Eugene Driscoll is a journalist and horror movie-buff turned blogger that runs the Hollywood Chainsaw Blogger site. He made a very common mistake in that he let his domain name, which forwarded on to his blog, expire.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, many webmasters lose their domains. While some are purchased by other webmasters wanting to set up a new site, it is seemingly more common for them to be purchased by domain speculators who turn them into garbage domains with lots of advertising hoping to profit from residual traffic and/or resell it at a higher price.

However, Driscoll’s case was a bit unique. The purchaser of the domain, a Russian using a host in Germany, wasn’t content on merely getting the domain itself and also copied all of Discoll’s site, including all the content and the template, and set up a mirrored version of the blog at the domain.

At first glance, the two sites appeared to be the one and the same but the new domain version had made slight alterations to the layout, such as removing the blogroll and changing the content in the sidebars, mostly to remove unwanted links. The site had also inserted advertising not present in Driscoll’s site, turning it into a for-profit venture.

Though Driscoll’s story has a happy ending, I was able to secure closure of the site via my new DMCA takedown service (though the EDEC was used in this case), it serves as a warning to bloggers and webmasters everywhere, be careful to not let your domains expire as they can be used against you.

The Importance of Domains

Many new blogging services like Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress.com make it easy to integrate a domain into your site even though they really aren’t necessary. Many of these bloggers buy domains for their sites for convenience but get most of their traffic directly to their their username from other users of the service.

This may make it tempting to let those domains lapse when renewal time comes as the lack of traffic and use can make them a bad deal. However, where it might not have a great deal of value to you, it could be very valuable to someone else.

Not only do domains have residual traffic, but they also have residual links. The links that went to the domain don’t disappear and that means both the people who click them and the search engines that see them will continue to visit them. This gives the domain weight.

When most spammers get a hold of such previously used domains, they just upload garbage content and ads in hopes of riding that residual traffic. However, as Driscoll’s case shows, some are getting much more aggressive and are swiping the domain for the purpose of creating a duplicate site.

This is considerably more dangerous than regular spam blogging as the domain was previously associated with the site, is a TLD and has inbound links. This means that search engines, very likely, will give it higher ranking than the source, trusting it over the original.

Though this case is fairly unusual in my experience, most cases of expired domains being bought involve garbage content or wholly different sites, it is easy to see how this problem could grow to be more common.

But even if it doesn’t the fact at least a few spammers are trying it is a clear sign that webmasters need to be extra careful with their domains, even if they aren’t actively relying on them.

Avoiding Trouble

The obvious solution to this problem is to keep up on your domains but this can be difficult even for very careful webmasters. Contact information often gets old, especially when one owns many domains, and reminders to renew often don’t make it to their destination.

The best thing you can do is use one registrar for all of your domain purchases, if possible, and be sure to whitelist your registerar’s domain in your spam filters. This makes it so that you only have one set of contact information to maintain and you know all correspondence from them will not be sent to your spam folder.

If you have to let a domain expire and have some time to plan for it, point the domain away from your sites before it goes belly up and try to get those linking to it to change to the new URL. This will make the domain a less appealing target for spammers. However, if you have enough time to do that, you would likely be better off selling the domain yourself, and setting the terms of the sale while reaping some profit.

But even with every precaution taken, this is a very difficult mistake to avoid and one that many, many bloggers make (including myself at least twice). What’s changed is that, where once it was a fairly minor mistake, especially if the domain wasn’t in active use, now spammers are using it as an opportunity to try and completely replace the original site, using their own domain.

That should give most webmasters at least a brief pause to think and perhaps work on a new domain strategy.

Bottom Line

Sadly, there is no easy way around this one, we will all just have to be more careful with our domains moving forward. This case indicates that at least some spammers are getting more aggressive about buying expired domains and building them into replacement sites for the original.

If you use your domain as your primary URL, you probably don’t need me or anyone else telling you how important it is to hold on to it. However, if you use it as a secondary URL, such as many people on blogging network sites, the danger is less clear.

In the end, if you purchase a domain and connect it with your site, you need to protect it and make a commitment to it. In the wrong hands it could be a very powerful and dangerous tool to replace you and eradicate the position you’ve worked so hard for.

The days in which one can let domains come and go without consequence may very well be coming to an end.

So be careful with your domains and, if you do let one expire, watch it carefully to see what is done with it so you can respond if needed.

Special Thanks: This story was retold with the permission of Driscoll, thank you for letting me share the case to help warn others.

photo credit: lovelihood

For spam bloggers, or sploggers as they are often known, copyright is one of the most daunting challenges. It only takes one or two copyright complaints to bring down a spam blog network by alerting the host, destroying a significant amount of work. Likewise, a few complaints to advertisers can strip a splogger of a large percentage of their income.

Because of this, splogs have been working on finding ways to feign legitimacy. This helps them both stay online longer as hosts are more reluctant to take them down, helps them better establish a rapport with the search engines, their end goal in most cases, and appeal more to human visitors.

They’ve used many tactics to meet this goal including truncating content use to comply with fair use, spinning content so that it is unrecognizable and even skipping on borrowing content at all and simply using automatic content generation.

However, several readers have drawn my attention to a new kind of spam site, one that, according to their site, gets its readers to submit RSS feeds for inclusion and instead tries to hide behind a veil of user-generated content. This idea of crowd-sourcing spam is a relatively new one to me, one that actually closely mirrors YouTube’s “wild west” early days, but is almost certainly going to upset many bloggers who have had their content used without permission.

