, or another service, and embed it into your site.
2. Simply copy a few lines of HTML and drop it into a new post or page.

While both are practical solutions to anyone with a modest amount of computer knowledge, the latter is much easier, requiring only a few seconds of time, while providing consistent and quality results to your viewers.

If there is one thing that is well-understood about plagiarists, it is that they usually take the path of least resistance. They copy articles because it is easier than writing them. They ignore CC licenses because it is easier than following them. They scrape articles with scripts because it is easier and faster than doing it by hand.

Though plagiarists have many motivations, there is always an underlying thread of taking the easy route. If that is the case, than embedding is by far the easiest route of them all.

This is not to say that the people who use YouTube and other embeds are simply lazy plagiarists, but that would-be plagiarists are, in some cases, herded toward a more legitimate route simply by offering a means of copying that is far easier than taking it by force.

It is a novel concept, but one that seems to work at least fairly well.

Benefits to Content Creators

Though offering an image or a video up for embedding might seem to be a step in giving up control of the work, it is actually quite the opposite.

Consider the following:

• When offering an work for embedding, you can still remove it at any time.
• You control the user experience, including how it is displayed.
• All traffic to the work is tracked at the original source, despite appearing on multiple sites.
• Likewise, all advertising revenue from the item still returns to the source.
• It is possible, in most cases, to track what sites display the work and participate in discussions there.

Though many would prefer that all views of the work take place in a set location on their site, it is generally not practical. Once a work reaches a certain popularity, it can be safely assumed that others are going to want to share it on their sites and profiles.

If they lack a legitimate way to do it, many will turn to copyright infringement and possibly even plagiarism, depending on their motivations.

This, in turn, results in a complete loss of control over the work, with multiple copies existing with different names affixed to them. This not only fragments the audience, but can hurt any advertising efforts and destroys any attempt to track viewership.

By giving up the exclusive right to display your work on your own site, you can actually better consolidate your audience in many cases, using the actual media file, not your site, as the touchstone.

The Fly in the Ointment

The problem with this system is that it does not always work.

Images, particularly, are still vulnerable to plagiarism as it is easier in many cases to just save the work and re-upload it. Even though services such as Flickr make it trivial to embed images into other sites, image copying is still rampant.

A recent example of this occurred when a strip from the Webcomic XKCD appeared on college humor, initially without attribution and while bearing the College Humor watermark. The matter drew a great deal of attention and was eventually resolved.

However, even videos are not entirely safe. Many people download and copy online videos to either to move them to their favorite service, such as taking clips from Revver and putting them on YouTube, or to profit from them on their own site.

In that regard, video game site Screwattack has had to repeatedly ask users not to download and post clips to other sites and encourage users to help “police” the matter. This is despite the fact that all Screwattack videos are easily embedded into other sites.

Likewise, Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation video series on the Escapist Magazine has seen a similar problem with people ripping out the video file and uploading it to other sites without permission, removing all of the ads along the way. Once again, the player for Zero Punctuation offers an “embed” feature with every post.

Clearly, while ease of use is a major factor in determining how others will use your content, it is not the only one. Others will continue to be motivated by other elements, including a desire to use their favorite service, a wish to boost their own views, a need to take credit for the work and even simple monetary greed.

These factors may combine, in many cases, to ensure that a work is used inappropriately, no matter how easy it is to legitimately use it.

Conclusions

Clearly, making multimedia works available for embedding is not a cure-all for content theft. However, though hard numbers are not available, it does seem to lessen it and create new opportunities for content creators.

However, the one thing it does beyond any doubt is end one of the pro-copying arguments, that people just want to “share” the work with others.

While that argument is generally a stretch to begin with, when there is a simple and legitimate means to share the work in a way that continues to support the creator, it speaks volumes when it is not followed.

Much like Creative Commons helps to separate the sharers from the plagiarists, embedding has the same effect.

In that regard, it lets you focus your time and energy on fighting the true bad guys, not well-meaning, but misguided, fans.

That, in turn, frees you up to make more content while helping push your work to an even larger audience.

For most, making content available for embedding is a clear win-win.

The article detailed a case involving the site Celebrity Hack, a celebrity gossip blog. The site had one of its articles, entitled “37 Famously Stupid Celebrity Quotes” submitted to Digg only to be buried for unknown reasons. Then, a few weeks later, a lower quality copy was submitted to the site and reached the front page without being buried at all.

It is obvious that, in that case, the traditional notion of social news failed. The usual means of preventing duplicate failed to stop the advancement of the plagiarized story. It would seem that, in that light, there is very little that a site such as Celebrity Hack can do to prevent scraped and plagiarized content from being promoted on social news sites. If the crowd fails to see the duplication and pushes a duplicate article forward, there is little a lone Webmaster or blogger can do.

