Blog Ex Machinas last blog post..Lead Philippines

No need to apologize for discussing pictures in your reply to my comment. They were, after all, part of the original discussion in your post, and they are just as important to the issue of borrowed/stolen content as are written works.

Not sure I totally understand how the digital fingerprints plugin works on WordPress. (By the way, I don’t use WordPress. My blog is part of the Orble blogging community and uses that company’s own software. Orble, an Australian blog-hosting company, features its own proprietary blogging platform created by its owner/technician. While my blog is on its own domain, Orble owns the domain name and pays my blog hosting fee. The company, which has a thriving community of over 4,000 blogs, offers domain blogs to selected bloggers whose blogs it feels have the greatest potential to succeed and hosts the rest on its own site at Orble.com.)

It’s fascinating that you’ve been able to learn so much from the blackhat bloggers you know and the blackhat SEO sites you read. That’s a great way to arm yourself and your readers against content hijacking. And while it’s undoubtedly true that experienced content scrapers have a technical advantage over most bloggers, who lack their level of hacking skill, Google Alerts really can help–because there’s no way the automated content scrapers can automatically change the wording of the entire piece (at least as far as I know), which means that setting up alerts that use unique phrases from your work can detect pirated content even when its title has been changed and its byline removed. That’s one great way that bloggers can fight back against content scraping.

The only reason these scraper sites can get away with this is because full feeds give them the perfect medium for easily appropriating entire blog posts. This is one strong argument for partial feeds–though, of course, few people like partial feeds because they do tend to defeat the purpose of using a feed reader.

You are so right not to publish anything from your novels or short-story collections on your blog. Often, it’s very tempting to do that; but with content scraping as rampant as it is, it really wouldn’t be a wise move.

Take care!
Jeanne

I know some blackhat hackers – the things they do are unbelievable and many are extremely unethical. I think with text content, the higher ranked a site is, the more likely it is to be scraped or hacked. It’s a real pain to deal with it, and any blogger that writes something good is a target.

That’s a great idea to check for phrases, and if you want to be safe, you almost have to. I am working on a few novels, and will not be publishing anything from them on my blog, especially my book of short stories. I just publish really short stories on this blog, but nothing I plan on selling – I’ll save the good ones for print.

A really skilled content scraper will automate their system to change titles and bylines based on keywords, etc. and enable them to not get caught often. The big problem is that the average blogger does not posses the technical prowess of a hacker, so they have a huge advantage.

I read several blackhat seo sites so I can learn more about how they do what they do. I figure knowledge is power and I need to know my enemy. I do feel helpless sometimes when I get an onslaught of theft. It never ends! Thanks so much Jeanne

I’m not really very knowledgeable about photo rights. My comment was intended only to discuss written works.

About Google Alerts: I never set up alerts using titles to my work. It’s too easy to change a title before posting a piece, and several of my articles which have been used without permission (or used with permission but altered without permission) have had their titles changed. I set up my alerts using unique phrases from my articles, which is the way I’ve found the articles that had been posted to various websites without authorization.

I also set up an alert using my byline, which helps me find any website that posts anything with my name on it. This is interesting information to have, though it isn’t helpful for spotting plagiarism, since people who steal your work don’t leave your name on it. Sometimes it can help you find people who innocently post your work without realizing they should have gotten permission first, though, since these people usually leave your byline intact.

Wasn’t aware that when you change the name of an image and resize it, you effectively hide it from a Google Alert. Interesting.

Jeanne

I am more inclined to stay away from using blogger’s photos than I am news and entertainment pictures!

As far as Google alerts go, they only work if the titles or exact text is stolen. When using pictures, I change the name and resize it – then it can’t appear on a Google alert.

As dcr says, facts aren’t copyrightable–and neither are ideas. It’s only the way those facts and ideas are expressed–the words and phraseology used to express them–that may be copyrighted. I really doubt that news is copyrightable, either–no matter what the news agencies may say (unless, of course, one uses the same wording used by the original news source without quotation marks and without giving credit).

It would be very easy to get around AP’s ridiculously high charges for using 5 to 25-word (and likely even 26 to 50-word) excerpts from their news stories by simply placing those excerpts in quotation marks and crediting AP as the source of the quotations. Of course, it’s a different story entirely if you decide to use those excerpts without placing them in quotation marks–in which case AP would appear to have a legitimate right to charge you for using its phraseology.

And make no mistake: When you illegitimately post someone else’s intellectual property to the Internet, your indiscretion is very easily found out via Google search or a Google Alert, should the author of the piece decide to use one of those methods to maintain the integrity of the work.

I’ve used Google Alerts to check up on my work for quite some time now and have found a number of instances in which my work was posted in its entirety to various websites without my permission, several cases where my work was legitimately posted but illegitimately altered and/or stripped of my byline, and even one case in which it was stolen and sold as someone else’s work.

Thought-provoking piece!
Jeanne

michael wongs last blog post..The purpose of this blog

Incoming links are the lifeblood of any site – if someone uses a little from my site and gives me a link, I’m happy to get it. Hell, I’ll personally thank them in most cases