The Example

Note: All links to the site have been nofollowed. Please visit those links carefully and note that you do so at your own risk. The links are included purely for demonstration purposes.

TheBlogHub is, by all appearances, a very large and prolific spam blog network. It republishes the full RSS feeds from roughly 50,000 sites without truncation and while hotlinking the original source images.

This includes many of the Web’s most popular blogs including TechCrunch (which appears to be out of date), Mashable and Engadget (Also out of date).

However, according to the site, all the RSS feeds are submitted by users of the service. The exact nature of this service is unclear beyond the site’s mission statement of “to provide quick and easy access to relevant blogs and articles for our guests and members, whilst promoting the respective blogs and their authors.”

But the site does very little to actually promote authors. Not only is the full content used, but the site’s robots.txt file encourages search engines to read the content, thus making it a direct competitor with the original articles and there is no link back to the individual posts, just a small link back to the home page at the top of a site’s content.

The site also accepts comments on its service, which has the potential to further fragment the audience and conversation for the blogs involved.

To make matters even worse, though the site does offer a means to request removal of content, you are required to give some form of verification that it is your content. However, to add a feed into the service there appears to be no such need. The site does, however, offer a means to file a DMCA-like notice buried in their terms of service but the email address bounces mail as undeliverable.

Hosted on Web24, the site appears to be based out of Australia and has ties to an Australian company, other sites of which are advertised heavily on the site.

In short, despite the fact that this site proudly proclaims not to be a spam blog network, it at the very least bears all the signs of being as such. If its goal is to truly be a legitimate service, is has many steps that it should take to be more cooperative with the original authors.

Note: An attempt to email the creators of the site via both the listed email address and the address listed to receive DMCA complaints were returned as undeliverable.

Why This is a Problem

If these sites are truly crowdsourcing the locating and addition of RSS feeds, which is up for debate, it can create challenges for content creators whose works are being reused without permission.

First, in some cases, the sites may qualify for safe harbor. If the content is actually provided by the direction of users and they can show they did not profit directly from the infringement, they may be able to claim safe harbor. However, this is heavily muddled by the Grokster ruling which holds companies can be held liable for “inducing” copyright infringement. However, this only applies to the U.S. and the issue becomes further muddled when other nations become involved.

Second, hosts will be much less likely to take down such sites if they seem legitimate. Instead, they will more likely pass on any infringement notices to the owners of the site, allowing them the chance to remove it and continue on with the other content.

Finally, content creators will be more inclined to treat these sites as legitimate and contact the owners directly, if possible, to resolve these matters. Even if the site is intentionally or tacitly encouraging infringement and benefiting from it, copyright holders will treat them as if they were other legitimate hosts.

The problem with all of this, however, is that it seems unlikely to me that users would, willingly, crowdsource a spam blog network. Contributing RSS feeds to a service for “centralization” seems like an unlikely service to attract thousands of visitors. Instead, it seems to me much more likely that these sites merely attempt to give the appearance of legitimacy by feigning as if the content is submitted from 3rd parties.

Bottom Line

Still, I have no way of knowing with any certainty what is going on in this particular case. But whether they are actually receiving the feeds from users who are agreeing to their terms of service or simply pretending, the result is the same, scraped content from many thousands of sites, the majority of which almost certainly never gave permission.

A spam blog is a spam blog. Whether it is created intentionally, through recklessness or even simple mistake, the outcome is the same.

As such, the spam blogs need to be dealt with accordingly. Though contacting the owner might be best in cases where it seems to be a simple mistake, such as with an RSS reader that was accidentally exposed to the broader Web, in other cases it is most likely best to go with the hosts or advertisers if possible.

Though I typically encourage people to try and sort disagreements over copyright face-to-face. However, with spammers it is usually a waste of time. As with the case in this site, two letters seeking comment bounced back, including one to the email address supposedly set up to receive notices of copyright infringement.

If your feed is republished on the above site, for example, and you want it removed. You would likely be better off reaching out to their host, especially since all of their contact addresses no longer work.

I’m a big fan of WordPress and one of the key reasons has been the plugins. There’s a great community of WordPress developers out there that create very powerful plugins that do everything from make your site run faster to keeping the comment spammers at bay.

However, one area that has been a bit of a disappointment has been when it comes to tracking and content protection. Though Copyfeed was a veritable Swiss army knife for RSS tracking and protection, it hasn’t been updated in over a year and doesn’t work with current versions.

Likewise, the Digital Fingerprint plugin has fallen on hard times as well.

WordPress plugins are in a great position to help bloggers track and protect their content. Not only do they have direct access to the server and its files, including the feed, but they operate largely in the administration area, where most WordPress users go for all of their blogging information.

With that in mind, here are four WordPress plugins I have not been able to find but would like to see created. If there are any developers looking for a weekend project, maybe they’ll consider one. Likewise, if I’ve overlooked a plugin, please let me know so I can update this post.

4. Proper Licensing

There seems to be about a thousand WordPress plugins that let you add a Creative Commons License to your site. This seems odd to me as it is pretty trivial to just add the CC license yourself via your themes editor, but if you prefer to use a plugin, that is perfectly fine.

However, there seems to be no plugins that help people license the content correctly, including completing the license. PhotoDropper is an excellent example of correctly licensing content as it goes into the blog, but I want something to help others as they license the content from my site.

Specifically, I’d like a “reuse this article” link to appear on my site and provide the visitor with HTML code that they can use to paste the work into their site. That will include proper attribution and, if appropriate, a link to the CC license. Ideally, I’d like to have this plugin remove images (or at least the option to) so to avoid hotlinking issues.

