When is it OK to post someone else’s content?
October 2, 2007 by Deb
Filed under Freelance Writing
I don’t know if you remember, but several months back there was a major controversy involving FWJ and another blogger who used a feed aggregator to post the content here to her Live Journal page. I accused the blogger of stealing but was pretty much forced to apologize because of all the Live Journal bloggers coming here to insist she didn’t steal, she scraped my content using a feed. After a few hours I grew angry, she still posted my content without permission, not once, but every day. Whenever that happens, it results in a loss of traffic and revenue for this blog. That’s not the worst of it though. Plain and simple, it means someone has taken my content, the hard work Jodie and I put into this blog, and placed it on her own blog without permission. This immediately minimizes all the effort we put into it.
I received a lot of flack for denouncing this practice (and for outing the content thief). Just about all bloggers and writers got it, though. Someone stole my content, there’s no gray area. Live Journalers and amateurs who updated blogs once in a blue moon thought my jeans were in a bunch over nothing and felt I was rather selfish and hysterical. They even made light of my experience as a blogger and suggested I didn’t know what I was talking about. I maintain it’s never all right to post another person’s content, in its entirety, without permission.
It happened again
So it happened to me again. Yesterday I discovered a webmaster who was publishing my content, in its entirety, to his writing forum. Even though the bottom of this blog lists a copyright notice, even though the bottom of every feed from this blog says “If you’re not reading this through an RSS reader this content is stolen”, he still went ahead and published my content without contacting me first. That’s the part that gets to me the most. As a fellow writer, how could you not consider contacting the original author to ask permission?
RSS Feeds
RSS readers are for the individual. They’re sort of like me subscribing to a newspaper. It wouldn’t even occur to me to copy that newspaper over to the Internet. If you never realized it before, I’m telling you now, it’s a copyright violation to scrape someone’s feed and post their content to your blog or website without permission. Now, the person behind yesterday’s incident had honorable intentions, he just didn’t realize he was stealing. So today, for those of you playing the home edition, I’m going to lay it all out for you.
When you’re allowed to use someone else’s content
Here’s when you’re allowed to publish someone else’s content:
- When you offer a quote with attribution: There’s nothing wrong with quoting another blogger, even a paragraph or two. Be sure you’re offering a link to that quote and provide the proper attribution. Bloggers appreciate the link love like that, and usually reciprocate.
- When you have permission: Do you want to print an article from this blog? Ask. I don’t know if I’ll say yes or no, but you might be surprised by my answer. If you do print my article, I’ll expect the proper attribution.
- When the copyright indicates: There are plenty of articles on the web available for reprint. Manu authors feel this is a good way to get their name out there. (I’m not one of them.) If there is no where on or around the article indicating you’re allowed to publish the article, you do not have permission.
The bottom line? Ask permission!
If you didn’t have a conversation with the author about whether or not you can republish her content, you’re stealing. There’s no way around it. Someone else’s content on your website, without permission, is stealing. It doesn’t matter if it came from a blog, a magazine, an RSS feed or a website. It’s stealing.
Please support FWJ
THANK you. People think that just because something’s online that means it’s free for the taking. NOT SO. And when writers don’t stand up for their work and enforce their copyright, ignorant people who mean well and scammers who want to rip off anyone they can alike get away with murder.
kk
Thanks for posting this. Like the most recent blogger, many just may not know the rules of the game. It’s not like you get a handbook when you create your blog, so it’s important to learn about the ins and outs of blogging. That being said, it’s pretty much common sense that you can’t post someone else’s content without attribution or permission. Is there any legal recourse for those of us who have our content stolen?
This still occurs in the print world, particularly in the areas of reports/white papers.
These are sold for several thousand dollars, so Gartner and other research firms don’t want magazines stealing the content.
However, they’re usually more than happy to provide an executive summary with the highlights that can provide the basis for an article.
So, a graph or two — with attribution — is find. Beyond that, I would think (not entirely sure of blog ettiquette) that the third party should only use that info followed by “for more on this topic,” see (blog url).
