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This license is for both commercial and non-commercial use.

Please bear in mind that you can do this without asking for permission. Though I appreciate all of you who have written to ask my permission and I understand wanting to be doubly careful when dealing with a site dedicated to plagiarism issues (I know I would be), one of the goals I had with this site was to educate as many people and give out as much information as possible. That is something I believe this license helps me achieve and I wish to encourage the content to be distributed as freely as I can within reason.

The only caveat is that the images that are displayed with the articles are licensed under different terms. Though most are either screen grabs from relevant sites, logos or images from free stock photo sites such as Morguefile and sxc.hu, some are licensed just to Plagiarism Today. So, while the text is available for copying, please use caution with the images. The same is true for comments, which are copyrighted by the people who submitted them.

Bear in mind that I made this choice years ago because I believed it was right for myself and for this content. I don’t believe it is right for all content nor will I use the same license for every work I create. Part of being smart about copyright means looking at your work, your situation and your goals to find the right license for you.

Still, with Plagiarism Today I believe strongly, as I did when I first made the choice years ago, that this is the right move for this site and the goals I have with it.

Plagiarism Today Elsewhere on the Web

Finally, there’s also been some confusion as to where you can get access to Plagiarism Today content elsewhere on the Web, in particular what accounts are used for what purposes.

When it comes to social media, I keep two kinds of accounts, hybrid site/personal ones and strictly site-related ones. The hyrbid ones will include most site news but will also have personal updates from me. Site ones are strictly site-related and will contain no personal tweets or updates.

Here’s where you can find the various accounts:

Hybrid (Personal/Site):

Twitter
Facebook (Subscribe available)
Google+

Site Only

Facebook
Google+

There is no site-only Twitter feed at this time as I’ve had issues in the past with RSS posting. If there’s interest in such an account, I will create it.

All in all, if you want just the site updates, you can add the site-only social media feeds. If you don’t mind my bad jokes and personal postings, you can add any of the hybrid ones.

Hopefully that clears up those two issues and I return you to your regularly scheduled posting on Monday! Have a great weekend!

In the meantime, I wanted to let everyone know that, in addition to my presences on Facebook, Twitter, and this site’s Facebook Page I’m now on Google Plus as well (thanks to Google Apps users being allowed in finally).

So, in the future, I’ll be posting updates there in addition to the other sources. Feel free to follow me there and add me to your circles. I know many of you have begun to prefer Google+ over Facebook and it means a lot to me to have a good presences there as well.

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know. However, the best way to get in touch with me is still via email.

Thank you all for being patient with me this Halloween. For those who are curious, it was a great success as we had over 529 people come through the haunted house and collected a lot of money/canned goods for the Second Harvest Food Bank here in New orleans!

However, times have definitely changed. Last year I wrote about how the role of RSS was changing. By most accounts, the use of feed readers peaked in 2008 at about 11% and has been declining since. The broader public found feed readers too complicated and not useful enough for regular consumption.

But at the same time, RSS usage has grown in very big ways. Currently millios of people are reading RSS feeds without realizing they’re doing so. Countless Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages are being fed via RSS and are serving them much like a feed reader was supposed to, sending people near-instant updates and letting them read all of their content in one place.

This shift is changing what RSS is and means, turning it away from being a means to read a site and into the engine that enables sharing and content discovery.

This, in turn, is impacting how webmasters and bloggers use and interact with RSS and is also shifting the ways in content creators protect their works and how users interact with it.

Here are just five examples of how that is happening right now.

1. Fewer, If Any, RSS Buttons

If you go to TechCrunch, you won’t find a single RSS button on their home page. Since their recent redesign, the RSS link has been moved to the footer, three little letters at the bottom of their site.

Meanwhile, their Facebook “Like” box is prominently displayed in their sidebar and Twitter sharing buttons line the entire site. Webmasters have been steadily downplaying RSS subscription in favor of social networking.