This could be used with CC licenses, which would be ideal, but could also be used for those who want specific “author boxes” on their reused articles. Either way, the end result would be that, with a click, a copy and a paste, a visitor would be able to republish my articles and complete my license terms.

Note: There is already a plugin for licensing RSS feeds called SourcedFrom that I will be talking about more next week.

3. Non-Repudiation Integration

One of the more difficult problems on the Web is knowing who published something first. Though not likely useful in a court of law, it can be VERY useful in the court of public opinion. To help with that, non-repudiation services such MyFreeCopyright, Numly and Registered Commons have formed to record when a post is saved.

It would be nice if the process of submitting to these services would be automatic so that, when I hit “Publish” the work is automatically uploaded, timestamped and stored. Technically both Numly and Registered Commons have WordPress plugins but both are out of date and Registered Commons was too difficult to ever be practical.

However, the limitation here is likely due to the lack of robust APIs. MyFreeCopyright and SafeCreative, the two leading free services, both lack publicly available APIs at this time (though both say they are working on it).

This may be a situation where someone has to create the service first and the plugin second…

2. FairShare Integration

FairShare is a free service by Attributor that follows your feed and produces a second feed for you to subscribe to that locates copies of your works on the Web. It works very well for bloggers and uses the same matching technology as the main Attributor service, which is used by many major publishers.

Integrating this into WordPress makes a lot of sense. A simple version might just subscribe to the FairShare feed in the admin panel where more advanced ones could look at the content of the entries and prioritize them in some way.

This might be tricky as the FairShare feed is just a regular RSS feed with the content laid out in a table. Also, the feed structure could change at any time as changes are made to the service. Still, given how frequent content reuse is and how much of the potential audience is on other sites, it seems like it could be a worthwhile addition.

1. CopyFeed Replacement

CopyFeed, when it worked, was a powerhouse against RSS feed scraping let you track where your feed was being used and then block the spammers from accessing it. No need to send cease and desist letters or takedown notices unless you wanted the old content removed or the spammer constantly worked to circumvent your blocks.

It required careful use, especially since you could block legitimate visitors as well, but it was a powerful plugin that was great for those who did not use FeedBurner. However, it doesn’t appear to work with current WordPress versions and seems to be dead in its development

That being said, the plugin is GPL, so there may be an opportunity for another developer to revive and fix it.

Bottom Line

Though I don’t expect all or even any of the plugins above to materialize, I hope that by tossing these ideas out a conversation will start about the role such plugins could play in licensing, tracking and protecting content. Maybe then one of these ideas, or an offshoot of them, will catch the eye of a developer who will take it up.

Even just one of these plugins could be a huge asset for bloggers. I’m hoping that someone else will see that and consider at least one to be a worthwhile venture…

You’ve found someone infringing your content and you want them to stop. However, after contacting the infringer directly, they are either unresponsive outright refuse to take any action. You decide that it is time to contact the host but, after performing your due diligence and finding the host of the site, you find yourself lost on how to actually get ahold of the right person.

The problem is compounded by a reluctance on the part of hosts to make this information readily available. Some of it is a desire to discourage false notifications, however, much of it is just a general desire to keep complaints to a minimum while still complying with the various laws. After all, every complaint costs them money both in terms of time and, most likely, lost customers.

The good news is that there are many places that you can look for an email address or other contact information. It is just a matter of knowing where to look.

Step 1: Look on the Site Itself

The first step for finding a DMCA agent to file a notice of copyright infringement is to look on the host’s site itself. Online service providers, as part of the DMCA, are required to post this information on their site and the vast majority do so.

However, this doesn’t mean that it is easily visible. This information is very often heavily buried.

The best place to start is at the bottom of the host’s home page. There look for a “legal” section as it is most likely to have the contact information you need.

Failing that, you can skim through the site’s terms of service and other policies to see if there is any relevant mention of copyright or, if needed, reporting abuse. If that doesn’t work, look at the site’s “contact us” page to see if they included it there. Finally, if that fails, take a look at the site’s privacy policy as it usually comes with an email address aimed at the company’s legal department.

Step 2: The Copyright Office

If you can’t find the DMCA contact information on the host’s site directly, it might be worthwhile to take a few moments to visit the Copyright Office’s directory of designated agents. Though this list is difficult to use (based on image-only PDFs) and tends to be out of date, it is a solid backup in the event you can’t find a DMCA contact on the site itself.

Be sure to check the age on any documents you open and be very careful to open the right file as many companies have very similar names.

Step 3: Ask

If neither of these sources produce any useful information, but you have an address that you know is valid, just wrong for the purpose, such as a “support” address, send an email there and ask where to direct the issue. It might add an extra step to the process but it is very effective when hosts do respond.

However, don’t give bogged down waiting for a reply, some will discard all non-related questions. So, once a day or two has passed, it is time to move on.

Step 4: Check for Another Host

If you’ve gotten this far and haven’t had any luck, it is worthwhile to take a moment and see if there is another host involved that it might be better to contact. For example, some Web hosts lease their servers from a larger company. Depending on how you found your host, you may want to contact the larger company or the smaller one instead.

The way to check for this is simple. Perform your Domain ToolsDomain Tools check a second time, look at the two lines marked “Name Servers” and make a note of the domain. Then proceed to the IP Whois information, as instructed in the video, and compare the two. If there is a discrepency, it could be a sign that there are two hosts involved.