I do some subcontracting for a PR firm that does just this with tech clients.
It amazes me how many people still don’t understand what exactly plagiarism is. You’d think we’d all “get it” in high school when the teachers are explaining the fact you can’t just copy out of the encyclopedia or other books to get the content of your report. You’d think the little bit about having to attribute each and every direct quote, while keeping them as short as possible, or risk landing yourself a zero for plagiarizing would get through.
But perhaps I’m still naive enough to believe small things like lying and stealing still tarnish a reputation, and folks should and do give a care about keeping their good name.
I like to consider myself as having far too much pride for plagiarism. Once, an article of mine was total edited and rewritten, and I successfully lobbied the editor to remove my name from the byline. This is no longer what I wrote, I maintained.
A few months ago I cited columnist/blogger Debbie Schlussel in a column regarding Britney Spears’ head shaving. Schlussel, an attorney, speculated that Spears probably did so to mask evidence (hair) of drug use. Because I didn’t see this thought elsewhere, I credited it to Schlussel. In the past, she has accused Sean Hannity of plagiarizing her blog. Her accusations are perfectly warranted: if someone is going to cite information you have exclusively or cite you word-for-word, then they should credit you.
To me, it is simple courtesy. When I wrote once about Army general Harry Shelton’s grave reluctance about supporting General Wesley Clark for president, I cited the New Mexico newspaper to which Shelton made his announcement. By not doing so, it makes it sound like General Shelton made the comments to ME.
If you don’t want people to plagiarize your work, don’t plagiarize others. Otherwise, you head down the path of Jayson Blair and become unhirable.
I only deal in using excerpts to make a point, although I know there’s another issue with publishers taking a column and posting it without getting permission from the writer first. I’ve seen columns of mine appear on other blogs; for instance, as a Christian I wrote about the rapture and things to expect from the anti-Christ. Well, this odd blog posted excerpts of my column and strongly implied that I was saying that Hillary Clinton will be the anti-Christ. Since this blog is very infrequently accessed, I felt it was sufficient to simply post a blog stating that I had been taken out of context. If it had been a bigger one, I probably would’ve discussed with my attorney cease-and-desist options.
Dear Deb & Crew,
I *think* that if you will start using the “more” option in your posts it will prevent this. The more tag cuts off an RSS feed. That’s how I do it in my blog. In this way, I am thankful for the people that use my RSS (Because it generates links to the site) instead of stealing the entire content. Sucks to have to do that, but it would fix your issue.
Thanks for the incredible resource!
Thanks for posting this, Deb. I write about dating for an online content mag, and I’m constantly having to fight with people to remove my copied articles. Some of them even think that as long as they credit me they can copy and paste the entire thing. They can’t do that either. I don’t think bloggers realize that in doing that they cost us money and time. Mentioning it here will hopefully help.
It never ends, does it? I know that when you call people on copying or stealing, they get their knickers in a knot because that’s how they see it. They think they’re doing you a favour if they give you credit.
Sorry it’s happening to you.
There is nothing so disheartening than the “manipulation” of intelletual property. There is no VIN number aand when you wake up in the morning, you don’t see your manuscript missing in the front of the yard.
Learned from long experience if you do not do anything..you are at fault.
Hugs,
Mac
My favorite is the folks who abide by the “I’m not from your country, so your rules don’t apply to me” when it comes to stealing my content.
I’d never thought about RSS feeds as related to content theft, but it doesn’t surprise me now that you mention it.
Amy
I’m no lawyer, but intellectual property rules are recognized by most Western countries. Actually enforcing these rules is another issue, though.
The mention about an RSS cutoff by LB seems to make sense, though I’m not familiar with the technology.
I hope you reported it to Live Journal too. On the first offense, I think the best tactic is to inform the person that they don’t have permission and ask them to remove the content. After that, I’d go to the admins of the site.
That might sound harsh, but once a person is informed of copyright infringement and persists in doing it they go from ‘ignorant user’ to ‘thief’.