RSS just doesn’t have the “cool” factor any more and it’s been moved to a behind-the-scenes player in content distribution. This is why many webmasters, myself included, have been slowly scaling back RSS subscription efforts in lieu of other, more popular alternatives.

2. Better RSS Control

RSS by its nature has historically been completely open. Anyone could be accessing it. A visitor to an RSS feed could be single user looking at it in Outlook or it could be Google Reader preparing to send it to hundreds of subscribers. This opened the door for scrapers and others who wanted to misuse the content in the feed as everyone had to be let in.

However, the number of distribution channels is dropping. This makes it possible to limit who has access to the feed and only let in permitted clients. Though you’ve always been able to block scrapers, this would change the system from one where everyone has access until they’re booted to one where only the permitted users are let in at all.

This could stop scrapers before they start, or at least force them to pull from other channels to get the content.

3. Greater Tolerance of Truncated Feeds

Five years ago, having a truncated feed was a sure-fire way to turn away potential subscribers. The issue was such a hot-button topic that a petition was circulated around against partial feeds and it gained a bit of traction.

However, with the new subscription channels, people are more used to getting a preview and clicking through. They are more about content discovery than content consumption, making partial feeds roughly as useful as full ones.

4. Loss of Platform Control

While the ability to control access and the ability to greater openness to the use of partial feeds gives webmasters more control, it also comes with drawbacks.

Previously, if a single RSS reader or site using your content did something you didn’t like you could always block them, file a takedown notice or take other action. However, if Facebook decides to display RSS feeds in an in appropriate or controversial way, there’s not much one can do as that is a large percentage of the audience.

The good news is that Facebook and Twitter both don’t integrate RSS directly and, instead, use third party apps to do it. However, that’s no guarantee in and of itself as decisions by these two can impact and even cut off how RSS flows through their systems.

In short, even though you can always switch apps, Facebook and Twitter are still very much in control.

5. Losing Sight of What RSS Even Is

With RSS disappearing from sites and fewer bloggers even using them, it seems likely that even fewer people will be aware of RSS in just a few years’ time. Even those who know of it and use it somewhat now will, with time, probably forget about it as both the name RSS as well as the famous icons will be all-but-meaningless to end users.

This also means that fewer webmasters will be thinking about it and fewer will be weighing the issues and decisions that come with having an RSS feed on your site.

This may, in turn, open the doors for others with less-than-pure intentions to exploit the naivete of webmasters, who are unaware of how they are gaining access to their site’s content.

Bottom Line

All in all, the changing role of RSS is a mixed bag for webmasters and content creators. While it will make it easier to block and reduce the impact of traditional scrapers, the loss of control over the platform and lack of front-of-mind understanding of what RSS is and how it works still opens up some serious vulnerabilities.

However, this is a transition that is happening slowly and will continue to do so for some time. Most likely we still have several more transition years before we truly reach the point with RSS where it is meaningless to users.

That being said, with so many major blog eschewing or downplaying RSS, it may be that the transition is happening much faster than once thought possible. It may simply be that the simplicity and large presence of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are just overpowering to the traditional RSS model and we may be mourning RSS’ demise as a destination sooner rather than later.

Either way though, RSS will live on, behind the scenes, driving social media and marketing for content creators of all stripes. That much is definitely certain.

Basically, in the setup, site A scrapes or otherwise lifts content from site B. However, due to Google’s crawling patterns, site A is spotted first or otherwise has more trust with Google and, as such is treated as the original.

In the video Cutts, who previously said that such a scenario was “highly unlikely”, admitted openly that Google is not perfect and it does make mistakes in this area though it is doing everything it can to avoid them.

However, in addition to offering the typical Google solutions, including DMCA notices and spam reports, Cutts also listed two ways in which webmasters may be able to fight back against this kind of issue. This included “push” services and protocols, such as pubsubhubbub, but also Tweeting a link as soon as it is live.