Try the domain that you are not looking at, most likely the domain of the name servers, and repeat steps 1 through 3 to see if you can find contact information for them.

Step 5: The IP Whois Records

If you used Domain Tools to locate the host of the site, you most likely have already looked at the whois information for the IP address. Though the initial purpose behind this was to find out who the host of a site is, or at least who owns the IP address, this record also contains some potentially valuable contact information as well.

Specifically, there will usually be an email account specified to receive abuse complaints. If you can find that account, it’s likely a safe bet that it’s a valid starting point for your contact (though they might not be the last).

Step 6: Guess

If you’ve reached this point, you’re probably at your wits end. If nothing else has produced a valid contact or the other addresses you have written haven’t panned out, the best thing you can do is simply guess. The most common addresses for DMCA-related questions, that I see, are as follows:

• abuse@
• dmca@
• legal@
• copyright@
• dmca-agent@
• support@

Odds are that at least one of those will get through to a human being. Though sending additional messages to webmaster@ and mail@ might not be a bad idea.

However, if you do send an email to all of these addresses, do expect the majority to bounce. The hope is that one or two will get through.

Bottom Line

In the end, finding out who to contact about a DMCA agent takes a bit of sleuthing, especially if I don’t already have the site on my DMCA Contact List. However, if you’ve found the correct host, the hard part has already been done.

All you have do now is keep looking and, hopefully, find the information that you need.

One of the recurring themes on Plagiarism Today has been how difficult it is to send a DMCA notice to Google, especially over their Blogger service. I first wrote on the topic in 2006, and posted a workaround to email a DMCA notice to Google in 2008.

However, sometime very recently, Google updated their Blogger DMCA page, to include a new contact form that automates much of the process.

Since Blogger, Google’s free blog hosting service, has been a strong focus for spam blogs and other kinds of infringers, this is a potentially huge step forward, especially for those who have dealt with misuse by Blogger users. The previous means of emailing a notice to Google involved creating a PDF of the notice, complete with scanned signature, and emailing that in. This form makes it almost instantaneous to send in a complaint to Google.

However, there are some limitations to this form that have to be considered and it is important to use it for the right reasons.

How it Works

The form, though not much to look at, could not be much more clear. It works by having the person filing the complaint fill out a series of blanks and then submit it, much like with any other contact form.

Someone filing a DMCA notice puts in their name (first and last), company, email address, location of original works, description of the original works, infringing URLs, agree to two sworn statements and then date/sign the form. It is very straightforward and ripped pralmost directly from the DMCA itself.

There are only three issues that I see with the form.

1. Offline Works: The form could be a bit difficult to use for works not already on the Web. You are required to list both a location of the work and identify the work. Though both are a requirement of the DMCA, sometimes they are one and the same, for example with books and ISBNs. However, both boxes are required. You may for example list the publisher and ISBN in the location box and the Title in the first, as Google suggests.
2. Layout: I’m having some trouble viewing the form in my browser (Firefox on Mac) as the description text runs over the edge of my monitor and I can’t scroll horizontally. I was able to work around this by doing a “select all” and pasting the text into another application.
3. No Additional Contact Information: Though it’s not specifically required by the DMCA, it is considered a best practice to obtain mail and phone contacts for people filing the notice. The reason is that, should there be a dispute, the person who is the subject of the notice may need that information to appropriately respond.

All in all, while the system has its flaws, it is a vast improvement over the one that existed before. Still, there are some limitations to be wary of.

Limitations and Problems

It is important to remember that the new Blogger DMCA form is exclusively for Blogger and not any other Google services. For example, Picasa, Orkut nor any other Google service offers an online form for filing a DMCA.

In those cases, the method I described above is the easiest way to email a DMCA notice successfully.

Hopefully Google will create other forms to make filing DMCA notices easier for those services. My wager is that they are taking this route to discourage people from filing DMCA notices with Google Search over items hosted on other Google services. Not only is that a waste of time for Google, which likely spends much longer dealing with search DMCA notices than regular ones, but less effective for copyright holders.

I’m hoping this marks the beginning of a change for Google in terms of speed, cooperation and user-friendliness when it comes to matters of copyright infringement.

Bottom Line

It is nice to know that, after literally years of talking and writing about these issues, Google is finally responding. There had been rumors such a system was in the works for some time, but after years of no activity, it seemed that the project had been abandoned.

Though the new form is far from perfect, it is definitely a step in the right direction and a tremendous improvement over the current DMCA regime at Google. If I were doing my DMCA Seven review of Google Blogger today, I would likely say that it is a “B+” rather than its original “D”.

Google has taken a very big step forward and I encourage others to take advantage of this form when reporting abuse on Blogger. If you do, please let me know what your results are as I’ll be eager to hear what others’ experiences are like.

I will post on my own as soon as I have cause to file against Blogger.

Hat Tip to Digital Inspiration

It was an inevitability. As Twitter has grown in popularity, both as a networking and as a promotion tool, it has become an increasingly enticing target for spammers.

To date, most of the Twitter spam has been of the auto-follow variety. A spammer sets up an account, links it with a site they want to promote and the proceeds to follow hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers. Those strangers not only get the follow notification, thus turning it into a form of email spam, but also are forced to click the link to the Twitter account to determine if it is one they want to follow back, thus exposing them to the advertisements.

As frustrating as these accounts can be, for the most part, these spammers have had little interest in creating a legitimate-looking Twitter presence. They typically post only a few tweets, usually filled with links to the destination site, and they attract almost no followers.

