FIGHTING SPLOGGERS, TECHCRUNCH, AND PROTECTING YOUR POSTS

While think of wholesale copying in terms of file sharing and novels posted without permission, there are a lot of other ways copyrighted material is misused on the web.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld notes that his posts are being ripped off wholesale by sploggers.

Splogs, in case your cave doesn’t have broadband, are spam blogs. They are the parasites of the blogosphere and they leech off legitimate blogs and bloggers to drive traffic to their sites and make money off the efforts of real bloggers. The ‘content’ of such blogs is either noise or stolen.

What Erick is complaining about is stolen content. Sploggers are stealing TechCrunch’s content wholesale and posting it without attribution on their splogs, surrounded by ads. This generates ad revenue for the splogger with virtually no work.

This is not a trivial problem for some blogs. In Erick’s case a single post was reposted in whole or in part nearly six hundred times. In itself that’s not surprising since TechCrunch is a popular source of technology news and comment. Most of these sites merely quoted extensively from TechCrunch articles and a few reprinted the articles in their entirety with attribution and links back to Michael’s site.

However there were a lot of sploggers who used the material as splog fodder. As Erick notes: “And of those, 115—or 25 percent of the original—were plastered with ads, making money off our work without so much as a link.”

It wasn’t just individual posts. Some of the sploggers were stealing TechCrunch posts repeatedly and presenting them without attribution to generate page views and ad revenue.

Judging by the responses, TechCrunch isn’t alone in the problem. Several other bloggers chimed in on the forum to report they have had material stolen by sploggers as well. And indeed anyone who does much web surfing will find these sploggers all over the place. I ran into one last week following up on a mention of one of my articles.

Equally predictably there was a small band of the morally tone deaf who roundly criticized Erick for complaining about being splogged while TechCrunch opposes the RIAA and others who are trying to crack down on free distribution of copyrighted material such as music. Attempts to make the critical distinctions were roundly ignored by the “intellectually lazy” (in another poster's phrase) who just wanted to run up their snark scores.

What follows started as a response to Erick's original post and has been suitably edited, emended, and (perhaps not so suitably) expanded for this post. I’ll start with the practicalities for someone who’s being splogged in this fashion and then we’ll get back to the distinction between this and file sharing.

Note also that none of this deals with bloggers who quote extensively from other blogs with proper attribution and linkbacks. We’re talking about scammers who are making money by stealing other people’s work and using it to generate ad revenue.

The practicalities
I do have a few practical (?) suggestions for anyone whose content is being stolen wholesale.

• The first is to watermark your copy. Not your pages, your copy. Embed the watermark in the text file, not as a separate background layer. That way any robot who scoops it up will also get the "TechCrunch" (or whatever) all over it.
• The second suggestion – which should really be the first – is to personalize your posts. That is, make the material truly yours by things like repeated mentions of your site in your posts, multiple links to related articles on your site, adopting a more personalized slant in your posts, etc.

Sploggers aside, this is a good idea anyway because it helps to distinguish your ‘product’ from all the other blogs out there. Vanilla prose, like vanilla layouts, are much less effective at attracting and keeping readers that something that is truly yours. This is true even in technical blogs.

Blogging is a form of communication that works best when your readers have a sense of who you are. That’s true of web interaction in general. Among other things, it helps to build a sense of community if your readers feel they know you. And community is one of the most important generators of repeat views, word of mouth and all the other happy little marks of blogosphere merit.

These suggestions go to the problem of attribution. The sploggers aren't going to go to the trouble of teasing this stuff out of your posts, especially the rewritten copy. That's too much like work after all. On the other hand, the misguided bloggers who think of themselves as legitimate are likely to make the effort. Which provides a useful distinguishing characteristic. Perhaps the misguided ones are susceptible to a gentle note about blogger etiquette.

There are also a couple of legal-type things you can do without turning into a junior-jackboot version of the RIAA or spending a ton of money.

• The first, and most important, is to copyright your blog. Make sure every post is copyrighted and include a statement of terms of use in the TechCrunch site. This can be as copy-friendly as you want to make it, but specifically deny things like posting without attribution and requiring things like linking. Also include a phrase about the posts being free for non-commercial use. This puts you on a firm footing legally.
• Next, and almost as important, is complain long and loud to Google about all the AdSense ads the sploggers are using to make money off the stolen material. Under the AdSense agreement, Google has broad authority to terminate the agreement – and the ad revenue if it feels the blogger is misbehaving. With luck Google will pull the splogger’s AdSense agreements. Even if Google does nothing on your specific complaints, if enough bloggers complain about the misuse of their posts, Google will be forced to deal with the problem.
• Like any scheme of theft for profit, the sploggers’ greatest vulnerability is the money and the trail it leaves behind. Going after the sploggers advertising agreements is the most direct form of attack and it hits them where they live.
• If you decide to go this route it’s important to establish that there is a pattern of misuse. Google or other ad services aren’t going to care about a single stolen post. However if you can demonstrate that the splogger has repeatedly stolen large chunks of your work and used it without attribution, Google or whoever is going to be a lot more receptive. For one thing they understand quite well that there’s the potential for a lawsuit against them based on a pattern of supporting bad or illegal practices.
• And finally, there's that ol’ debbil the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. File DMCA takedown notices against the egregious offenders with their ISPs or blog services and force them to remove the offending articles. The DMCA makes this extremely easy to do. All it takes is a letter containing the appropriate language and the site or its ISP is virtually forced to comply. You can automate the process and keep doing it every time one of these guys reposts another of your articles. The sploggers will find easier prey soon enough.

Which leaves us with the purported hypocrisy of being angry at sploggers while supporting, or at least tolerating, file sharing and such. I've preached from the very beginning in Heresy Pornography and Treason that while free copying of material is an inevitable part of our brave new online world, theft for profit is not.

For the morally tone deaf among you: I'm saying it's unstoppable, not that it is all right. As an author I've had stuff ripped off and posted on the web (in Russian, no less!) without payment or permission. I may not like it, but I recognize I can't stop it and I'm not losing any sleep over it. Okay?

But that's not what's going on here. Unlike people randomly reposting TechCrunch articles with or without attribution, people who steal content to sell it, whether directly or by loading their stolen content with AdSense ads, are in a different class, both practically and, at least in my mind, morally. Sploggers can be stopped because there's a money trail.

But what, some of you ask, about the torrent sites that are loaded with ads? Why aren’t we upset about them? First, I don’t know anyone who has any particular soft spot for the ad-supported sites. A lot of people will reflexively defend them when they come under attack by the RIAA or other copyright Nazis, but you’ll notice that shutting down even a popular site doesn’t arouse one-tenth the rage that the RIAA going after welfare mothers and teenage girls does.

Yet like the sploggers these sites are terribly vulnerable. Why doesn’t the industry mount a concerted campaign to shut them down instead of more-or-less randomly going after the most popular file sharing sites? After all, the sites are vulnerable because unless they're doing business through the late, unlamented, Russian Business Network they can be tracked and shut down.

Why aren't they being shut down en masse? Because the RIAA and their ilk have chosen instead to conduct a campaign of legal terrorism aimed at intimidating the average downloader in the hope of scaring them out of the practice. In other words they're crazy as a gang of bedbugs and not behaving rationally.

And copiers for profit should be stopped. Copying and reposting without economic gain is, perhaps, homage. Reposting for profit is theft and should not be tolerated.