Feed guarding: Protecting your weblog content from theft — or worse fates . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Back in the dark days before the turn of the millennium, if you saw something I had written, down at the bottom there would be a little addendum: “Join my email update list.” If you did this, you would get a copy of every new essay or story I wrote at the time that I made it public. Not as convenient (or as annoying) as a Listserv, but you wouldn’t have to scrounge around on Usenet to find my deathless prose. Back then, a lot of people distributed content this way.

Dave Winer, the Tesla of weblogging, saw how stupid this was and invented a much more efficient alternative: RSS syndication. Instead of an email pushed from an email client, an email of updated content was pulled from a newsreader. Not only would I not have to undertake any special effort to send the email, you could receive it only if, as and when you wanted it. Genius!

What’s important about this is that, from the standpoint of my copyright to my original content, nothing has changed. Before I was pushing emails to individual readers. Now individual readers are pulling emails. But, simply because an RSS feed is easy to obtain, easy to repurpose, easy to resyndicate — this does not imply that I have waived any rights to my intellectual property.

People sometimes argue that RSS syndication creates a gray area in IP law. It doesn’t. In the United States, a transmissible work of the mind is presumed by default to be copyright protected. The presumption is rebuttable — for example by a waiver of copyright. But if you have not waived the rights to your work, you do not need to assert them by filing a copyright notice or by appending a copyright symbol to your work product. Your work is yours, and, except for fair uses for non-commercial purposes — e.g., a quote with a link in a weblog post — no one has the right to republish your content without your expressed permission.

So: Your fine young weblog gets splogged: Your feed is “scraped” and republished with a lot of creepy ads surrounding it. Or worse, some cheesy Realtor is kiting your entire feed and presenting it as his own work. A little less infuriatingly — perhaps even flatteringly — a real estate news aggregator is blending your feed with feeds from dozens of other weblogs. This stuff happens every day, probably quite a bit more often than you know unless you’re watching for it.

Okayfine — but who cares? I think you should. Some of the bigger fish in the RE.net have been talking about this in email this week, with the meta-topic being what, if anything, to do about it.

Matt Heaton at Active Rain was the first one to go public, providing an overview of the topic, and deftly dealing with some of the fears associated with the issue by pointing to some Google documentation and details on copyright law.

Dustin Luther, Jupiter Optimus Maximus in the RE.net pantheon argues that you shouldn’t worry about it. There is some truth to this. Sploggers, particularly, are a rape and run crowd. They may hit you three days in a row, then forget about you forever.

Sellsius offers some tips on how to regain control of stolen content, and Joel Burslem at The Future of Real Estate Marketing has also offered advice on this subject.

Bottom line: Should you worry about this or not? I think you should.

There are two potentially very negative consequences that can result from your failure to defend your feed:

First, Google and other search engines can decide that you are the bad guy. Search engines police hard for duplicate content, since it is so often the harbinger of Black Hat SEO games. In principle, you should be protected from the presumption that you are trying to game the system, but this seems to me to be a very big chance to take.

Second, if you fail to defend your intellectual property, it is arguable that you have abandoned it. I don’t think a judge would buy that argument, but how much money in legal fees are you willing to pay to find out? That notwithstanding, whatever resale value your work might have is massively diluted by wanton republication. This really may not seem like an issue right now, but you have no idea what tomorrow might bring.

If, like BloodhoundBlog, your weblog has contributing authors, you have a third reason for vigilance: You probably do not have the legal right to tolerate republication of your contributor’s works or likenesses.

So how can you tell if your feed is being stolen? First, watch your trackbacks and pingbacks and your Technorati links. If you see a link from a blog you don’t know, investigate. Half of them will be new friends. The other half will be thieves — even if they don’t understand that resyndication without permission is copyright theft. These are the good kind of thieves, at least: They’re linking back, which may protect you from duplicate content penalties.

The bad thieves you can only catch by trolling the net for your own content with software like Copysentry from Copyscape.com. If you set up an account with them, you’ll get a very eye-opening weekly report of who is ripping you off.

You don’t have to do this. Dustin may be right: It may be a better use of your time to just press on regardless. My take is just the opposite — and I am extremely vigilant to make sure BloodhoundBlog does not get resyndicated. You have no way of predicting the downstream negative consequences that may emerge from failing to defend your intellectual property. But, stipulating that they could be very bad, a small effort today could save a lot of trouble later…
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