This weekend saw dueling announcements that painted a sharp contrast about the future of RSS. First, the big news from a slow weekend. was that Ask.com is shuttering it’s Bloglines Reader. Once one of the most popular RSS readers, Bloglines has maintained a strong following but has largely taken a backseat to Google Reader as a Web-based RSS reader.

Still, its closure comes as surprise and is being viewed as a sign that RSS is about to meet its maker.

However, a separate announcement came from Automattic, which has added a new RSS-based subscription feature to its WordPress.com offering. The idea is to make RSS usable and approachable to people who aren’t as tech savvy as your average RSS user and compile RSS feeds into a Facebook-like news stream.

What does this mean for RSS as one Internet company enters the field and another makes an exit? There’s no clear answers but one thing is certain, content creators need to pay close attention.

A Changing Relationship

Bloggers and other content creators have always had a love/hate relationship with RSS. On one hand, it has been a powerful and compelling way to engage and stay in contact with readers. Everything from RSS readers to RSS-to-email services have kept readers connected and reading more content.

On the other hand, RSS has been accused by some of robbing sites of page views, a notion FeedBurner disputes, and has opened the door to RSS scraping by spam bloggers and other garbage sites.

However, RSS adoption never really took off. In 2008, RSS adoption was at 11% and it largely peaked there. The years since have seen widespread growth in social networking, including Facebook and Twitter, but limited growth in RSS use.

This is a story I’ve seen first hand here at Plagiarism Today. My RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, have been flat (though FeedBurner stats have not been very reliable) even though I’ve seen growth in pageviews, Facebook and Twitter subscriptions. Though RSS is still a major way to access this site’s content, now more people view the site on Twitter and Facebook than RSS.

Simply put, mainstream users never really understood or made use of RSS, finding it too complicated and hating having a “second inbox”. RSS may never be widely used for its intended function, but that also doesn’t mean that it’s dead, contrary to what TechCrunch may say, just an indication that the function is changing.

Changing Faces

RSS may not be a destination much longer but it is still an important tool and an important means. Feeding Facebook, Twitter and other social news sites requires a standard to distribute the content, something RSS provides.

But as RSS’ relationship with readers change, so it will with content creators. Slowly, it’s possible content creators will abandon public RSS feeds and favor private ones they feed to their various channels. The idea of a partial feed will become less egregious as RSS’s function is pushed to fit into 140 characters and other short status updates.

Where once RSS was viewed as the ideal way to follow a site, it is slowly becoming the way to feed the new ideal ways to follow a site. In short, it’s the tool that enables realtime, not the destination for it.

Looking Forward

Many creators, myself included, have been downplaying RSS on their sites for some time but the question is what will you be doing? Will you be looking at making your RSS private, switching to a truncated feed or staying the same? Will you be shifting focus to other methods for readers to connect or continue with RSS?

I don’t have any firm answers for myself, only what I’ve done in the past (almost without realizing what I was doing), but I can’t see myself ditching RSS completely or truncating my feed. There are still several thousand who read this site via RSS and I have no desire to cut them off or impede their reading.

But it is clear RSS won’t be the way of the future for me, or likely many other bloggers, at least not as a destination.

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.

Today’s Plagiarism Today post is actually on the site of my good friend Lorelle VanFossen. She’s away from her blog for a bit and has asked me to post a few things to keep the blog going until she returns.

Specifically she requested a guide on filling complaints (copyright, spam, etc.) to WordPress.com as there appears to be a great deal of confusion about it. So I’ve written a post clarifying the process and providing links to the relevant policy pages on Automattic’s sites.

The hope is that, anyone who needs to file a terms of service violation regarding a WordPress.com blog should have no trouble knowing where to go to now.

So, without further ado, go check out the post!

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.

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 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.

Step six specifically instructs you to “sign the paper” and step seven only provides two means of sending it in. The first is via postal mail, the second is via fax.

The problem with these steps is that the vast majority of hosts accept, and even encourage, DMCA notices via email. Email is by far faster and easier to send for such complaints and, according to the ESIGN Act, should be able to deliver a perfectly acceptable electronic signature.

However, Google’s limited contact information and requirement of a physical signature seems to turn a digital matter into one that needs pen and paper to resolve. This has caused many to give up on sending notices to Google and just tolerate any misuse that takes place on Google’s servers, including Blogger.

Fortunately, there is a way around this and a means to successfully email your DMCA notices to Google. All one has to do is be a little bit creative.

Step 1: Scan Your Signature

The first step is to get your handwritten signature into your computer some way. This is because Google, even when accepting notices via email, still requires a handwritten signature most of the time.

