Take a good look at Blair on the left here. Blair thinks it’s OK to steal the entire content of someone’s web site and post it as his own material. If you see him on the street run, don’t walk, and get the Blog Police. Bad Blair, bad!
Yesterday Kevin noticed that one of his posts on jkOnTheRun had been posted illegally on another website. Not just a typical blurb or mention, this was the entire post with images lifted from our Feedburner RSS feed. It even included Kevin’s initials as typically appearing at the end of the post. Closer examination revealed that this entire blog was publishing our content direct from our RSS feed, including the “Digg This!” link at the bottom of each post. The person stealing our content is known simply as Blair and in addition to adding “Posted by Blair” at the end of each of our items appearing on “his” blog he is putting his photo on each article too. That’s assuming it is even his photo.
I informed the webmaster of elgg.net, the host of “Blair’s” blog, of the copyright infringement and the fair use abuse. This morning I heard from Ben Werdmuller of elgg.net who agreed that this exceeded fair use under the copyright laws and that he would ask Blair to take the content down. I appreciate Ben’s prompt response and his promise to rectify the situation if Blair doesn’t remove the content promptly. Surprisingly, he also mentioned:
It is worth noting that although this appropriation does go beyond fair use, the RSS standard is designed for syndication and your copyright notice at the bottom of your site is incompatible by this.
By its nature, RSS will be stored in a retrieval system, i.e. an RSS aggregator.
This leads to an interesting debate given the wording of the jkOnTheRun copyright notice:
Copyright 2004 – 2006 by jkOnTheRun.com, all rights reserved. All materials appearing on www.jkontherun.com may not be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system without prior written permission of the publisher and in no case for profit.
Feedburner is the aggregator serving the jkOTR RSS feed that Blair is ripping off and they have permission to do so by my signing up for their service so I am not sure how this copyright notice is incompatible with the situation as Ben states. Any IP lawyers (Matt Buchanan or Doug Sorrocco) out there care to comment?
UPDATE: I have been contacted by Blair and believe that this fiasco was a mistake and not nefarious behavior on his part. He has removed our content and is closing down the blog in question. As a result (and because I am a generally nice guy) I have agreed to remove his photo from this post. I will continue to watch to make sure it doesn’t happen again and if so the photo goes back up.
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