However, the DMCA may provide the answer to that problem. It gives individuals who have had their content ripped off and posted to social news sites the ability to have those links removed. It can help webmasters mitigate against the damage that such plagiarism can do and even stop thieves before they see any benefit from the stolen work.

Why Digg has a DMCA Policy

The DMCA carves out safe harbor protection for many kinds of online service providers. One of those service providers, found under section 512(d) in Title 17, is what is called an “Information Location Tool”.

The law goes on to define an “information location tool” as one that is:

referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link

That section covers search engines such as Google, directories such as DMOZ and any other site that links to Web pages where infringing material may be found.

The law grants those sites safe harbor, meaning they are not liable for the infringement, so long as they have no knowledge of the infringement, remove access to the material once notified and register a DMCA agent with the United States Copyright Office (USCO).

This is one area where the DMCA has done a great deal to assist the development of the Web. By eliminating most of the gray area that existed before the law was passed, the DMCA made sites like Digg easier to found without the fear of being held liable for linking to infringing material. In short, it removed a great risk factor from starting this kind of site.

However, because of this, social news sites have had to develop copyright policies and work to comply with the DMCA. Most larger social news sites have designated DMCA agents and processes in place to handle complaints of copyright infringement.

Here are just a few examples of that.

Digg

Format: Email
Email Address: abuse at digg dot com
Location of Policy: Item Five, Terms of Use
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: Overall, Digg’s DMCA policy seems very well-rounded. It offers the necessary links to information for filing both a notice and a counter-notice under the DMCA. However, Digg’s contact information is somewhat lacking. Digg handles all DMCA-related matters through their abuse email address, which is normally the best way to handle such matters, but offers no additional contact information including name, phone number, fax number or physical address. Sites that list their DMCA agents with the United States Copyright Office have to include such information. Digg may need to see about expanding their policy to include this information and formally registering with the USCO.

Reddit

Format: Email, Fax, Snail Mail
Email Address: copyright at sbandg dot com
Location of Policy: Item Four, User Agreement
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: Reddit apparently has taken on the services of the NY law firm Sabin, Bermant & Gould to handle their DMCA notices. It seems likely that the policy was written by them as well. The policy is both succinct and thorough, covering all of the required elements of a DMCA notice and offering multiple means of contact to get in touch with the agents. However, the policy completely lacks any mention of a counter-notice, which is relatively unusual. However, that information may be included in the contacts sent to users that have had DMCA notices filed against them.

Slashdot

Format: Email, Snail Mail
Email Address: dmca at ostg dot com
Location of Policy: Item Thirteen, Terms of Use
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: DMCA complaints to Slashdot are handled by their parent company, the Open Source Technology Group. Their policy is very lengthy and covers all of the information needed to both submit a DMCA notice and file a counter-notice. The contact information is complete, though it is unclear if the number listed is a phone or fax number, and the policy itself spells out the steps needed, without referencing other sites. Users unfamiliar with the DMCA will likely find this policy very helpful.

Netscape

Format: Email, Snail Mail
Email Address: See Form
Location of Policy: Own Page
Registered with USCO: Yes
Comments: Netscape’s policy, which is handled by their parent AOL, is probably the most mature out of all of the copyright policies. Not only do they have a well-written policy that provides all of the needed information to file a DMCA notice, they even provide an easy form to submit it. Lacking from their site is any information about filing a counter-notice, once again, information likely included when notifying a user that has been the subject of a DMCA notice, and a fax number for sending in complaints that way. Still, they have the easiest and most robust policy overall and, in my experience with their Web host, have a very respectable reputation for handling infringing material.

Fark

Format: Email?
Email Address: See Form
Location of Policy: None
Registered with USCO: No
Comments: Of all the social networks I looked at, Fark is the only one completely lacking a formal DMCA policy. Though the contact form can be used to ask a “legal question” or report a bad headline, there is no clear place to file an abuse report nor is there an actual policy for receiving DMCA notices on the site. This isn’t the first time Fark’s copyright policy has been questioned, but the first time was easily explained by poor writing and it seems likely that this is also an issue with a poorly-written terms of use. Hopefully, as Fark works on their copyright policy, they will also work on their DMCA policy as well. Otherwise, they risk losing protection under the DMCA safe harbor act.
Update From Fark: I heard back from Drew earlier today, he said that he is going to work with his new attorney on this matter shortly after correcting the current copyright policy, which is now in final draft stage. Hopefully, this matter too will be cleared up easily.