The reason is that Google is. theoretically at least, constantly monitoring Twitter and the parts of Facebook it can access. Therefore, it’s likely that a link that appears there will be indexed by Google before it is crawled on a scraper or plagiarist site.

This makes plenty of sense because, though a spam or plagiarist site might be a higher PageRank than yours, it most likely won’t have more trust than Twitter and Facebook. As such, those updates will be spotted first and trusted more.

Unfortunately though, while all of this might have been true in April, when the video was made, it’s of much more dubious use now. The reason is that, in July, Google ended it’s real-time relationship with Twitter. As such, not only is Twitter not nearly as immediate with Google as it was, but supposedly the links are now nofollowed, meaning Google isn’t discovering new content from Twitter.

Facebook has similar issues as Twitter, including the nofollowing of links, but also in that much of Facebook is hidden from Google’s prying eyes.

So, while the technology is there and has been used previously to make Twitter a form of non-repudiation service for Google, independently verifying which links are original, it most likely isn’t very useful now. Still, it’s probably best to play it safe and continue as if nothing has changed as there may still be some benefits to tweeting out new content immediately and there certainly isn’t any harm.

In the end, it’s likely that tools like Pubsubhubbub, which push content directly from the site to the interested parties (including Google) that offer the long-term solution. The reason spammers and plagiarists are so easily able to outrank original creators is because of the quirks of a “pull” web. Switching more to a “push” model eliminates that problem.

However, according to Cutts, Google only places a small amount of credibility in such systems right now though it may expand its use of them in the near future. It will be interesting to see what impact they will have on spammers when and if they do.

The case study follows a single tweet put out by user @Haleys_Hell (NSFW Language Warning) on August 7th of this year. The tweet went as follows:

I once had a goldfish that would hump the carpet, but only for about 30 seconds.

The tweet became something of a small sensation, shooting quickly to 100 favorites and earning a lot of retweets. However, not all mentions of the tweet carried with it proper attribution. FunFlood looked at some six days of the tweet’s history, starting on August 12th, and noticed that many of the tweets lacked credit for the joke or gave incorrect attribution.

While this isn’t terribly surprising, what is interesting about it is how the attribution eroded away. On the first few days of tracking, nearly all the tweets were either true retweets or attributed tweets (using RT @ format). However, after a few days, it was the unattributed tweet and the misattributed tweets that were winning out, growing to the point that, on the last day of tracking, there were no correctly attributed tweets at all.

This process was spurred ahead by at least two Twitter power users, one with over 75,000 followers and another a professional NFL player, who both used the tweet without attribution, highlighting the impact just one or two people can have if they reuse a work inappropriately.

In short, a handful of people who reposted the tweet without attribution (for whatever reason, benign or sinister) created a snowball effect that caused the latter tweets to give no credit at all. Since the exact wording of the tweet appears to be original, it’s a pretty interesting case study to watch.

But what fascinates me with this is that Twitter, in many ways, is a microcosm for the rest of the Web, one that moves at a much quicker pace.

It’s not hard to imagine that, instead of a tweet, we were talking about a poem, a blog post or a photograph. As it gets passed around on the Web, attribution sometimes gets left off and, eventually, the new posts are more and more likely to be unattributed or misattributed. This is due to the increasing numbers of poorly-attributed uses of the work.

However, on the larger Web, the process wouldn’t be nearly as quick, at least in most cases, nor would it be nearly as drastic. Due to the short lifespan of tweets, the attributed one probably died off and became irrelevant earlier than almost any other medium.

To be clear, I don’t think all or even much of these attirbution issues are intentional and I’m not sure about calling the post “Tracking a Stolen Tweet” because there are many reasons for attribution to get hacked off, especially on Twitter. That being said, the effect is often the same for creators whether the intent is nefarious or not.

Still, it’s an interesting case study about attribution on the Web and how a single tweet can, over the course of a few days, go from being well-attributed to not being attributed at all.

