How do you protect your feeds?
Here’s an interesting site I came across just now : http://www.healthvoices.com/. Why’s it interesting? Well, because it’s a blog network that takes its members’ feeds, and reposts them in full. They do credit the source, but that’s the only way you’d know that that content wasn’t written by them. Blink, and you’d miss it.
Wanna know how I found it? Search for ‘wurk’ on the big G , and it up it pops in the results. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d think that the content on this page was owned by the site owner. Click through to individual articles, and you’d hope/imagine that you’d be taken to the site where the content originated from. Nope. Each item in each feed is reproduced as its own entry with its own permalink and comment form. They even wrap a bunch of contextual ads around it. Hmmmm.
Now, I wouldn’t care a great deal about this if they’d asked my permission to do this. I’d probably still say no, but that’s not the point. The point is that they haven’t. And that pisses me off.
But the thing that winds me up most is that if I published full feeds for the wurk sites, then the *whole* of our content would be displayed as part of their site, and their readers would have the ability to comment on it, and permalink there. So that is exactly the reason why I only publish the first 200 or so characters of each feed.
I also include at the end of each item a quick, unobtrusive statement that says ‘This is just an excerpt – visit the blog to read the rest of this article!’.
What I might have said ‘yes’ to is if they displayed post headlines that actually link through to the original article on that individual wurk blog. To me, that’s acceptable – it’s half the reason why feeds are published (the other reason being to alert people that there is new content).
So, I’m going to do two things.
1) I’m going to email whoever owns the site and politely ask them to stop reposting the content in full. If they want to display headlines that click through to the original article, then that’s fine with me. Alternatively, another way to solve this would be for a wurk Adsense publisher ID to be used in the contextual ads on his site that are wrapped around our content – meaning that the guy can display all the wurk content he can fit on his pages, but he won’t make a penny from it. Think he’ll go for that one? ;o))
2) I’m going to amend the statement at the bottom of each item in feed to say something like: ‘This is just an excerpt – visit the blog to read the rest of this article. If you are reading this outside of a feed reader, or this content is being displayed on a website outside of the wurk network, then the owner of that site is committing content theft, violating copyright laws, and just generally being an arse.’ Or words to that effect.
What do you think?
**UPDATE: I’ve just being doing a little more browsing aroung Healthvoices.Com, and found a page all about ethics . One question, though… how ethical is it to aggregate content from a bunch of blogs without permission, display it as your own, and wrap contextual ads around it?
Just asking.
Contributor: Barry Bell
I'm a freelance writer and designer with over 10 years’ experience of creating award-winning recruitment and consumer marketing communications, together with a wide range of other creative marketing colateral. ... more »
WURK profile: http://WURK/profile/admin
Contributor website: http://barrybell.com
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Barry,
A few points:
1) The feeds are posted as you publish them (for distribution, I guess?). This is NOT full content, only excerpts you provide. You can embed ads or anything else you like.
2) We are not stating or implying anywhere that your site is member of our network. Your feed appears in the syndicated feeds section. Exactly as published. With your “excerpt” note and links back.
3) You question ethics. Our ethics efforts focus mainly on MEDICAL ETHICS of blogging. The exact rules for blog/RSS syndication fair use are far from being established. We are open to input.
4) If you do not want to be part of our rapidly growing community of med bloggers, just ask to drop your feed. We might add headlines-only feeds at some point, but not now.
5) If you really want to fume about someone using/monetizing your contents without your permission, complain about Google and Technorati. Go ahead.
If you publish any kind of feed, expect more aggregators to pick it up. Just not everyone would even respond to your requests, like we do.
So you decide what we do. Remove your feed completely or replace with another one you provide.
Regards,
Dmitriy Kruglyak
Publisher, The Medical Blog Network
http://www.healthvoices.com