There are several ways you can get your signature into an image file. First, you can simply sign a sheet of paper and scan it. Second, you can use a program such as Paint and draw your signature (best done with a stylus). Finally, you can take a picture of your signature with a good digital cam.

The end goal is to get your signature in clear black lettering on a white background.

Step 2: Get your DMCA Notice Ready

Next, obtain a copy of a good DMCA notice. If you wish, you can use the stock letters available on this site.

Once you have your notice, paste it into a word Processor that is capable of both importing images and exporting to PDF. You can use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or many other applications for this purpose.

Then simply fill in the needed information as if you were just emailing it out and make sure that all of your information is accurate.

Step 3: Import Your Signature

Once you have the notice in your word processor, scroll down to where the signature goes and import your handwritten signature as an image file into the document.

Take a moment to make sure that it looks right and is ready for export.

Step 4: Export File to PDF

Export the file to a PDF using the best tools available. Though most word processors can do this export directly, if you need to print the file to a PDF you can use a free PDF creator.

Most of the details about the quality of the PDF are unimportant, just make sure that the PDF is clear enough to be read and small enough to be emailed.

Step 5: Email the PDF

Though Google does not advertise their email address on their site, they did file a designation with the U.S. Copyright Office that provides an email for submitting DMCA notices.

You can send the PDF to that email address. Simply include it as an attachment and paste the text of the notice into the email.

There is no word if that email address will work after the designated agent returns to the office.

Conclusions

For most Web hosts, sending a DMCA notice is simply a matter of having a good stock letter, dropping it into an email, filling out the necessary information and then sending it on. It is only Google, to my knowledge, that requires this kind of effort.

However, Google receives such a large number of DMCA notices that it is important to be prepared to work with them. Not only do they host Blogger, which remains one of the most common hosts for spam blogs, but they host Google Groups and other services that could host infringing content.

They are also one of the top advertising networks with Adsense and their policy for reporting infringers using Adsense closely mirrors the one for Blogger. This technique should also work for that.

Most importantly though, they are also the number one search engine in the world and the search DMCA policy also closely mirrors the other two, complete with physical signature requirement and fax/snail mail only filing. This technique should work with it as well.

Until new systems come online to help us report spam and copyright infringement to Google, this is the best technique to file a DMCA notice via email.

It is a bit complicated and convoluted, but it is certainly preferable to the delays of postal mail and the hassle of a fax.

When people find out that their content is being copied without permission, how they seek to handle it is often determined, in part, by whether or not the site is a spam blog.

Where many might be willing to forgive copying by a novice blogger, especially with the promise of a link back, most are not prepared to have their content used so a spammer can trick the search engines and sell questionable items.

This means that, very often, I am forced to make snap judgments about whether a site is a spam blog or not, something that is becoming increasingly difficult as spammers have improved their techniques.

So how does one tell if a blog is a spam blog? The answer is not as simple as it once was but there are still ways one can detect a spammy site.

The Spammer Dilemma

Spammers, over the years, have gotten better and better at making their blogs look human-edited. Though they still can not make their sites appear to be “good” blogs, they, in many cases, can pass off as the efforts of novice bloggers or of non-native English speakers.

This can create quite a problem when approaching a suspected spam blog. Is it a spammer using the default Blogspot template or is it someone new to blogging that doesn’t know how to change the template? Is the strange word choice the result of automated spinning or someone learning English? If the spam blog did its job, it can be difficult to say.

However, most would agree that being heavy-handed with humans who copy, especially those who make some attempt to provide attribution, is counter-productive. Especially when you consider that the person struggling with English may either grow into an important blogger or, worse yet, already be a major figure in their part of the world, it becomes clear why telling humans from machines is important.

But how to do it? There are several different ways, but unfortunately none of them seem to work 100% of the time.So it is important to take all of the methods below into account, look at how spammers beat them, and develop an informed opinion.

PageRank Check

One of my sneakier tricks was to check the site’s PageRank and see if Google had given it either a n/a or a 0. Either would indicate that the site was either very new or had been deemed spam by Google. Either way, it certainly warranted suspicion.

How Spammers Beat It: Tricking Google. This method has become less effective as Google seems to be assigning PageRank to more and more obvious spam blogs. That is a subject for another article.

Turning the Tide: PageRank is still a decent indicator of spamminess, but it is no longer as reliable as it was. It is best to ignore PageRank if you have other reasons to be suspicious of a blog.

