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

1: Copyright Owners Win Broader Rights for Works Made Abroad

First off today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that copyright holders have the right to restrict import of copyrighted works produced and legally purchased in other countries. The court, ruling in the case of John Wiley & Sons Inc v. Supap Kirtsaeng d/b/a Bluechristine99 centers around Kirtsaeng importing cheap foreign copies of John Wiley & Sons textbooks for resale in the U.S. The court ruled that copyright holders have the right to restrict such imports, despite the right of first sale which grants purchasers the right to do largely anything they resell a legally purchased copy of a work.

2: BBC Caught in Twitter Copyright Row

Next up today, the BBC has found itself in a copyright spat over images posted on Twitter. After a blogger called out the British news organization over its use of copyrighted images of the London riots, BBC responding saying, in part, “Twitter is a social network platform which is available to most people who have a computer and therefore any content on it is not subject to the same copyright laws as it is already in the public domain.” BBC later recanted that statement saying it is factually inaccurate and not a reflection of their policies. However, they did admit to sometimes reprinting images before clearance when there isn’t time and to attributing them to “Twitter” or any other source when the photographer can’t be identified. The case mirrors others in the country, including one with the Daily Mail, that have involved news media taking photos from Twitter for reuse.

3: Judge rejects copyright suit against Stephen King

Finally today, author Rod Marquardt has lost his case against Stephen King and his publisher. Marquardt had accused King of plagiarizing his 2002 book “Keller’s Den” when creating the bestselling “Duma Key”. The judge tossed the case saying that Marquardt had failed to prove substantial similarity between the two works. Marquardt claims to have sent a copy of his book to King’s publisher in hopes of getting a blurb but the publisher says the book was returned.

Suggestions

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

Want the Full Story?

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

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

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

1: German Rights Holders Go After 300,000 P2P Users Per Month

First off today, as controversial as mass file sharing lawsuits are in the U.S., commonly called “speculative invoicing” due to the nature of such lawsuits to send quick settlement offers to plaintiffs, it seems Germany has gone well above and beyond what has been happening here. According to the country’s Internet industry association, ECO, ISPs in the country have turned over subscriber information some 300,000 times per month. This is more than the total of all such lawsuits filed in the U.S. combined. The increase in speed is due in part to a change in German law that no longer requires copyright holders to file a lawsuit to obtain information, instead just receive a court order to get the information. Most who have their identity turned over to copyright holders are asked to pay between €300 to €1200 ($430 to $1720 USD) for each unlawfully shared file.

2: Judge Approves Settlement in Music Royalties Class Action

Next up today, in Canada a judge has approved a $50 million settlement between the four major record labels and artists over the “pending list” claims. According to the lawsuit, the labels would often, especially when building compilation CDs, place artist songs on a “pending list” meaning that no payment was made yet but would be later. Those claims were often never paid, thus prompting the class action lawsuit. The settlement, where the labels admitted no liability, was held up due to a dispute over the estate over the lead plaintiff. However, that was resolved by simply substituting the lead plaintiff, allowing the case to go forward.

3: That Famous Space Shuttle Photo: When is Sharing Stealing?

Finally today, when Stefanie Gordon took that now-famous photo of the shuttle Endeavour piercing the clouds after liftoff, she didn’t realize the impact it would have. But while she’s collected license fees from five different news outlets and others asked permission, most that have shared the image have not licensed it in any way. But while Gordon herself says she’s happy to have the image copied and doesn’t mind the use, it’s raised questions about the role of media outlets when using images and other copyrighted content from social media. Though the laws are straightforward, they are muddled by TOSes applied by third parties and the fact amateur photographers don’t know how to distribute and control images they take.

Suggestions

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

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

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

Last month I promised that I would do a 30-day experiment with the new micropayment service Flattr to see how much money I made, if any, and how well it worked (or might eventually work) as a business model.

I’ve now crossed the 30-day threshold (a few days late actually) and I’m here with an update.