Strange and surprising, but very believable.

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

1: Copyright Owners Win Broader Rights for Works Made Abroad

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

2: BBC Caught in Twitter Copyright Row

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

3: Judge rejects copyright suit against Stephen King

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

Suggestions

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

Want the Full Story?

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

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

I’ve also filed at least a couple with Twitter, (and can say that they have improved drastically since my first review) but only over avatars and backgrounds. I’ve never filed a DMCA notice over a tweet and, the few times I’ve been asked to, have discouraged others from doing it.

Simply put, filing a DMCA notice over a Tweet doesn’t make sense and when others do it I’m always left scratching my head. There are just better, more practical ways to deal with copyright infringement through and they require no additional effort.

Too Late to the Wrong Target

The problems with filing a takedown over a tweet are legion, but the biggest is that the length of a tweet, 140 characters max, makes it almost impossible for the tweet itself to be infringing. Short of haikus and links to outside sources, the odds of a tweet being infringing (or even qualifying for copyrightability) are slim.

But, even if you’re targeting links within tweets, it probably isn’t a wise idea. Simply put, filing a DMCA notice with Twitter is a waste of time, not because Twitter doesn’t respond effectively, because of the nature of Twitter.

Consider the following:

1. The Tweet Lifecycle: Most tweets have a useful lifespan of a few minutes to, on the high side, an hour. So by the time you see a link and incur the time and expense to file the notice, it’s already off the radar.
2. Wac-A-Mole: Tweets are meant to be retweeted so odds are that anything on Twitter with traction will have other copies of it out there. One would have to file a notice against all of them and, likely, keep monitoring for a while longer to be truly effective.
3. Easily Reposted: If you are able to kill the only copy of a tweet, it only takes a few seconds to repost it. Even if you only spend a minute filing the notice, they can have the tweet back online in a fraction of that time.
4. Little SEO Benefit: Since tweets don’t rank well in Google, there’s little danger of an old tweet appearing in relevant Google results, competing with legitimate offerings.
5. It Can Blow Up Easily: Twitter is known for spreading news fast, filing a DMCA against a tweet, especially if it is at all questionable one, is a great way to experience the Streisand Effect first hand.
6. The Tweet Isn’t the Problem: Most likely, you’re upset not about the content of the tweet, but a link within it. It is much more effective to deal with the target of that link rather than trying to stop every single tweet.

In short, if you file a DMCA notice over a tweet, your notice is going to arrive too late and at the wrong target. With the nature of Twitter being as it is, filing such a notice is a waste of time and, most likely, money.

There are better approaches to take.

A Better Approach

The best thing one can do if they are tempted to send such a notice is, if there is a link involved, first see what can be done about the subject of the link. In most cases, that content can be removed from the Web, thus making the entire tweet pointless. It usually doesn’t require any more time or effort but does much more to actually resolve the issue.

The simple truth is that you are not going to be able to remove every single mention of an infringement from the Web, it just isn’t practical or productive, Once you can accept that, you can then focus your energies on strategies that are practical and, with that in mind, it’s easy to see why targeting tweets isn’t a productive use of time.

That being said, if a Twitter account, possibly created by a spammer, is doing nothing but spamming out links to infringing material, it is probably wise to take some action. However, in those cases I’ve just reported the account to Twitter abuse and, for the most part, they were taken care of through that process as they are usually also violating other Twitter policies. No DMCA notice needed.

Bottom Line

All in all, one has to keep a level head when dealing with copyright on the Web and focus on being realistic and productive. Chasing down tweets that reference infringing materials is neither.

Targeting the actual infringement, not the tweet, is a better way to spend one’s energy when dealing with these matters. In fact, Twitter can actually be a useful tool for tracking infringements as following tweets relevant to your work can help you find infringements Google might have missed.

In that regard, Twitter may become as much of an ally in the fight against infringement as a foe, much like Google itself, a double-edged sword that can be put to a number of uses.