A short quote, as you said, is fine. But I had a big blowup with an editor with whom I had a long and good relationship. FYI, I self-syndicate my work, selling reprint rights to small publications.
In this case, another writer exerpted the best lines in a humorous piece I wrote and put them in his article. There was attribution, but that doesn’t pay the bills. That “new” article was short and my material was 17% of the content. The other content was quotes from other writers’ work. When I complained to the editor, he said I should be happy to have been quoted! (Of course, he did not “buy” that whole article from me.)
I was (perhaps wrongly) assuming this was a Wordpress blog. Wordpress offers a “more” function that cuts the article display off and forces people to click the permalink to see the rest of the story. The RSS feeds cut off where the “more” tag divides the story, so it’s like putting a teaser in a feed. I believe movable type has a similar option, though I am not as familiar with it.
It’s really terrible that we have to go to these lengths to protect our content. I don’t know what’s worse, the outright theft of deadbeat clients or people who think they are “doing you a favor” by stealing your content…
So, wait, was the girl actually copying and pasting all of the entries to her own blog? Or did she set up a LiveJournal syndicated feed account (in which you plug the URL of someone’s feed into LJ and they make it a separate account so you can add it to your friends list)?
If the former, obviously that’s terrible.
But if the latter, it gets more confusing– for a lot of people, LiveJournal basically *is* their RSS reader. Is there a significant difference between my seeing Deb’s posts in my personal RSS reader and seeing it as a LiveJournal post?
A syndicated account on LiveJournal is not editable by anyone (including the person who requested it be made), and each post includes a link to the original. Since I see it in my regular RSS reader, I’m guessing Deb’s “buy me coffee” link would appear intact as well.
I understand the idea that a syndicated feed might draw traffic away from the main site, but that’s true of the RSS feed itself– with the rare exception of when I want to comment on something, I pretty much read everything in my reader. And if someone wanted to comment on a post here from the LiveJournal feed, they’d still have to come here to do it.
The entire TV news business seems to be based on lifting ideas and stories from newspapers (through AP and UPI). And I’m thinking that this may be one of the reasons that your web site is being so blatantly ripped off. People may tend to think that if TV can do it, what’s the problem? One consequence of the downsizing in newspapers and TV stations is that the “news hole” is also downsized and good, original enterprised stories are becoming a rare commodity in both print and broadcast media.
I think the problem with the RSS feed lies duplicate content. As you say, everything appears intact in an LJ RSS feed, even links. Many prefer to just lurk instead of post, so why come here when they’re reading Deb’s blog in another venue if they don’t intend to post comments in the first place? Reading the content in a syndicated feed removes the necessity to come here. As such, advertising revenue takes a dip.
Another issue of course is Google’s penalty on duplicate content. I don’t think a syndicated feed would cause Deb to be penalized with duplicate content seeing as this blog has a high PageRank. But it is STILL an issue. Who knows when Deb’s ranking in the SERPs will plummet because a certain number of people syndicate her blog in a reader which could be crawled by SE spiders?
My above post was in response to gia’s.
Phil,
I’m not a lawyer either, but I worked for lawyers long enough to learn a thing or two. Unfortunately, there really is no such thing as an international copyright that is recognized by every country. Still, I’ve managed to get more than one site shut down based on copyright infringement, even if the thief lives outside the U.S.. If the hosting company in based in the U.S. or any country that recognizes U.S. copyright, it doesn’t matter where the thief lives. Hosting companies don’t want law suits, so they’re usually more than happy to oblige.
You know, I had this happen to me before. Every day that I posted something new, my wordpress dashboard would show that I had a link coming into my site from…my own story.
My stories were being posted on another site thanks to some thieving person that subscribed to my RSS feed for the sole purpose of getting free page content. I just kind of ignored it but it did bug me.
Thanks for the post.
