-
Website
http://www.scobleizer.com/ -
Original page
http://scobleizer.com/2006/08/27/blogger-says-its-ok-to-steal-if-they-use-rss/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
What exactly is the difference between this and Bloglines making money of other peoples content?
You really should quit saying they didn't provide attribution they did! Notice the tag line after the posts on http://www.crazyfactor.com/ where it says something like:
Original post by Robert Scoble and software by Elliott Back
Not to mention you previously wrote that the world was free to do with your content as it pleased. If you didn't want them to you would only publish descriptions in RSS or revert back to HTML.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/16.htm...
Which leaves me with my unanswered question, what's changed your mind since you wrote that?
Why don't the syndication standards provide a flag to indicate if redistribution is allowed?
It's over the line, pure and simple.
The monster created by the scientist come back to wreak havoc.
Booger
As I've pointed out on my site, copyright law is a big problem for scrapers, but most recent scraping cases have hinged on these other matters.
There is simply no way that this kind of scraping is legal or ethical without prior permission.
Sad to say for some spammers out there...
Back on topic, as I tried to post on his site, there's a bit of a difference between a single user looking at RSS and someone reposting it and then spamming trackbacks all over.
You lock your door of your house in most places, why isn't the same done with the feeds, etc?
But onto the other comments, there is some hypocrisy and double standard though when it comes to scrapping/ using RSS feeds. Bloglines and others do republish full feeds, so essentially they could be breaching the law as well. It does seem to me (playing devils advocate a little bit) that it's a matter of taking sides when both are doing essentially the same thing.I think Quadszilla over at the SEO Black Hat blog here sums it up well.
The site CrazyFactor is republishing the content under his name. He is stripping out all ads and amazon ids and replacing as his own.
I have a copyright notice served with my feed which has been republished on all the posts.
He has even scraped my personal posts (check the personal section). Does he lead the same life I do?
I guess any blogger who argues in the favour of RSS Scraping has definitely not had his content stolen. Maybe then his/her stance may change?
There are fair ways of using rss and they just happen to also fall under 'fair use'.
Blogging is about being heard, not controlling the channel, if you obsess about that don't even publish RSS.
I spelled out EXACTLY why this guy is pissing me off. It has everything to do with trackback spam.
Also, Google can penalize you if your stuff is copied too many places on the Internet.
Also, my readers were getting pissed off (because of the trackback spam, but a couple because their own content is getting ripped off).
Denise Howell and I talked about this subject on IT Conversations some time ago... See:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail655....
Also, I wrote a comment discussing this subject on a Denise's new ZDNET blog (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howell/). See: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12556-0.html?for...
bob wyman
Isn't the whole purpose of these here internet tubes to transfer data freely and present it in different forums?
Sure, if this guy is sending your blog posts around as spam that's an abuse of the system, but should trying to stop him via copyright ruin legitimate reposting and syndication of RSS feeds?
CrazyFactor and GetItaround have been suspended by the hosts :)
Will have to thank Duncan for finding the actual hosts... Tailor Made Servers.
It is good that the site owners decided to take action.
Spammers btw are never going to care about copyright, so that's a dead end solution.
Also, why are you worried about Google pollution? Their algorithms are smart enough to figure out who is the original source of material based on pagerank.
Nobody would have bothered to notice it on my blog, if you hadn't posted about it and also linked to me later :)
Not just crazyfactor, but a lot of his spamblogs have been suspended.
Why lock the door to my house when I leave? Because it's easier than trying to get your stuff back.
If someone from Sealand is stealing your content, how exactly are you going to stop them?
That's not to say someone couldn't scrape the screen if they knew how to code, but RSS is leaving the door unlocked.
/just saying
http://www.psfk.com/2006/08/note_to_tailran.html
So what if there's a regurgitation of a regurgitation?
http://www.voiceindigo.com/ht/feed.do?rssid=4907
See if you can see any link back to podtech apart from the url to the feed image
*red flag UP*! :)
http://www.voiceindigo.com/ht/feed.do?rssid=2451
hmmmm.......
What the hell are you talking about?
There are two links (one to the web site and one to the rss feed) to the PodTech.net web site right at the top of the web page.
Published by: PodTech.net web rss
Copyright: PodTech.net 2006
Last modified: 2006-08-28 00:02:49.0
Why don't you actually look at the page before sending you "flag up". :-)
Seems like there's not that much difference between what the Crazy Factor guy was doing and http://scobleizer.scripting.com/....
Just add some advertising.......
Anyway, back to the point. In the case of Voice Indigo, they place the RSS link and web site link right next to the title PodTech.net.
Kosso claims they are doing something wrong. Kosso happens to run Podcast.com, which one could argue competes with Voice Indigo.
Now, if you go to - http://podcast.com/show/1499/ you can see a page that looks very similar to the Voice Indigo page. The title of the podcast is a link back to the PodTech.net site and there is an RSS link as well. So how is this different than Voice Indigo's web page?
Sorry, Kosso, but it seems like you are just trying to trash the competition to give your service a leg up.
Also, if we're going to bring up the law in all this, then I should poiint out that the law protects people from things like libel, slander, defamation of characters, etc., in addition to content protection. Something to think about when one goes off half cocked and calls someone else a crook.
Alex
PS - I am not affiliated with Voice Indigo in any way. I do not have a podcast they distribute. I have in fact never actually used their service. I just find it amusing when someone who owns a podcast directory calls out someone else for doing something wrong and they actually do the same thing :-)
I put "victim" in quotes because bitching about any uses made of my syndicated feed strikes me as akin to bitching when someone links to you -- as some people still do. The purpose of a document on the world wide web is to be linked to; don't put it up if you don't want that. And the purpose of an RSS feed is to be syndicated elsewhere; don't put it up if you don't want that to happen. Or so it seems to me -- our host apparently disagrees.
Indeed, I'd go so far to argue that putting up a feed for syndication constitutes an implied, if not explicit, grant of license to republish the fed material, pretty much without limitation.
That said, a lot of the uses that get made of "my" text (again the scare quotes, because most of my posts are heavy on quotes from elsewhere, with a lesser volume of commentary by me) are pretty scummy; they most commonly get used to bulk up the keyword density of spammy (extreme advertising densitity, prose-content free) porn blogs. Attribution to me is often missing, or text only (linkless). My solution, akin to the guy who puts advertising in his feed, is simply to modify my feed. One thing I do is hack the feed template so that each item title ends with "-- from MYDOMAIN.COM" so that it's tough (impossible for scrapers using standard tools only) for "my" stuff to get used without attribution.
By the way, that site is now shut down. That's what happens when you go over the line. Reasonable people who run ISPs say "uncle."
However, I'm not convinced that you're being reasonable in doing so. To me, it's as if you set up an open bar and then got angry with people who drank too much and got loud and stupid. Yeah, they are jerks, but it's an inevitable consequence of having an open bar at a party above a certain size.
That ISPs (a conservative, legally-vulnerable bunch) agree with you does not necessarily make you right, from an internet-philosophy perspective. You're right about the law (probably right, that is, depending on whether my implied-license argument has legs) but we all know that in these fast-moving times the law doesn't always map very well with the custom and usage of the community (a community that some of us, at least, value more highly than we value the opinons of "series of tubes" senators). Don't be too proud that Senator Stevens (one of mine, for my sins) is on your side.
That said, the trackback spam is ugly stuff, which is why I have disabled trackbacks on all my blogs. In my corner of the blogging world, the benefits of trackback are minimal compared to the abuses.