Conclusions

Of all of the DMCA policies I reviewed, Netscape’s procedure was far and away the most robust and the most user-friendly. However, this is understandable as AOL has been a Web host for over a decade and has a lot of experience working with the DMCA. Also, they probably have the largest volume of complaints.

After Netscape, Slashdot and Reddit both have very solid policies, both are registered with the USCO and both provide all of the needed information. They are definitely both excellent role models in this area. Digg is also more than acceptable, however, their lack of registration with the USCO is worrisome since it is a requirement of the DMCA and their safe harbor status may be in jeopardy because of that. However, these are all easy things to fix.

At the bottom, right now, is Fark. Their lack of a formal policy not only puts their safe harbor status at risk, but also, can confuse and hinder anyone reporting links to any infringing material.

However, since I have not worked with any of these companies personally, save AOL, I can not make any judgments on them for the host report, all of this is based purely upon my evaluation of their stated policies and information I have heard from others.

The bottom line, however, is that social news is supposed to be about rewarding people who produce high-quality content. That can’t happen as long as plagiarists are able to steal that content and promote it as their own.

When the crowd fails to catch a thief in time, as will happen sometimes, it is important for a site to have an effective and copyright policy and a strong will to enforce it.

Otherwise, social news sites risk becoming an even darker element of the “echo chamber” that some feel blogs already are.

Note: All of the above networks were contacted for this article and, as of this writing, had not responded. I will update this article should any reply after it is published.

Note 2: This story is in no way related to the HD-DVD story that has consumed Digg over the past 24 hours or so. That story, apparently, did not involve a DMCA notice, but rather a cease and desist letter, and this story was underway well before the HD-DVD controversy began to draw much attention. This was intended to be a follow up to the story mentioned above.

Needless to say, traffic was extremely high yesterday and remains very high today. However, I wanted to welcome all of the new readers of the site and encourage those of you interested in Web-related copyright issues to subscribe to this site’s feed. There will be a lot more coming on these issues, especially as they pertain to social news, very soon.

Second, I would like to thank my host, Media Temple, for keeping this site alive during the storm. I moved to MT after my last host crashed twice under similar burdens, once following a Slashdot, the other following a Digg. MT kept swimming right along, exactly as designed, and hopefully won’t hit me with too much of an overage.

Finally, a thank you also has to go out to everyone who helped with the article, especially Drew Curtis for writing me back so promptly despite his busy schedule.

It was a crazy day yesterday and I’ll be recovering much of the day today. But I am looking forward to returning to my normal schedule this weekend.

About two weeks ago, an article on the site entitled “37 Famously Stupid Celebrity Quotes” was submitted to Digg. The story reached the front page briefly but was buried for unknown reasons.

Yesterday, a much lower-quality scraped version of the same article was submitted to Digg. The article, which has since been removed, was promoted to the front page and not buried, earning over 800 Diggs.

This has lead many, including Muhammad Saleem at Pronet Advertising, to worry that social networking is making the problem of content theft issue worse.

Sadly, Saleem seems to be right. Even as social news sites like Digg are increasing the rewards for creating original and interesting content, they are also rewarding those who steal it.

Content Theft Goes Social

For years Webmasters have been worried about the duplicate content penalty. The fear is that, since search engines place a higher value on unique content and intentionally bump down duplicate pages, that the search engine might bump down a site simply because it is being scraped and reposted elsewhere, even it is taking place without permission.

Though Google has addressed that and said that it should not be a major concern, I have worked with several businesses that have had their marketing material scraped, only to have the plagiarist rank as high or higher they.

Even if there is no “penalty”, scraping is a cheap and fast way for sites to compete for the same keywords with the same strategy and, with good linking such as comment spam, achieve similar or greater results.

But with social networking and social news begins a new problem. If search engines, with their advanced algorithms and overhead view of the Web, have a difficult time telling duplicate content from original material, individual users have at least an equal challenge.

Sadly, it is often a challenge that they fail to meet, especially when they are in a rush to submit an article to their favorite social networking site.

A Ripe Target

With sites like Digg, Slashdot and Reddit capable of directing incredible volumes of traffic to a site (Note: This site has been both Dugg and Slashdotted at varying points), they’ve become very ripe targets for spammers.

The desire for placement on Digg has even generated a few start ups, including the most recent Subvert and Profit. These companies, reviled by most Digg users, let submitters purchase Diggs and pay members for Digging up stories.

The popularity of these social news sites has also attracted spammers who, often times, copy high-quality and legitimate content, post it to their site and then actively promote it on these networks.