“About” Page

Since spammers that use WordPress installs typically spend as little time as possible setting up their blogs, they routinely leave the “About” page, which is created as part of the install, with its default text. Very few human-generated sites have this problem.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have started either deleting or filling in the about page. However, those that fill in the page often use it as an opportunity to keyword stuff, often further tipping their hand as a spam blog.

Turning the Tide: If an about page does not have actual information about the site or the owner, it is very likely spam. Some spammers are starting to include fake information, but few seem to be able to resist the opportunity to keyword stuff and link.

Posting Rate

The goal of a spam blog is to get as much junk content into it as possible, as such, spammers routinely have extremely high posting frequency, often well over 100 posts per day. It would be physically impossible for a human to post so much content without the aid of a machine, creating a dead giveaway that the site is spam.

How Spammers Beat It: Some spammers have begun to show restraint, only having their blogs update a few times per day and at irregular intervals, to more closely mimic a human blogger.

Turning the Tide: The content is more telling than the frequency, unless the posting frequency is outrageous. Consider an extremely high posting volume to be a dead spam giveaway but don’t write off a site because it has a reasonable rate.

Formulaic Posting

We’ve all seen the spam blogs that start out with something like “I saw an interesting post today about…” and then proceeds to inject a few keywords and quote from the scraped article. By themselves, these posts may appear semi-legitimate, especially with trackbacks, but are clearly spam when you look at them in group.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have started to use multiple post templates in the same blog. However, the limited set means that, if this method is chosen, it is still easily detected over the course of about ten posts.

Turning the Tide: Check and see if the posts have the same pattern, are roughly the same length or all contain quoted material. These are all signs of a spam blog.

Ugly Templates

Sometimes the first sign a blog is spam is the template that it is in. If the template is the default WordPress theme or a stock BlogSpot theme without modifications, it’s a likely tip off of spam content.

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers have been getting better about mixing up their themes. Most spam software applications come with a variety of themes that are rotated and, given the ease with which most blogs can be skinned, spam blogs can be amazingly varied.

Turning the Tide: Fortunately, spammer themes still don’t have any elements of hand-crafting. There are very rarely custom images (or contain only very crude ones), the CSS often looks off, the color scheme is often jarring and the elements many times do not fit together correctly. If you see a glaring mistake that would be caught by anyone looking at the site, it is likely spam.

Domain Names

Spam blogs are typically restricted to three types of domains, 1) .us, .info and other strange extensions 2) domains stuffed with keywords (and often hyphens) 3) Free blog hosts (primarily Blogspot still).

How Spammers Beat It: Spammers are participating in the domain aftermarket, snatching up expired domains that have had sites on them previously. This helps them carry both the PageRank of the old site, in some cases, and obtain a more “honest” name. Spammers are also spreading to other free blog services, including little-known ones, as well as social networking sites.

Turning the Tide: If you are unsure about a domain, use Domain Tools to investigate it. Look specifically for false whois information or other irregularities. Still, most spam blogs are hosted on spam domains. Better ones are too expensive for spammers to buy in bulk and are more profitable at auction than as spam tools.

Ad Excess/Spam Blogroll

Many spam blogs earn their money by framing the content in a slew of ads, generally from one of the public advertising networks. If not, then they often times use the blogroll to put out obviously spammy links in hopes of building PageRank and search engine position for those domains.

How Spammers Beat It: The formula is simple, fewer ads, fewer links, more spam blogs. Spammers have begun to show restraint with both their ads and their outbound links but are creating larger and larger spam farms to compensate. Spammers are also turning to alternate sources of revenue, such as Amazon afiiliate IDs, to better hide their activities. Others will mix “good” links with “spam” ones in their blogroll to further hide the nature of the site.

Turning the Tide: One spam link is too many. Hover over the URLs in the Blogroll and check for any that are suspicious or out of place. When checking for ads, look not so much as quantity, but for the appearance that they were simply “stuck in”. Spammers don’t have time to integrate ads with their site usually.

Conclusions

When looking through these elements, any one of these would make me suspicious of a site’s origin, save perhaps if the site were hosted on a free blog host. Two, in turn, would make it a likely spam blog and three or above would make it a virtual lock.

The bottom line is that, while spammers are not making it any easier to spot their handiwork, it can still be detected by a careful eye (or a not-so-careful eye in many cases).

Though the spammer’s survival depends on staying under the radar and fooling humans and search engines alike, the nature of creating tens of thousands of junk blogs means that sacrifices have to be made and the results will have limitations.

By exploiting those weaknesses, we can continue to detect and stop spam and separate the spammers from those who are just getting started.