However, a new breed of Twitter users seems to be changing that. These users are creating Twitter accounts that aren’t spammers in the traditional sense, but are actually Twitter scrapers. These accounts grab results from Twitter search feeds and republish them.

The question, however, is whether these new bots are legitimate forms of Twitter expression or a new form of spam that needs to be stopped. Also, if it does need to be stopped, how can it be done?

From Haikus to Shut Ups

If you mention the word “Haiku” in your tweet. It is almost certainly going to wind up on the @haikutwaiku account. It doesn’t matter if you’re posting your latest haiku creation, discussing haikus or just using a hashtag with Haiku in it, the account picks it up and, currently, does not attribute the tweet back nor does it indicate that it is a retweet.

Every tweet in the account is, originally, from another user. For example, this tweet on the @haikutwaiku account is actually from @jennar. Likewise, this @haikutwaiku tweet is from @CobWebsStir.

The @haikutwaiku account is both very active, with nearly 200 tweets per day, and relatively popular, with over 700 followers as of this writing.

Twitter users, for the most part, seem to either tolerate or be oblivious to the copying of the @haikutwaiku account. Most of the discussion with the account has been positive. However, a few Twitter users, such as @timtfj, have expressed displeasure.

This isn’t to say that all Twitter scrapers are plagiarizing their tweets. Another scraper, @shutupmeg targets tweets with the keyword “shut up” and give attribution to the tweets, though it uses “(@username)” rather than the “RT @username” format.

However, the response to @shutupmeg has been much more hostile. This may be because the attribution informs more Twitter users that their tweets are being copied or the keyword in question may attract a more hostile kind of Twitter user.

Either way, these are just two of the wide variety of Twitter bots that are scraping search results and republishing them in a new account. It seems likely that the controversy has just begun.

Copyright, Plagiarism and More

The next obvious question is whether or not any of these scrapers can be accused of copyright infringement, as many spam blogs can? As I pointed out during the Tweetbacks controversy, most tweets don’t rise up to the requisite level of creativity needed for copyright protection. As a result, it is likely that these services don’t raise any direct copyright issues.

However, the @haikutwaiku service may be an exception. Since it targets haiku poetry, a format of literature that is both tweetable and has been ruled protected in the past, it is easy to see how one could reach the conclusion that its activity is an infringement, even though there may still be fair use issues.

Beyond the copyright issues, it is unclear what could be done to stop Twitter scrapers if it were so desired. The current terms of use at Twitter make no mention of auto-posting bots, something that would have likely outlawed WordPress plugins and other tools used by bloggers for getting posts into their Twitter stream.

The end result is that these scraper bots may be here to stay and, unless Twitter users are able to motivate Twitter itself to take some kind of special action, it doesn’t seem likely to change.

Conclusions

Though Twitter scraping is likely annoying, especially when it is plagiarized, the nature of Twitter works against resolving these issues through traditional means. Copyright claims on tweets will be dubious and any Twitter rules that would target these bots would likely ensnare other, more accepted uses of the service.

The real question is how will Twitter users react as these bots become more common? Right now the response is rather mixed, some users expressing outrage and blocking the bots in question, others are tolerating or even enjoying their presence.

The real test will be how these bots are accepted after the novelty has worn off and after spammers begin to use them for more devious purposes. Right now the bots are fairly benign, linking only back to themselves or to nothing at all. Once they are used for promotion of sites or products, attitudes will likely change.

In short, we’ve only seen the very beginning of both the Twitter scrapers and the battle over them. Over the next few months, this will likely be a space where things get very interesting, very quick.

Lijit is a popular and well-respected search application for bloggers. Many sites, including this one, use it because it not only drastically improves upon the default WordPress search, but also because it allows searchers to pull content from sites within the blogger’s network, including social network sites and other blogs.

However, a new service of Lijit has been causing some controversy. It’s new content networks service has already been accused of being similar to scraper and spam blogs.

So I decided to take a look and see for myself. However, what I found very worrisome and gave me a great deal of reason to caution bloggers to pause and think before they made the jump to join or create a network on Lijit.

The Big Idea

The idea behind the content networks service is one that should be familiar to bloggers and Webmasters. In these networks, a group of bloggers in a similar subject come together and pool their content into a single site (or as Lijit calls it, “publication”) and, in exchange, content providers get their sites linked in the blogroll of the hub site and have the articles linked back to their source.

In short, content networks are not “networks” so much as “aggregators”. These sites act as a hub for all of the content on the member blogs, in some cases republishing the full content from the RSS feeds.

The theory is that, if member sites link to this hub, visitors will explore the network site, find new content to follow and this will increase readership for all of the blogs involved. It is very similar, in that regard, to other networks and traffic-generating schemes that have been tried over the years, usually without success.

However, the question remains, is this service a spam blog and should bloggers consider signing up?

The Spam Question

Determining whether or not these content networks push the boundaries of spam blogs or scraper blogs is pretty difficult as the definition itself itself is hard to nail down. What we can do is look at how the sites operate, the good and the bad, and make a determination. For this purpose, we will be looking at the network blog for their new Security Blog Network.

The first thing that most will notice is that the network site is scraping the whole content of the RSS feeds, including any footers, such as Feed Flares, that are added. Though other network sites, such as the Cycling Bloggers Network, use truncated feeds it is clear that the service is both capable of and often does use the full content.

The good news is that, once you look past the full content reuse, it is clear that the site does follow many of the content reuse best practices. On the site in question, clicking the headline of any given story will take you to the original story and the “Comments” link also goes to the original page as well. I was unable to find a “permalink” that did not reference back to the original source. Furthermore, all of the links to the original content are “dofollow” links, ensuring that the search engines will pick up the original sites.