To recap the idea of the experiment, Flattr is a cross between a social news site and a micropayment donation service. You add funds to your account and “Flattr” content you find interesting. Others do the same for your content. Every month, the amount you have in our account is divided up amongst the works you’ve Flattred and you receive funds from those who have Flattred you. If you get more than you give, you can withdraw the surplus revenue.

I had agreed to test the service for at least a month to see how it went. I added the Flattr button to every article on this site (right next to the Twitter button) and kept track of the stats. Now, a little bit over 30 days later, I’m back with a report.

Outcome

Over the 30 days the experiment ran, I received some 8 Flattrs. Seven of the Flattrs were for the original post and one stray Flattr was for a previous post on Embed Anything. All totaled those eight Flattrs ended up being worth €1.19 in revenue, or about $1.55.

However, since I spent about €5 ($6.50) to set up the account, I actually lost approximately €3.8 ($4.95)over the month using Flattr. In short, I actually went into the hole slightly trying to make Flattr work.

On the other side of the coin, things weren’t much better. Despite my best attempts to find good content to Flattr. Very few sites I read ran the buttons. Only two sites I regularly visit, TechDirt and TorrentFreak, actually use the buttons. I ended up only Flattring two things, one was an article on Torrentfreak and the other was actually a test.

However, I probably would have Flattred a great deal more if I had remembered I was supposed to. Looking back over the month, there were several other stories that may have been worth a Flattr but, without seeing the buttons regularly, I simply forgot to follow up.

With Flattr, unlike tweeting and email linking, are not a part of my daily “sharing” routine, and just didn’t feel natural. It is clearly going to take a few more months of use to become more normal.

Still, the month gave me an idea of what to expect from Flattr and my conclusions are fairly mixed at this time.

Is Flattr Worthwhile?

It’s almost impossible to say anything conclusive about Flattr or the notion of micropayment donations after just one month. Not only is one month not long enough to reach any good conclusions, but the market penetration in the U.S. for Flattr is pretty weak and almost certainly will improve.

Still, it’s hard to say that the results were anything but discouraging.

Though eight Flattrs is not very bad for a service with little penetration in my home country, it only achieved a $1.50 (€1.19) in revenue and, thanks to forced participation of about $3 (€2) there wasn’t much that I could hope to do in terms of earning any money.

The bigger problem though is all the trouble I had with Flattr. I mentioned many of the problems in my first report but the month seemed to be plagued with problems with the service in general. The buttons would disappear from the site for long periods of time, would load very slowly and generally the service didn’t seem to work very well.

Since I couldn’t Flattr my content, I have no idea if these problems were preventing people from participating but it was something I noticed repeatedly when visiting this site.

But despite the problems and the fact I lost money, I’m not ready to write off Flattr just yet.

Speaking for Flattr

My friend Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, who runs the great Copy, Shake and Paste Blog reported to me that Flattr has done very well in Germany, where she is from. There, some sites have made upwards of €500 ($650) per month, not enough to earn a living from, but certainly enough to pay even a very high hosting bill.

This seems to mesh with what I’m seeing on the Flattr site. Most of the articles listed on the site are in German (or at least what appears to be German) and the payment troubles I had when setting up my account were largely due to the site is geared toward visitors from the EU. This presence shouldn’t be a surprise given that the company is based in Sweden, but it might also explain the slowdowns and other problems I experienced.

In short, either a U.S.-based competitor to Flattr or a greater presences here in the states could help me get a great deal more out of the service and make this an experiment well worth running again.

Bottom Line

I haven’t fully decided what I’m going to do with Flattr now. I’ll likely remove it but I may leave it up for another month or two in a bid to continue the experiment. However, if it continues to slow down my site’s loading time and create other problems, it may go away well before that.

In the end, I see the potential for a service like Flattr to work and I am definitely interested in the possibility. I want to give it as fair of a shake as possible but, until it reaches greater penetration into the U.S., it probably won’t be a practical solution for me.

Still, the idea is there and even though my initial results were mixed at best, I am not ready to write it off.