Legitimate Webmasters, who passively promote these social networks with badges, links and buttons, often don’t get as much push as the sites created almost exclusively for the networks. Legitimate users of the network, genuinely interested in the content, unwittingly promote the scraped version until it reaches the front page, thus rewarding the plagiarist for his acts.

Sometimes the theft is caught in time, either by an astute reader or the original author. Other times, as with the case in the Celebrity Hack story, the plagiarized work goes straight to the front page and the plagiarist enjoys the traffic and revenue that the site brings in.

The beauty of this approach from the angle of the spammer is that it only takes one story to take off to justify the effort. Much like with spam blogging, many attempts can fail so long as one succeeds. The rewards for success far exceed the penalties for failure.

Reasons for Concern

This type of plagiarism is especially damaging to Webmasters as it can impact them very deeply and very directly.

1. Only the Best Content: Unlike spam bloggers, who scrape indiscriminately, plagiarists targeting social network sites are only interested in the best-quality content. They select articles, copy them by hand and paste them to their own site without attribution or under their own name.
2. A Public Plagiarism: This plagiarism is especially damaging as it takes place in the most public forum on the Web and in the most deceptive way. The plagiarists involved often use hand-crafted sites, not just easily-detected computer-generated sites like spam bloggers, and many viewers may genuinely believe the plagiarized copy to be the original work, even if there is significant evidence to the contrary.
3. Closing The Door: Worse still, it detracts from one of the major incentives to post original, high-quality content on the Web. By taking their content to the social news sites, the original authors lose that ability to get their work to that large audience. It greatly impacts the original author’s ability to use the social news sites to build their reputation and readership.

In short, this type of plagiarism doesn’t just risk replacing the original in the eyes of the SERPS or a few readers, but in the minds of tens of thousands of people and on some of the largest, most popular sites in the world.

Reasons Not To Worry

On the flip side of the coin, there are several reasons why spammers may not be drawn to the social networking sites over the long run.

1. Limited Ad Revenue: Users on social networking sites tend not to promote sites that have many ads and studies have shown that traffic from social networking is much less likely to result in ad clicks than via search engines.
2. Limited Search Engine Benefit: The SEO benefit of getting a page listed on Digg or another social news site is dubious a best. A single link that scrolls off the home page quickly will not carry as much weight as multiple links on more static sites.
3. Higher Costs: Surviving a Digg or Slashdot effect can be difficult, as I have personally found out. Doing so requires either investing more into hosting or setting up shop on services such as Blogspot that have less credibility on the sites.

In short, while these sites can definitely generate a large amount of traffic, they don’t always generate a lot of money for the people they link to. Professional spammers will likely be seeking out other methods that should result in larger checks.

The more likely candidate for this type of plagiarism is a new Webmaster trying to grow his blog or blog network and is very misguided on how to do so. They are frustrating and annoying, but are generally easily stopped once they are spotted.

Simply put, in these cases the shame of being discovered a plagiarist is usually, in and of itself, enough to send the plagiarist into hiding.

What Webmasters Can Do

Despite the drawbacks, it is obvious that the problem is both real and ongoing. Bloggers and Webmasters, especially those that wish to leverage social news sites, need to consider taking a few steps to guard against this.

1. Track Popular Articles: Monitoring and protecting the RSS feed will stop spam bloggers, but not plagiarists who manually select content. You need to track your best articles to ensure they aren’t copied without permission. Consider using Google Alerts to monitor those articles automatically.
2. Monitor the Social News Sites: Sometimes the plagiarized articles can hit the social news sites before Google or even Technorati picks them up. Follow the social news sites in relevant categories, you probably should be regardless, and catch plagiarists early.
3. Report Infringement to the Social News Sites: In addition to the usual steps of getting the works removed from the plagiarist site and, possibly, getting their ad revenue severed, report them to the social news site they submitted to. Most sites will ban domains and sites that host plagiarized content.

Though these steps can not guarantee that a plagiarist will not slip through and get an article of yours on the front page of a social news site, they can help thwart that vast majority of those who might try.

Conclusions

The important thing to remember is that, even with blogs, plagiarism goes well beyond just RSS scraping. As social news sites have bolstered the rewards for hosting and creating content that stands out, many plagiarists will start taking only that content, often bypassing the RSS feed completely.

It’s another concern for Webmasters and bloggers, many of whom spend hours a day creating content only to have it ripped off by others almost immediately. It’s also a concern that is difficult to deal with.

It is also an issue that we will be talking about this more in depth over the next few weeks as it doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon.

In fact, it seems likely that we’ve just now seen the beginning of it.

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.