It is annoying, particularly when splogs on Blogger remove the nav bar and there’s no way to contact the “author”. If it’s running any kind of PPC, Adsense or otherwise, I report it to the company serving the ads. It’s not much but maybe they’ll lose their accounts and any of their ill gotten earnings

The trouble with RSS is it’s a double edged sword – if a quality site wants to syndicate my headlines, that’s probably a good thing, but a crappy splog/scraper site, even if it links back to my original work, is not something I want to be remotely associated with. A link from such a site may well be a link, but it’s worth very little even if it’s not nofollowed, which of course most will be on Blogger splogs.

One site a few months back actually completely plagiarized some html from an old static site of mine – they even had the decency to leave all the affiliate links in place LOL

Ah, well, whatcha gonna do………

I didn’t have to do anything! Here’s what their email said:

Thank you for letting us know about this website. I have forwarded your
comments to our team of specialists so that they can look into this issue
further.

then some links to their policy pages, then:

While we appreciate your help in
upholding these standards, please note that I am unable to comment
directly on the site or the outcome of this issue, as we are dedicated to
ensuring the privacy of all AdSense accounts.

That’s it. There’s nothing for me to do, but sit back and wait to see if they do anything (they’re not going to tell me). Gotta say my hopes aren’t too high…

Thanks for plugging FeedEntryHeader – you don’t have to, so it’s appreciated!

@ Jonathan – Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a valuable comment. I think I understand a good majority of what you explained. I was fairly certain it was illegal and your statements reinforce that. Thanks alot for the offer of help as well.

I, myself don’t worry too much about it. Most of these splogs will never go anywhere and theres very little chance they will do any considerable damage to my rankings. It’s really just the fact of the matter that they are stealing the work of those who take the time to create it that gets to me.

@ Terry – Well thanks to you for setting this blog up for me when I had no idea what blogging was all about, I have the same realization now I still visit the forum from time to time, but I’ve found so many excellent blogs, I just keep up with them and learn much more.

@ Stephen – I reported one a few months back and I got a reply laying out exactly what to do. Unfortunately the things they needed would have taken hours, if not days, to produce so I just gave up.

I’m almost to the tipping point in favor of installing your FeedEntryHeader plugin. Not sure why I haven’t already. Laziness probably I’m going to give that a plug in the main body by the way. I should have initially.

It’s just plain wrong and, I’m pretty sure, illegal. The problem is what we can do about it?

I reported a splog to Google’s Adsense team 3 weeks ago (for including content that breaks copyright agreements) and so far the site still has Adsense showing.

Really we need Google to take the lead on this and banish splogs from the Adsense program. If they don’t, then they are sending a message that it’s bad to sell links or write sponsored posts (which aren’t illegal), but it’s fine to rip off people’s content (which is illegal).

Anyway, for now I’m sitting tight and waiting to see whether they’ll take any action or not. Of course, I’m also using my FeedEntryHeader plugin to put a copyright statement and the url of the original post at the top of my feed…

I guess there isn’t an easy answer to scraping, other than not sending out your full post in the RSS feeds. In that case, any scrapers truly are giving me a link and anyone who wants to read the entire article has to visit my blog.

At the same time though, that handicaps the use of an RSS reader, so I’m torn.

A good analogy is TV signals. The mere fact you can rebroadcast them and that they are sent out to anyone and everyone with an receiver in range does not means you have the right to do so. Cable companies ran into this issue when they started transmitting local TV stations over cable lines. Broadcast stations eventually won the right to charge the companies for that access.

There is, with RSS, the issue of an implied license. An implied license is a license granted to a user by the actions of a copyright holder. For example, when you post works to the Web, you give users an implied license to cache copies and for search engines to index the content. Both, however, become invalid if you offer an express license, by either adding nocache or forbidding search engines through robots.txt.

An implied license, for the most part, extends only as far as what is physically necessary for the user to use the content in the intended fashion. It extends only to directly foreseeable consequences of a use and, in most cases, RSS’s most foreseeable uses involve RSS readers. The fact that so many are surprised that their content is syndicated via RSS indicates that they are unaware of the possibility and did not intend for it.

However, even if there is any implied license with RSS for resyndication, something I see as highly unlikely, it can easily be trumped by an actual license. This can be done by either using a copyright statement or applying a Creative Commons License. That is, until a fully automated means of providing a copyright license comes along (something similar to either meta tags or robots.txt).

All in all, I would agree wholeheartedly that you have full rights to go after anyone that republishes your feed. Whether you should do so is, of course, another matter. But that I leave up to the individual.

If you need any help dealing with a scraper, please let me know and I will gladly assist. If you need any contact information or stock letters, I should have that on my site.

I’ll gladly do what I can to help!

I don’t care about spammers’ backlink, I just don’t want to be on splogs. Period. I work hard for my content and I’m happy to share it with other bloggers, but people making money out of it? No, thanks.