http://technosiastic.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/scraping-your-way-to-rss-feeds/

Clarise and I have created a “Lens” on Squidoo as yet another tool to help support our Open Source Business Intelligence book project. A “lens” is basically a Web2.0 tool to aggregate content about a topic. There has been some controversy about S…

There are no serious money to be made in scraping – it’s probably 10 unique visitors a day, which generate 10 clicks, and hence increase the amount of click fraud, which in the long run hurts Google.

With that, I think that if publishers like Om make a stink about it, we’ll see improvement in the way the copycats are dropped from the index.

As usual, Mike over at TechDirt has what I think is a nice take on the blog plagiarism (or ’splog’) problem that has afflicted some top bloggers, including Om Malik and Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. Mike’s response boils down to this…

So as all media become bits and everyone owns their own bit-manufacturing factory (with zero marginal cost at that), it’s clear that this isn’t just a Hollywood problem… it’s a problem for the rest of us prosumers/indies as well, as Om has insightfully been prodding the community for some time.

As I’m sure many of you will agree, the answer to this “disruptive” problem is not yet known, at least not at an obvious level. And many of us are involved with efforts/projects/ventures that are trying to address this issue head-on.

That said, there is one thing that I know for sure. The answer does not lie in some type of extension to traditional biz models. The risks to protecting your own content, today, is a direct coefficient of the fact that the world is now internetworked by computers (e.g. your own bit factories). This is a whole *new* problem, and the more you’re rooted in traditional strategic thinking, the less likely you are to be a solver here.

Heck, every big media exec goes to bed every night thinking… “how the f**k is Google making that kind of money? and how did we miss it… what did we do wrong?” Even when they surround themselves with a thousand analysts for explanations, it is certain that they won’t grok it at the end.

So wholly new solutions are needed. But history tells us that such innovations need a long time to gestate… yet once understood, the hockey stick curve takes hold. The answer might very well already be among us… and whoever has the answer will hold the key to the foundations of the new economic/business models that will eventually reshape all “creative” industries. The thing is, it won’t be obvious and quite possibly counterintuitive.

OK, taking the plane down now from 20,000 feet ;-)

Speaking very vaguely it seems that historically the content creator is always at the vulnerable end of the financial equation. Musicians and music labels in the 40s and 50s is a very easy example. Newspaper reporters and photographers in the 90s surrendering reusage rights in perpetuity to the papers is another. Where the laws are unclear or in favor of the business person, the jewels of the creatives will be plundered.

I suspect many an artist has pondered, as you are, about why they should produce anything if it means anyone but themselves will profit from. Business people will almost always, by their nature, seek to reduce the profit from anyone else involved in their endeavor while maximizing their own. The artist either then needs to become a savy business person or expect a life of unequal compensation. That’s seems to be a law of our style of capitalism.

Once upon a time a wonderful creative company was tired of others profiting off their creative property (even though they borrowed heavily from others to get going) and this company, tired of the theft, decided that no one should ever get the right to reuse their creative. And 75 years later later the Disney company is still extending their control. Once upon a time they were simply protecting their personal creations, now they are manically protecting what their corporation owns, very little of which was created by anyone living.

With the web and feeds and early agreements on open standards what we see are many thin lines of rules and norms that financially motivated entities will seek to push any way they can in their favor. It will take a bunch of lawsuits, a bunch of new thinking and a lot of screaming content creators to make them larger more recognized lines.

I think if one states one’s site’s conent is not for reuse by means of scraping, non-human request or however it should be legally termed than that request should be recognized by all.

I’m sure Jim and Craig at craigslist and many other top-level content creators/providers are thinking on this topic every night. In the big picture I think simply becasue you can scape a site does not mean that you have the right to do it. From afar it’s akin to transcribing a WSJ article and reposting. The AP can always offer syndication rights to whomever they chose however they want, but they can restrict those rights however they want, even if one can pick them up off the wire.

So what’s your plan to limit usage of your feeds seems to be the big question. Creative Commons extension? Formal copyright? Approve feed requests one at a time?

Thanks for sharing all this as it all coming to a website near year sooner than later.

Also, I disagree with Greg’s comments above. There are RSS readers that display ads, and I don’t think most people will mind. The ads aren’t profiting on other people’s “content” but profiting off of *making that content useful* by putting it in an easy format to read. I’m sure plenty of people would bail out of readers like Google and Bloglines if they refused to post whole feeds.

Let’s face it, the content you write is, in many ways, an advertisement for you. Not all of it is going to work — and some of it is going to get copied unfairly, but that’s just a minor loss compared to the people who will know it’s you and will come straight to the source.

This is a silly debate, to me, and seems way too similar to the RIAA or MPAA whining about people sharing music and movies. It’s all about control.

Stop worrying so much about controlling all of your content — focus on providing good content and a good experience and people will come to you.

Findory, for example, explicitly tries to send traffic to the creators of the content. We only show excerpts of articles, even for weblogs that provide full text feeds, and have people clickthrough to the weblog to read the full article.

It works out well for everyone. Findory readers discover articles and weblogs they wouldn’t have found on their own. Bloggers get traffic when Findory shows an excerpt of their content to those that might be interested.

In the end, I suspect all commercial web-based feed readers will only show excerpts. My Yahoo only shows excerpts. While Bloglines and Google Reader do show full text, they have no advertisements on their pages. If they try to put advertising on the page while still showing full text content, I think they’ll be a strong outcry for exactly the reason you mentioned, that they are profiting while giving nothing back to the content providers.