A recent post in the New York Times entitled “Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt” has caused a controversy on the Web. The article, by Brian Stetler, talks about the frustrations of copyright holders, specifically large media companies, with sites such as the Huffington Post and Silicon Valley Insider, that routinely excerpt and repeat information from them with a link back.

The article quotes Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, as saying, “They (the news organizations) think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

This has become a very hot topic in journalism circles in the last few months. Last month, Scott Baradell, a former journalist and executive at Belo Media, wrote that newspapers are running out of time to deal with their “content theft” problem. It has also taken off in blogging/social media circles as well as yesterday, following the NY Times article, Allen Stern on Center Networks wrote an article about about why scraping will only get worse.

These are among dozens of op-eds and blog posts on this topic. However, the question that has been raised by all of them is simple enough, when does copying, even excerpted and attributed, become something that harms content creators and what, if anything, should they do about it?

Answering it, however, is far more difficult than asking it.

The State of the Scraping Web

In Stern’s follow-up, he wrote that there are two types of scrapers “Those who scrape full rss feeds and those who scrape just enough to keep you on their site and keep the conversation there as well.” Though he originally thought the first type was the bad kind and the second was tolerable, he now feels that both kinds “suck”.

If I have noticed any shift or changing scraping over the past three years it has been that there are fewer and fewer “whole feed” scrapers to be found. Though there are still many on the Web, there has been a huge shift to partial feed scraping. When I look through my FairShare feed for this site and other sites I monitor, I see almost no blogs scraping more than a few dozen words.

I have been timid about going after these sites though many are clearly just spam blogs. By using such short excerpts, even though most violate my CC license or the licenses of my friends, they are giving themselves a decent fair use argument and they aren’t hurting either in any meaningful way.

However, there has been a new group of sites that have begun to push the boundaries between scrapers and social news/networking sites. As Stern pointed out, these sites scrape content and then encourage users to to comment, vote and socialize on generally stay on their site rather than visiting the original. I instantly think of SocialMedian and Fav.or.it when I ponder these sites.

Though the two sites above scrape significant portions of the post and even hotlink images, two things that has raised a lot of concern among many bloggers, there have been a new crop of scrapers that take only a small part of the content and add social news features such as voting and commenting. Though these sites may look like Digg or Reddit, it is clear that the content is not user-submitted and the human element only comes in after the fact.

In short, what is happening is scrapers have been shifting their focus, trying to improve their legitimacy both in the eyes of copyright law and in terms of users. With that, some have turned their attention away from blind attempts to game the search engines toward keeping users and building repeat traffic.

This has been a constant headache for me in the past few months and education/outreach attempts have been largely unsuccessful at producing any real change.

The Human Element

The area that Stern only touched on, which was actually the crux of the original New York Times column, is the human aspect of this. Many blogs have built quite a reputation on gathering news from other sources, excerpting and linking to it. Huffington Post, my most accounts, is the poster child for this kind of blogging and has turned it into a very successful business, one with over 20 million pageviews per month according to the article.

Though the Huffington Post has begun to do its own reporting, much of its content is still just excerpts and links to other articles. The question is whether the links it provides back to the content sources is adequate “compensation” for the content used. Many in the news industry feel that these sites are “leeches”, doing nothing to pay for the reporting and writing of an article but building an entire businesses around their use of other’s content even though the only value typically added is the organization and any additional commentary.

Even though most still feel excerpting and linking is, on the whole, a positive force, many news organizations have begun to recoil and are re-raising paywalls and shying away from their open attitude on free content. It is clear that many have reached the conclusion that “free” is not a viable long-term strategy for content that costs money to produce for the Web.

The question though becomes, what about the rest of us? Whether we’re blogging for fun, to promote a business or to earn ad revenue, we still spend hours writing posts and creating new works. Excerpting can affect us too. Good excerpting can drive tons of traffic and visitors, bad excerpting takes it away. Furthermore, many bloggers, including myself with the “3 Count” series, use excerpting alongside with original commentary. We certainly don’t want to harm or detract from those we pull from.