Misses E. has it right. Everyone should have learned this well by high school. In college, this kind of behavior is grounds for getting kicked out of a university. Rules and ethics in this area should apply whether we are talking about writing on the internet, writing for a magazine or newspaper, writing a short story, or writing a novel. Purposefully stealing someone else’s content-unless permission is granted or allowed by the copyright-is wrong. Any excuse otherwise is a attempt to justify thievery.
For me the issue is straightforward – for every person who reads my cellphone blog posts outside the blog itself, I lose revenue directly. I’m paid a flat fee + 10 cents per hit for the blog, so if you make the content available to your readers in its entirety thru an RSS feed, you are taking money out of my wallet.
The same principle applies to blogs that are monetised through advertising revenue- less readers directly translates into revenue loss for the blogger.
Hmmm, I see your point and the “thiefs” point. I have a tumblr.com site and I have all kinds of feeds that are fed into it but the link goes to the appropriate blog/author. So I wonder if that would be considered stealing? I have often pondered this as well.
Part of the problem is that colleges and universities are not as tough on this as they should be. I taught freshman English a few years ago and at least one third of the class plagiarized on at least one assignment. Pretty blatant stuff — copying and pasting from the Internet. This was *after* I had explained how wrong plagiarism is and had explained what it was, so ignorance was not an excuse. When I brought up the problem with my department, I was told to explain about plagiarism again. No disciplinary action was taken. These people grow up thinking that stealing has no real consequences. It really makes me angry.
No disciplinary action was taken. These people grow up thinking that stealing has no real consequences. It really makes me angry. – Quoted from AA.
This makes me both angry and sad. The problem’s bad enough here where several of the local professors will give you a zero if accreditation is there but done incorrectly. Believe me, I know. It’s something I triple checked before handing in papers out of fear for my GPA. I was class of 2004, so it hasn’t been that long.
I can’t imagine schools, whether high schools or colleges, letting their students get away with stealing so blatantly. No wonder Craigslist Curmudgeon keeps finding ads asking people to write college admissions essays and term paper mills. Kids used to have to be sneaky if they wanted to hire (or threaten) someone into doing their homework for them. It almost seems it’s the norm nowadays.
Shameful.
Thank you for posting this – it’s SO important for people to understand. I’ve found dozens of my articles reprinted without permission and I’ve been contacting each site asking them to either take them down or pay for the content. It’s been a pain, but it’s worth the effort because it takes a lot of time putting this content together. I don’t want some site that doesn’t want to invest in a writer to just rip it off.
Listening to Deb harp on and on about this over and over reminds me of the record industry lecturing people about downloading in 2000.
Deb, I’ll tell you what I told that distinguished panel, it is never going to stop, and if you can’t deal with it, then get out of the business.
BTW You never respond to e-mail, but seem to still want our sympathy on this issue. Sorry, I don’t follow that logic. Why should we care?
Again, I totally disagree. The point of an RSS feed is to FEED. To spread content. I work for a company, I write the blog and I wish everyone would take my blog feed and publish it all over the place. That’s how I get readers to read the work.
I use LiveJournal as my feed reader. If you visit my friends page you’ll see feeds from dozens of different places. It keeps ME from having to visit 20 sites everyday. All the info comes to the one place. If my friends want to read what I’m reading, more power to them.
Placing an RSS feed is not plagiarism. It’s not theft. If you don’t want people to use your feed, you turn off the option.
Hi Cynthia,
Am RSS Feed is to feed to an individual subscriber, not entire communities. Using an RSS feed for personal use is not indeed not plagiarism, using one to take my content and post it on your blog, is.
Deb
Hi Camera,
Deb always responds to my emails. Sometimes they’re late but she always responds. Maybe it’s your delivery?
FYI
Item on CNBC this am about theft of copyright material and cost to U.S. economy — $58 billion ot million (didn’t catch report, just promo for it).
I was not aware of this. Thank you for posting this Deb.
It is $58 billion. If interested, CNBC may have archived the report on its Web site.
“Mark Says:
The entire TV news business seems to be based on lifting ideas and stories from newspapers (through AP and UPI).”