On the flip side, images are hotlinked from the original source and the entire site can, and is, easily indexed by the search engines. Currently, the robots.txt file does not ban any search engines from any on the site (though only tag pages seem to be indexed right now as the permalinks point to the original content).

Though it is clear that these network sites could do more to minimize the negative impact they could have on the bloggers that join them, it is also clear that they are not trying to outright rip off the content of hapless Webmasters who sign up.

The end result is that, while I don’t think Lijit is doing something that is outright spammy, I also can’t advise anyone to consider joining one of these networks. Between duplicate content issues, network imbalance and oversaturation of content, it seems likely that many will find more drawbacks than benefits.

Conclusions

I recognize that many will disagree with me when I say that Lijit’s content networks aren’t outright spam. As the Mashable article pointed out, the appearance, presence of unwanted RSS content (such as Feed Flares) and bold advertising blocks seem to further that notion.

Indeed, if I found that one of these sites were scraping my content I would likely assume it was a spam blog and react accordingly. These sites look like spam blogs, scrape content like a spam blogs and will likely rank better than most spam blogs due to the large number of legitimate sites linking to them.

To some, they might not be spam, they are something worse.

However, it is important to remember that these networks are purely opt-in. Sites have to register and agree to let their content be used in this manner. If a blogger doesn’t want their material to appear on one of these sites, all they have to do is not register.

If bloggers want to allow their content to be used by a site that shares many features with a spam blog and provides what would seem to be little hope of an equitable return, this becoming more true the larger the original blog grows, then it is not my place to say no.

Though I would feel better if Lijit would add extra protections to ensure that search engines are not confused, such as mandating partial feeds or blocking the search engines from indexing the site, the end decision is the blogger’s.

Personally, I find that these sites border a little too closely to spam blog behavior for me to seriously consider joining. Unlike other content networks, such as BlogBurst, which add editorial value and a human element to the reuse, Lijit’s service is more about straight scraping and republishing.

However, the service, at this time, doesn’t sour me enough on the Lijit name and product to drop their search tool. I don’t think that Lijit is “evil” or “bad”, but that their new service, while well-intended, has some potentially ugly side effects.

The vast majority of hosts seem to take these issues seriously and pull down any spammy or infringing content quickly. Others seem to ignore any such requests and others reply with polite, but clearly stock, letters saying that they can’t help.

And then there is Joyent.

Joyent takes things to a new level. Not only does the site not help when someone is misusing your content, but they actually support scrapers and defend them in email responses.

Though many hosts have a policy of inaction against infringement, something that is legally dangerous and ethically dubious, none that I have seen have spent the time and energy Joyent’s representative did to protect them and defend them.

What Happened

Sunday, during some of my testing of FairShare, a system officially launched yesterday, I was notified about a site on a .info domain that had used nearly 100% of my recent article about U.S. Copyright Law.

I looked at the site in question and it appeared to either be a spam blog or a misguided aggregator. It was displaying the full content of dozens of entries on one page, using hotlinked images and the only original content was a pair of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons with each article that seemed to do nothing.

Though it linked to Plagiarism Today in the headline, it was not linking to or referencing my CC license nor was it referencing the “Share Alike” attribute. When combined with the hotlinked images, I decided to take action, filing a DMCA notice with their host, Joyent.

However, that was no simple process. Never having encountered this host, I searched their site for information about their DMCA agent. However, all I found was a postal address (Note: Link is to a privacy safe harbor, not copyright safe harbor). I checked for a registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, but found nothing. Since all other abuse requests seemed to be routed through their “Support” account, I emailed it and, since it was a weekend and they had limited support hours listed, I did not expect to hear back.

However, I heard back relatively quickly (within an hour), especially amazing considering it was also Super Bowl Sunday. The letter was from Linda Derezinski, who identified herself as the “Director of Support”. Her letter was short and said in part that:

“That is just a RSS feed aggregation site which is properly identifying as such, it is not taking your work and showing it as theirs…. If you do not wish them to show your RSS feed you of course are able to block them from reading it.”

In short, Derezinski was telling me that it was my responsibility as the provider of the RSS to “block” this site from republishing my feed wholesale on their site. Even though that is impossible with FeedBurner and impractical without knowing more about how the site is obtaining the feed.

I’m used to working with and educating hosts about copyright issues, but never have I had such a strong defense for a spam blogger. I responded back with some basic information about the DMCA and links to information on the law, including the Chilling Effects FAQ.

There was a slightly greater delay in this response but, after about an hour, Derezinski wrote back a second time saying the following:

“You have your site identified as creative commons…. They properly identify that the article is from your site. This is not DMCA issue.”

I wrote back a second time, this go around linking to my article about using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping, which includes a discussion with then-VP Mike Linksvayer. I pointed out that the site did not complete the license, neither linking to the license or mentioning the share-alike element.

That was the last I heard of the matter. As of this writing, the article in question is still up on the page in question (though it may cycle off any time now, after being up for a week) and dozens of other articles from different sources are still up, all with full text and hyperlinked images.

To recap what happened. I filed a DMCA notice in what seemed to be a straightforward scraping case, Joyent first defended the scraper saying that it was my responsibility to block them and then, after I showed that was not the case, then tried to tell me there wasn’t a copyright issue since I had a CC license. Once I showed that the site was in violation of my license, there was nothing but silence.