But where is the line drawn and how can anyone tell what side of the fence they are on?

Finding Guidance

As the New York Times article discussed, fair use guidelines in the U.S. are far too ambiguous to be of much use in this area. There are no “hard line” rules with fair use and everything is decided on a case-by-case basis.

While that maximized the flexibility in the law, it also causes headaches when trying to set up simple rules. Attributor, a company I have consulted with, took a stab at setting some “bright line” rules on their blog, suggesting the following three rules:

1. Excerpt must contain a link.
2. Excerpt must use less than 50% of the original content.
3. Excerpt must also use less than 100 words.

Though they admit that the exact numbers are up for debate, they feel that a combination of percentage and word count can be used to compile a good standard.

However, Silicon Valley Insider, one of the blogs mentioned in the New York Times article for its heavy use of excerpting, has taken a more “golden rule” approach to the problem and defined their excerpting policy as simply, “We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us.” Though they open the door for excerpting well outside the boundaries of what Attributor laid out in their rules, they did say that they would work with content creators that feel the blog took too much or did not provide clear enough attribution.

What has become clear is that “fair” truly is in the eye of the beholder, something I strongly agree with in the Silicon Valley Insider post, and that what one blogger considers right another will consider wrong. For example, even though I’ve done everything I can to make the “3 Count” column as fair to the original reporters as possible, including large links, limited quoting and adding original commentary, many will likely think it to be bad form.

As true as it is, it doesn’t help bloggers that seek to reuse content while doing the right thing nor does it help those who’ve had their content use on borderline sites.

Excerpting is one giant gray area and it is getting uglier by the minute.

My Personal Experience

Recently, my article about CC0 took off, receiving a Slashdot and a mention on Ars Technica.

As a result of this, my article has been quoted and excerpted countless time. My FairShare feed has been lit up with quotes from the article over the past few days as it has appeared on many blogs of varying sizes. Nearly all of the uses have involved short quotes, almost always with proper links.

Though I have seen some traffic from those mentions, it certainly has only been a small percentage of visitors to those sites. It has been more of a trickle than a flood from these blogs.

However, this isn’t to say that I think those sites “ripped me off” or did anything wrong. On the contrary, I’m very glad that they liked the article enough to quote it and link to it. I’m very happy with how that article did and caught quite off guard by the attention it received.

On the sites that I visited, it seemed that everyone was doing what was both right and legal. Even if we discarded my CC license and assumed I wanted to stop this kind of behavior, fair use would probably have prevented me from taking any action. Even though I only received a small number of visitors, they are people who never would have found my site otherwise and the fact many visitors didn’t click through is not the fault of those that used the content. The visitors, for whatever reason, were not interested.

To me, proper excerpting is not about bright lines, but about symbiosis, making sure that the creators of the original work gain from your use as much as possible. Though I don’t think I am ready to accept the Silicon Valley Insider’s “golden rule” approach to the process, laws and feelings other than your own still have to be considered, I’m not in favor of bright line rules, such as Attributor’s either. Though the latter can be useful as loose guidelines, the type of thing editors would send to their reporters, but not as an absolute rule.

The reason excerpting doesn’t work as well as we would like is because visitors routinely don’t follow through to the source. Even the best use of an excerpt will only pass along a small percentage of visitors to the original story. Though there are exceptions to that rule, such as sites like Digg and Reddit (these are sites where the “easiest” path is to the original site), most of the time visitors don’t click through, it’s that simple.

As surfers, we are all guilty of that, we’ve all read a post with an excerpt and moving on without checking out the source. We probably do it hundreds of times a day without realizing it. First off, it is infeasible from a time standpoint, second, sometimes the excerpt is all we need or want.

That’s understandable, and it explains why even proper excerpting can feel like a very unbalanced relationship.

Bottom Line

If you’re a blogger or are otherwise posting content on the Web, you are automatically involved in three different ways. First, as someone who is going to have their work turned into excerpts, as someone who is going to use other people’s work, either as quotes or as research, and as a visitor reading excerpted content and deciding whether or not to click through.

