Randy Morin has posted a Splogger Challenge to www.301powered.com. This site was copying the full text of Randy’s posts along with other feeds. The owner of the site supplied a response, claiming the site was not splog, but a useful aggregation of feeds.
The two posts have generated a lot of comments on Randy’s site, debating whether or not the site is splog. I have to agree with Randy on this one for calling the creator of the site out. The site is re-posting full text of entire feeds without permission, clearly making it a copyright violation. Whether or not to call the site “splog” does not seem as clear cut. The site is different from typical splog which is usually not useful to anyone at all, and is created mostly to get hits from search engines. So I would say this is borderline splog.
on January 22nd, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Aggregation sites are clearly on the darker side of the grey area. Some get permission to aggregate your posts which is fine. But many just repost whatever they feel like without attribution or backlinks.
It is because of Aggregation sites that many people only publish truncated RSS feeds. While many people posted in the comments there that they find this kind of service useful, they are likely not providing any of that content. I don’t make any money from my blog and no one else should be using my content to make money either. For those that do have ads, these aggregators are stealing their ad impressions.
Spamhuntress includes a copyright notice at the bottom of her feeds. I include a image link so anyone reposting my feed will be linking back (assuming they don’t strip out the link). Plagiarism Today has a guide on how to add footers to your feeds.
on January 23rd, 2006 at 8:40 am
Slight correction. The site is not copying my content. I only wish they were.
on January 23rd, 2006 at 11:43 am
Joe,
Aggregation certainly is a slippery slope. Its hard to tell what is “fair use” or not.
In the comments, Randy had some interesting links to this:
RSS and Copyright, circa 2006
More on RSS and Copyrights
I think if you only excerpt, have proper attribution, seek permission, and supply an easy way to opt-out, things are fine.
on January 23rd, 2006 at 11:44 am
Randy,
Thanks for the correction. I guess I just assumed he was using your feed as well.
on January 24th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
[…] This argument was bolstered, at least somewhat, by the presence of credit links on each of the articles. However, this incident has sparked a very heated debate on the issue of aggregation sites and their place in the blogging world. […]