Needless to say this has me frustrated, but not defeated.

Offering a Defense

In the interest of fairness, I’m going to offer some potential defenses here.

1. Splitting Hairs: I’ll admit openly that the representative was correct that I do have a CC license and the site in question did link back to PT. Though the use was a violation of the license, something I feel very comfortable saying, it is understandable why someone unfamiliar with the details of CC might think that the use was compliant.
2. Questionable Spam Blog: There is room for debate if this site was a spam blog or an aggregator. Though it clearly violates the best practices for aggregation, it does seem to attempt to add some value. This doesn’t make it less of an infringement, for a host that specializes in applications, it might have been seen as a defense.
3. Incorrect Person: Though it was the only email address provided, it is clear that Derezinski is neither familiar with nor accustomed to DMCA complaints. I could have sent the complaint via postal mail (I find it stunning that they don’t even offer a fax) but it is likely that the article would have scrolled off or changed URLs in that time.

I have no doubt in my mind that this is not an appropriate way to handle a copyright complaint (as I said in the title, the worst that I had seen) and that this company violates many of the best practices of the DMCA (Not registering their agent with the USCO, not having an email address, not having a direct copyright policy, etc.) but I do want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I hope that this was a misunderstanding and nothing more.

Conclusions

One of the jobs that I do in my consulting practice is work with hosts on these kinds of issues. I’m often recruited to check for any flaws in their DMCA system and even do test runs of their takedown process. I have a lot of experience in this area.

This is the worst response that I have seen in seven plus years of handling DMCA issues. Though I applaud hosts for looking at DMCA notices and considering copyright issues, this was not a case where the notice was clearly false, the use raised fair use questions or had other common issues that arise with erroneous DMCA notices.

What makes it worse is that the host came down clearly on the side of wholesale RSS scraping and republishing. Meaning that, if you are a spam blogger reading this that engages in RSS scraping, Joyent is likely a natural choice for you as their staff, at least judging from this correspondence, feels that you are doing nothing wrong or illegal.

My hope is that this was just a miscommunication but it has been over 48 hours since my last correspondence with them and no action has been taken on my ticket. If I do not hear more within the next 24 hours, I will look at calling them or filing the notices with Google, provided that the work hasn’t scrolled off or naturally disappeared.

Update

At about 5 PM central time the day this story was posted, I was contacted by Peter Watridge, who said that Derezinski has “escalated” the ticket it to him and he had not been able to get it in a timely matter. He is going to work with the owner of the domain to get the work removed.

Though this is great news and certainly puts Joyent in a better light. The initial response was still not what I would characterize as appropriate. I will update again when/if the content is removed.

The policy change, will remove all of the automated content posting features from free user accounts, which make up the “vast majority” of WPD members, according to Marty Rozmanith, the creator of WPD.

The tools, however, will remain available for all paid members of the service, regardless of the level they choose.

Previously, unpaid members had limited access to some of the content posting tools, including the Yahoo! Answers, article database and RSS posting tool, enabling free members, who were limited to only three blogs, to automatically post content from a variety of sources, typically without permission.

Whether this does anything to stem the vitriol that has been directed at the service remains to be seen, but I can’t see how many will be convinced, especially when there are so many difficult questions to be answered.

WordPressDirect Recap

For those who did not read the previous articles about WPD, the service promotes itself as a “WordPress deployment and maintenance service that helps people especially those with very little technical experience) create a search-optimized WordPress blog.”

In short, it is a one-click install program that not only sets up the software, but also adds a theme, optimizes the permanlinks and makes a handful of other SEO-oriented changes. In that regard, it is much like Fantastico, but with added features to help get the blog started.

However, WordPressDirect stepped into controversy with its add-on tools, which allow users to automatically update the blogs they create using content from a variety of sources including RSS feeds, online article databases and more.

This caused many, especially on the Mashable article, to accuse the site of being a spam service. In that regard, it does share many traits, especially when you look at how the tools work and where they pull their content from.

WordPressDirect attempted to defend itself against the accusations, blaming much of the problem on their marketing, but the attempts to make peace fell on deaf ears for the most part. This, in turn, led to the recent changes they just announced.

Fixing the Problem?

Most likely, these changes are going to do little to nothing to placate the mob that has formed around WordPressDirect. Though the changes mean that the 9000+ free members of the site will no longer have the ability to automatically scrape and repost content, it says nothing about the paid members. The limitations on free accounts, including just three blogs per user, effectively meant that no one could actually be a master spammer with a free account (unless they spammed WPD and set up thousands of accounts).

To many, including myself, this sounds like a very shrewd maneuver. Though it removes most of the users from the ability to do spam-like things, it does not affect the paid ones and the email contained several pitches for the paid packages. It seems not like an attempt to shed the spam-related but to profit from it.

This move does not remove these tools from the power users nor does it impact their bottom line in any meaningful way, other than perhaps adding a few new paid members.

WPD, as a service, is walking a very thin line. It is trying to proclaim itself to not be a spam tool while offering many of the exact same features that are found in spam applications. Though, as I said in my Blog Herald article, it would make a very poor spamming program, it is completely foreseeable and almost certain that users, likely even most users, would use it for that purpose.

Furthermore, issues such as the trademark concerns over the use of the WordPress name, the lack of attribution of copied works, etc. remain unaddressed. Though it is a good step, it seems to be one either too small or in an unrelated direction.

Conclusions

Shortly after my Blog Herald article was released, WPD sent out an email to all members saying that it was “most balanced article” he could find.