Though bright line rules can provide some guidance, the only solution that is going to work is respect. Whenever we do any of these things, we have to show respect to the others involved. We have to work when using other people’s content to attribute correctly and ensure they gain from the use, we have to be respectful of other’s rights to use our content within some limited capacity and, as we surf the Web and share links, we have to work to ensure we find reference original sources or at least sites with original commentary.

Are mistakes going to be made? Yes. Are some people going to go too far and need to be called on it? Yes. But if we keep it in our minds that the people who do the research, write the articles and create the content deserve the lion’s share of the reward and let that guide our actions, for the most part we’ll be ok.

Though big content creators like newspapers and magazines are going to have to hammer out business strategies to keep their doors open as they transition to the Web, bloggers and smaller content creators have a different, albeit similar, set of concerns.

In the end, we all have to work together. The difference between the good guys and the spammers is that the latter doesn’t care if the creator gets any of their due. If they work within the law, it is only because it is easier, not because it is the right thing to do. Good neighbors on the Web consider these issues and, though they might reach conflicting conclusions, at least try to offer support back to creators.

We should focus as much on the true bad guys of the Web, they are the ones doing by far the most harm and, while this conversation is important to have for many reasons, it can’t be a distraction either.

There are plenty of real scumbags on the Web to fight.

This announcement comes just over a month after Mashable discovered an author at the site plagiarizing their content, an incident covered here in episode 35 of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

This move represents a major step on the part of Associated Content to prevent plagiarism by its members and another major client for Attributor, which previously signed both the AP and Reuters as clients.

This will be a major test for both services. Associated Content, which pays money to submitters at the site, will have to decide how to respond to potential cases of plagiarism. This will have to include both incidents involving its submitters as well those involving others on the Web. Attributor, in turn, will see how well their technology detects duplicated content in a very fast-paced setting and in a manner it might not have been originally designed for.

It is unclear at this time if Associated Content will be using Attributor’s image matching service in addition to its text matching tools.

While Associated Content has always utilized human editors to help with quality control at the site, it is clear that, with so much content being posted, automation is going to be critical in effectively filtering out questionable works. Attributor seems to be rapidly positioning itself as a leader in this area and this latest deal only furthers that stance.

Hopefully this partnership will help avoid future embarrassing incidents for Associated Content and let them move past these issues.

Disclosure: I am a consultant for Attributor.

Online social media, like socialized forms of media before it, has at its core the concept of communal recreation. Lessig called it The Remix Culture. What ever you label it, its a focus on derivative works.

In urban legends, gossip and oral tradition, each time the story is retold it is remixed with frameworks and concepts already possessed by the teller. Verbatim repetition is very rare.

Online the media and the tools have changed but the idea remains the same, each remixer is applying their own frameworks and concepts to a new bit of media.

Copyright laws do not understand modern derivative culture because they differ from traditional forms in the size of their potential reach and distribution.

The music industry is one easy example after another. The Grey Album for instance. And there’s probably a new example of this every day on youtube.

It is impossible to fight the current of derivative culture, but it is possible to take advantage of it.

Marketers can and should take advantage of this phenomenon by encouraging users to remix pieces of brand content (and perhaps even giving them the tools to do it and share). Danger lies here, as Chevy learned with their Make Your Own Tahoe Commercial, but there is also a lot of reward to be had like everytime Stephen Colbert asks his users to remix some video of him.

A content producer will benefit himself greatly (And probably avoid unwanted content reuse) if he or she allows some of his content to be remixed (and again, encourages or facilitates the process and sharing) under a Creative Commons license. This trade of a little bit of media for increased exposure will ultimately increase the value of that producer’s work, not diminish it.

Dan Zarrella is a social media marketing consultant and if you liked this post you can read his blog, follow him on twitter, or vote for him for Best Social Media Marketing Blog in the Search Engine Journal Search Blog Awards.

If you are interested in writing a guest column for this blog, please contact me via email.

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.