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

Due to personal time off and illness, this show is being posted a week late but fret not we will be back on schedule next week to get caught up and resume as usual. In the meantime, enjoy this action-packed episode as we go over what we got for Christmas, the great games Patrick and I have purchased over the past month and a bit of copyright news as well.

This week’s stories include:

• Posting on Twitter Does Not Mean a License to Steal
• Promo CDs Can Be Resold
• Mattel’s Claim Against MGA Over Bratz Dolls Gets Limited
• “Expendables” Producer Next on P2P Litigation Train
• Pornographers Unite to Sue Infringers
• And Much More!

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

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

1: Twitter Does Not Mean Copyright Free, Court Rules

First off today, photographer Daniel Morel has won a key victory against the wire service the AFP and, along the way, a victory for those who post images on Twitter. The AFP had used one of Morel’s photo of Haiti earthquake in a story. After Morel claimed sued for copyright infringement, the AFP claimed that Morel had relinquished rights in the photo after sharing it on TwitPic. However, the court shot down that argument saying that posting via Twitter is not the same as relinquishing ownership. This paves the way for Morel’s lawsuit to continue and lets other Twitter users breathe a sigh of relief.

2: Porn Purveyors Target 13,000 More Does in P2P Lawsuits

Despite setbacks in late 2010 for other plaintiffs, the porn industry seems to be rolling out more lawsuits than ever with various smaller companies combining to file some 13,000 estimated lawsuits against “Doe” defendants all over the country. A similar lawsuit by the Adult Copyright Group targeting some 7,000 Does was thrown out for lack of enjoinder, meaning that there wasn’t sufficient reason to lump the lawsuits together. However, the new cases are arguing that the act of sharing files via P2P is a cooperative effort deserving of such enjoinder. Without it, all the lawsuits would have to be filed separately, greatly increasing the time and expense.

3: What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?

Finally today, January 1 marked Public Domain Day, the day in which expiring works lapse into the public domain. However, in the U.S. no works were to lapse into the public domain domain the the Center for the Study of the Public Domain instead ran a list of the titles that would have entered the public domain on January 1 2011 if it had not been for the Copyright Act of 1978. This year those works included “The Lord of the Flies”, “Horton Hears a Who” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” among many others.

Suggestions

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

Want the Full Story?

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

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

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

1: Sharron Angle Hit With R-J Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

First off today, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle has been hit with a lawsuit by the controversial Righthaven group, which is enforcing copyright for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Righthaven, as is typical for their suits, is demanding $150,000 and the forfeiture of her domain. Righthaven had previously sued the Democratic Party of Nevada, leading to claims of bias as Angle had used R-J content in a similar fashion on her site. Others said that her use of the content meant Righthaven had to sue her, a position Righthaven seems to have agreed with. Angle’s camp has not commented on the suit and this brings the confirmed number of Righthaven lawsuits filed to 117.

2: Police Swoop On 6,000 Song File-Sharer

Next up today, in a case that was overlooked due to yesterday’s raids against ISPs all across Europe, police in Sweden arrested an unidentified man who was, according to prosecutors, was sharing some 6,000 songs as part of a piracy ring. The person in question was using Direct Connect to share the files, which makes it easier for the police to detect mass online infringement. To date, prosecutors have largely ignored those who share files via Bittorrent.

3: Lessons In Smart Trademark Management: Free Licensing Of The Mark From Twitter

Finally today, TechDirt is highlighting Twitter’s trademark policy as an example of how to protect your trademarks while still encouraging widespread use. As the site points out, if trademarks are undefended, they can be lost so companies often times vigorously litigate trademark issues to avoid that risk. However, Twitter has offered a free license to use its “Tweet” trademark so long as it is used correctly and by those promoting the brand, thus limiting the need to litigate while still providing a means for developers to use the mark.

Suggestions

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

Want the Full Story?

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

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