Though I try to balanced with all of my coverage, I can not hide the fact that WordPressDirect has me very uneasy and nervous. The service has far too much use for evil and, even though I don’t know if its creators built the service with such intentions, that is the use that instantly springs to mind for myself and many others.

The problem is that a service such as what WPD proclaims to be, a WordPress installation aid that auto-optimizes the blog, could be very useful. I could even see someone such as myself using it rather than keeping a WordPress checklist for every new blog I install (I routinely get recruited to help with WP installations).

But as useful as that could be, the service, is too hot to touch right now and I seriously doubt that is going to change with these recent revisions to their policies. Though I am going to keep an eye open on the marketing changes they mentioned, I don’t see WPD becoming any less of a tainted name anytime soon.

To repair its name, WPD is going to have to make sacrifices that may hurt its business. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be what they are doing right now.

The results were stunning. According their report, on average the sites that they studied had 140% more views of their content on other sites than the original. This meant that well over half of all views of the content took place on sites other than the creator’s and were unavailable for either monetization or, in many cases, attribution.

Though the results are interesting, they likely are not at all surprising to many who deal with copyright and plagiarism issues on the Web. With human copying, RSS aggregation (both good and bad) and other republication as common as it is, many had already suspected that the audience of a content was much larger off the site than on it. Attributor is simply one of the first to conduct a study that shows it.

However, there are several elements of the study that are interesting beyond the initial findings and may offer clues as to what Webmasters are most at risk of having their content misused.

How it Was Done

According to the report (PDF), they analyzed 100 publishers from the Compete Top 1000, first discarding their existing customers and sites with partial feeds, and added some publishers into the list on top of that to ensure a good mix of different topics.

They then ran the sites through the content matching service and analyzed all of the copies that had higher than a 50% match and more than 125 words the same. After removing known licensees, they looked at the sites that had information on and used traffic estimates from Compete to get an approximate idea of how large the viewership was on these match sites.

After that, they then broke down the results by broad category to see which kinds of publishers had the largest “Audience Multiplier”, meaning viewership of their content on other sites.

The results were that, on average, the publishers tested had nearly 60% of their content viewership on other sites. This leads to missed opportunities both for linkbuilding and for monetization as well as possible causes for removal requests.

This obviously will be of great interest to many Web publishers, who are looking for ways to maximize their audience in the face of an economic slow down, but may not come as a surprise to those that have studied these issues.

However, other findings of the study are potentially even more useful to Webmasters, especially those in high-risk fields.

High-Risk Topics

The study, in addition to looking at publishers in general, broke down their results by content category and the results there were staggering.

Of the sites listed, automotive sites fared the worst. For them, they had nearly seven times the audience on other sites than they did on their own. Travel sites also had a high multiplier, over five times the amount and movie reviews had just under five.

In each of the cases above, the sites have audiences on other parts of the Web that easily dwarf their own traffic, meaning they are experiencing the highest level of unlicensed copying and the sites that are copying them have the highest amount traffic levels.

The topics that fared best were politics and health, both of which had barely over one. However, in both cases, the audience is still larger on the rest of the Web, only in these cases it is by a very small margin.

Why there is such a wide divide between the different topics is very difficult to say. Without the full statistics, which were not available in the report, it could be due to a variety of reasons. Though it seems unlikely that one site would be scraped and republished significantly less than another, especially since nearly all of the topics have a strong spammer following, it could be a sign that copying and pasting has had a higher degree of success in certain categories.

For example, with political sites, most people visit the one or two sites that they trust rather than performing blind searches. However, when automotive problems arise, people tend to put queries into Google and trust the search results. Even though both sites likely have many copies of their content, one is able to rely on their brand loyalty to keep much of their audience close by.

However, this is only a guess, but it is clear that it is time to think about the sites in danger slightly differently. Technology and health were two categories with very low multipliers, though they both have a very high tendency to attract spammers.

Some Caveats

It is worth noting that the study, while useful, should not be considered scientifically valid. The sampling size is too small and the traffic statistics, though likely about as good as possible, leaves room for error.

It is very difficult to imagine a more thorough study being performed without the backing of a major university, but any study in this area is likely to face similar challenges and limitations.

The other element is that this study focuses on large publishers and not regular bloggers. Whether this means that bloggers would have a much higher audience multiplier due to their smaller initial audience or a smaller one due to less copying and scraping remains to be seen.

Though, likely, the results on the different categories of content and their relative risk may transfer well to smaller publishers, a separate study would likely be needed for smaller bloggers to see how their audience compares.

Still, the purpose of the study is not to necessarily achieve these goals, but to illustrate the possibility of a much larger audience outside of the original site. This is something many have suspected but, to my knowledge, this is the first study to attempt to discuss the issue.

Conclusions

The bottom line is simple, most likely the audience for your content is much larger off your site than it is on it. What you do about that is completely up to you. Whether you attempt to monetize it, turn it into promotion or request removal of it (or a combination of all three) is up to the individual author and the course they want to take.

No matter what though, it is clear that this audience and its potential (both for harm and for good) is too big to ignore and it is important to start tracking and understanding what is going on. Whether it is through a professional service such as Attributor, one targeted at individuals such as Copyscape or even simple Google searches, the time to understand these uses is now.

What the Attributor study illustrates, more than anything, is the need for an even deeper understanding of how this copying takes place, what it means for publishers and what strategies could they use to maximize their benefit from it.

This is an area ripe for exploration moving forward and one that will require a great deal of creativity and work.

Disclosure: I work as a consultant for Attributor.