TV stations do not lift stories/ideas from newspapers (that would be illegal). TV stations (and newspapers) pay a hefty fee to subscribe to AP and other news feeds. This allows TV stations, newspapers, etc. to legally use the stories that come across the feed. Not every station/paper can have a reporter in Iraq, so the AP sends one and then they charge everyone else to use their story. Usually, TV and radio stations will rewrite the story to fit their medium, and it is not required to follow each story with a “This story supplied by report John Doe with the AP.” Newspapers are obviously different since its easy to print the reporters name. Even spoken quotes work differently in TV/radio than in print. I can keep going on as to how this works, but reputable TV stations (pretty much the ones you watch at 5 o’clock) do not rip stories from newspapers.
With regards to Deb’s situation, if Miss LJ wants to pay Deb to post her entire site on LJ, this discussion would probably go in a completely new direction.
(army) wife hit it on the head.
My degree is in Radio-TV and part of my internship many years ago was clearing the teletype wires. I spent 13 years in newspapers. AP/UPI, business wire and PR newswire are all paid for.
If a TV station mentions anything from a newspaper, the newspaper is credit as a source and the TV station can do no more than the highlights due to time constraints. A transcription of a 30-minute news program (24 after commercials) won’t even fill the front page of a daily newspaper.
Oof, I had this nice long response and then my browser crashed!
@Mariella: My point is that people reading from a feed on LiveJournal are not necessarily less likely to click through than people reading the feed in their personal readers. (In fact, LJers may be *more* likely than some individuals; some stand-alone RSS readers don’t have a built-in browser, where as LJers have to be at a browser by default.)
@Deb: I think the part I keep having trouble with is that you say this girl posted to her blog, which is different from running a syndicated feed on LiveJournal. Here’s an example of one of my syndicated feeds on LJ:
http://giapetanime.livejournal.com/
I’m the one who requested it be created, so I was able to give it a username that clearly credits me, though most people assign a pretty descriptive name to feeds (like “candicomics,” “PennyArcadeRSS,” “sinfestfeed,” etc). At this point, no one can edit any of the content or anything else to do with that account, including me (unless I contact LiveJournal personally). Now, here’s an example of a post in a syndicated feed:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/giapetanime/81921.html
As you can see, the FIRST thing that appears in the main entry is a link to the original post. There are also tags at the bottom that link back to my site as well. And like with any RSS feed, it will cut off if I put a MORE tag in, in case I want to force my readers to visit my site.
I only have 10 readers on LJ, but that’s still 10 I might not have otherwise– and they’re notified every time I update, like anyone else using an RSS feed.
They can comment on the posts on LJ but they’ll only access the other LJ readers, so they always click over to my site if they want to comment. And if they don’t want to comment or see the remainder of the content, it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference whether they were seeing the feed in an individual reader or on LiveJournal– they either will click or they won’t.
Obviously it’s a personal preference; in my case, I prefer my content to have the maximum reach possible. Ads and click-throughs and the like are secondary in my mind.
And of course, this is VERY different from someone copying and pasting content from someone else’s blog directly into their *own* (as opposed to an account they can’t actually touch). I’m still unclear as to which this girl was actually doing.
I DID see that there is a syndicated feed of Deb’s content, however. Here’s an example post from it:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/fwriting_jobs/43446.html
Again, the first two links are the FeedBurner and then direct link to the original content, and the username comes directly from this site’s name, and the buy-me-a-coffee link even comes through. If Deb doesn’t like it I’m sure LiveJournal would take it down at her request, but honestly: other than multiple people being able to “friend” it, what is the difference between reading it there and reading it in a personal reader?
Deb’s writing is not that great (ever read her about.com page? good cure for insomnia), I can’t imagine anyone actually lifting her work. They must be new to the web.
That’s not the point, and it’s rude to come to come here and say that. Stealing is stealing. That’s all there is to it.
