Content Stealing vs. Content Sharing

Feb. 03, 2011

Content stealing is a fairly controversial topic in the web marketing space. Many people feel that if content is made freely available then it is free to use, but when it comes down to it, using another organization’s or person’s content without permission or attribution is considered to be theft. One of the most common areas to see this is blog content. There have been many times when I’m researching content for a webinar, blog post or other piece of content and I’m reading some blog posts on the topic and I’ll come across a blog post that has been essentially copied and pasted into several different blogs, to the point where it’s hard to actually determine who wrote the original post.

The reason that web content theft is a tricky subject is because there is a fine line between sharing content and stealing it. Sharing content is crucial for many online businesses because it spreads word of mouth about their expertise, products and services, but stealing can be detrimental to an organizations online marketing strategy.

So what’s the difference?

Sharing – Taking content that someone else has created it and sharing it to your friends or followers through social media sites, email, blogging or social bookmarking with PROPER ATTRIBUTION and credit to the content creator is sharing content, and it is a vital component of online marketing strategy.

Stealing – Taking content that someone else has created and copying and pasting it or reproducing it on your website, blog, social media accounts, email or social bookmaking accounts without attribution or credit to the content creator. This often results in the content thief passing the content off as their own. Content theft is especially common when it comes to blogging (as I mentioned before) because it is relatively easy to take a blogs RSS feed and reproduce it on another blog. This process is often referred to as “blog scraping.”

What is Blog Scraping?

Generally a person trying to use your blog content is trying to make as much money online as they can quickly and easily. These blogs will take the full feed from your blog and add that content to their website or blog using a free blogging platform (like Wordpress or Blogger) using their own domain name. Once the blog is posting your content, they then cover the site in multiple advertisements like those from Google Adsense. Besides the fact that stealing content is an extremely unethical practice, stealing content in this fashion is actually not very lucrative. Most search engines are smart enough to tell when a website or blog is posting duplicate content, which means that the website won’t rank well, and won’t get the traffic it needs to actually generate any payback.

Recently I was visiting our blog’s Feedburner account to monitor our blog’s analytics when I was pointed to the fact that our feed was being used for several “uncommon” uses. Google define’s uncommon uses as:

“FeedBurner manages hundreds of thousands of feeds and in doing so, we’ve catalogued thousands of common places where feeds are referenced throughout the web. These include email clients, web-based feed aggregators, news filters, and more, each outlined in detailed in the Subscriber section of your Analyze tab.

Beyond these known places, FeedBurner can also help identify “Uncommon Uses” of your feed content. These references could be a neat little news filter somebody wrote, a blog somebody assembled from feeds, or even blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers want to see where their content is republished and it’s very helpful to have something like FeedBurner to provide visibility into usage. When FeedBurner identifies an “uncommon” use, we highlight it in your main Analyze tab Dashboard and in the detailed Uncommon Uses section within this tab as well.”

The answer goes on to explain that:

“You may ask what you can do if you see a domain using your feed in a way that you feel is not appropriate (e.g., the feed content is posted on the site without proper credit to the source of the material). In this case, you should contact the domain or the domain host and take up the issue with them directly. You may also want to use the FeedBurner Creative Commons Service (on the Optimize tab) which adds a machine-readable Creative Commons copyright license to your feed.”

When I checked to see what these uncommon uses were, I came across a blog that was blatantly making use of our RSS feed and posts without any attribution to us, not even a backlink to our website. After checking a little further it became obvious that the blog is making use of the RSS feed of several different (and some very recognizable) feeds without any credit due the authors (I must admit, I’m pretty interested to see how well they monitor this blog. If it’s done poorly, it’s going to be pretty amusing to see this post show up in their feed. I’ll keep you all posted).

I think you’ll see the irony in the fact that the website has a prominent link to a disclaimer stating:

1. Copyright, Licenses and Idea Submissions.

The entire contents of the Site are protected by international copyright and trademark laws. The owner of the copyrights and trademarks are (I've taken out the name of the actual blog, we're just spreading awareness in this post), its affiliates or other third party licensors. YOU MAY NOT MODIFY, COPY, REPRODUCE, REPUBLISH, UPLOAD, POST, TRANSMIT, OR DISTRIBUTE, IN ANY MANNER, THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE, INCLUDING TEXT, GRAPHICS, CODE AND/OR SOFTWARE.

So what should you do?

Well, that depends. There are several courses of action you can take against those that are misusing your content and they will depend on the severity of the theft and how seriously you take it. First, it’s important to say that content theft is definitely not an uncommon occurrence (no matter what Feedburner chooses to categorize it as). In fact, content theft is almost as common place as content creation. If something has been written on the web, then somewhere there is most likely someone who will consider stealing it.

If you want to take action against those using your content there are several things you can do:

Place a copyright or creative commons image in your feed footer
Link to your other blog posts
Contact the owner of the domain
Contact the domain’s advertisers and alert them to the issue
Take legal action

Why shouldn’t you take the theft too seriously?

In cases of blog posts (like the situation with our blog) we’re not very worried about the theft. Why is that? Well, after doing our research, we can tell that it is very unlikely that search engines won’t pick up the fact that this blog is stealing content, but there are also several other reasons:

For one thing, the blog has only been around for 2 months (search engines tend to give more credence to older domains)
the blog is using duplicate content from several different websites
Taking the time to deal with the theft is time we could be spending promoting our blog
Most search engines are smart enough to judge by the quantity of backlinks where the post originated

So, long story short, content stealing is unethical and in the long term, really not that worthwhile and while it may be annoying, it’s most likely not going to affect your overall traffic. Having said that, if you notice that someone is using your content consistently and it is influencing you success, then it is certainly worth taking action against. Every situation is different and you’ll have to judge for yourself if it’s worth taking action or not.

Image by Nisha A. on Flickr.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at February 3, 2011 8:15 AM