I was still trying to figure out what to do with the fresh wave of posts on blog plagiarism when a totally random search brought to the surface an example of someone taking the paidContent.org feed and posting it as though it is from their site. (Rafat tells me the site is removing our content and will stop scraping our feed.) It isn’t the first time this has cropped up: a major publisher is aggregating our content and sending it out as part of its own feed. A couple of clicks in there’s a credit or a link back but in both cases at first and second glance it’s not obvious that they’re relying on paidContent.org to make their sites appear more robust.
So what’s blog plagiarism? Essentially the act of taking verbatim content from a blog not your own and using it elsewhere without attribution or permission; sometimes involves subterfuge and masking of content origins but also can be blatant; usually done to boost traffic, rank, ad revenues, etc.
This wave started with a post from Fred Wilson channeling Jason Calacanis, who has been very vocal about the practice and the potential/actual damage. Calacanis appears to have coined the term “Really Simple Stealing” — a take-off on one definition for RSS as “Really Simple Syndication.” Feeds make it easier to do a lot of things, including port other people’s work to a different site. (It would be a mistake, though, to blame the technology instead of the bad actors.)
A follow-up by Wilson adding Really Simple Stealing to his Internet Axis of Evil also made it into the conversation. The theme was picked up by others including Business Week’s Blogspotting; scroll down for a useful explanation from PubSub’s Bob Wyman about how sites that scrape other people’s feeds can profit.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post