I hope you reported it to Live Journal too. On the first offense, I think the best tactic is to inform the person that they don’t have permission and ask them to remove the content. After that, I’d go to the admins of the site.
Reading all the comments, I think a lot of people got this whole thing confused. It’s not actually about plagiarism itself but the issue of RSS feeds “stealing” content (”stealing” is in quotes because it’s not really stealing per se). When people syndicate your blog, they don’t copy and paste the content to their web sites manually. If Deb would ask, perhaps LJ would tell the user to remove the feed, but they won’t see it as an offense because they’re the ones who included the feature to their web site in the first place.
@gia
Hi gia, It’s just my opinion, but if it were me reading LJ RSS feeds on a browser, that’s when I’ll get lazy to go to the actual web site (I speak from experience). Whereas if I were reading on stand-alone RSS readers, I’d feel compelled to surf over. But as I said, that’s just me.
I have to say though, I have to take back what I said about feeds generating duplicate content (with regards to search engine spiders) because feeds don’t get crawled. I think I got confused too.
BTW, nice meeting someone of the same interest, here, gia.
I’ll comment on your blog later.
@Mariella:
Just to reiterate, a person who sets up a syndicated feed on LiveJournal– i.e. goes to http://livejournal.com/syn and puts in an RSS feed URL, which causes LiveJournal to create an account that pulls from the RSS feed directly –does NOT have access to edit or delete that account. If asked, LiveJournal staffers would have to remove it, and I’m sure they would.
As for to click or not to click…I myself rarely click through to a blog; when I do it’s because there’s additional content I want to access or I want to leave a comment. For me, it really makes no difference whether I’m reading it in my standalone RSS reader, my browser’s RSS reader, a LiveJournal syndicated feed, or any other method. But I’m sure everyone has their own habits.
But without hard numbers, I’m still skeptical that an RSS feed syndicated on X or Y blog site draws significantly more traffic away from the original site than having an RSS feed available, period. (You may have noticed that the syndicated version of Deb’s feed on LiveJournal only had one subscribed reader…)
Keep in mind, after all: an RSS feed is a tool that the blog writer can *choose* to make available to the public. So I find it hard to blame the public when it uses the tool however it wants to in the end…as long as they aren’t actively trying to take credit for my work, which as I’ve noted before would be very hard to do with LiveJournal’s syndication methods (though I’m sure there are other sites where it’s easier to be unscrupulous).
…Anyway. When you say “interest” I’m guessing you mean anime and manga? It’s been a hobby of mine for ages and I’ve been working on making it a career since I got my foot in the door with a job earlier this year
(Unfortunately I was laid off– hence my being a full-time freelancer now!) Always nice to meet another fan ^_^
@gia>> actually, i’m already acquainted with the LJ syndication because I’m an LJ user myself. It just so happens that I don’t use their RSS feed.
Yes, I meant THAT interest
I’ll just comment on your blog so we can continue the convo there! ^0^/
——————————–
I have to say though, I have to take back what I said about feeds generating duplicate content (with regards to search engine spiders) because feeds don’t get crawled. I think I got confused too.
About that, I meant LJ RSS feeds. At least I think that’s the case, not sure though. But those published RSS feeds on public domains could be crawled by spiders, just thought I should clear what I said.
Let me clarify about the RSS/LiveJournal thing. It happened some time ago but it was just fed to one person’s blog with only a person or two seeing it, she started a travel writing page with over a hundred subscribers and was providing my feed as a way to help them find jobs.
It’s not like one person was reading a feed. The feed didn’t contain my ads either. After that I switched to a partial feed but once I switched to Wordpress, the full feed came back again.
Oh and guys, please don’t feed the trolls. It only encourages them. Thanks.
Ah~ Thans for informing us, Deb. Now I know where you’re coming from.
Deb, I’m with you on the plagiarism, but I think your newspaper analogy is off. The equivalent would be: if I buy the paper, would I allow my friends to read it for free? Of course I would. That is the analogy that likely applies most to people who post RSS feeds for social networking groups.