Rant: It's Illegal And Unethical And They Know It! Options

[copywriter]

There have been several posts lately on the topic of so-called "original content" that is really nothing more than a cheap and dirty way of ripping off authors. There is a huge wave of sites, companies, services and SEOs who all dedicate themselves to stealing (and, yes, that's exactly what it is) the actual original content of authors and also the content of spidered web pages. This stolen content is then recycled into supposed "original content" that is reused on other sites.

This just gripes me to no end! There is no way anyone can sit there and tell me that they honestly believe lifting paragraph after paragraph of content from someone's copyright protected article or web site page and using it as-is in another article is not a violation of fair use. Especially when the material, in almost every case, is for financial profit (an explicit exception to fair use as stated by the U. S. Library of Congress).

Free reprint articles, right? That means anyone can use them free for anything they want? Absolutely not! The author still holds the copyright and still has a set of reprint regulations that must be followed. The U.S. Copyright office also specifically states that. These people are not publishing the articles in full with proper credits and a link back to your site. They are cutting them into bits and pieces and making new "original" articles from them then barfing them out to the Internet all over again.

If you are some naive soul who is using these types of article and honestly hasn't thought about the seriousness of this type of thing, take a moment to consider it now. If you spent hours researching material to write a quality article for your newsletter or a page for your web site, how would you feel if someone swiped it and made it available for every spammer in the world to use and call their own? You wouldn't like it a bit.

If you are an SEO who has been using this type of unethical method of generating content for your clients, let it be known now that you are absolutely in violation of U. S. Copyright Law whether or not you choose to accept and acknowledge that fact.

I know I'm on a soapbox right now, but I've just had enough. This is wrong and everybody knows it. The people who run these sites just think they can get away with it. The owners of these sites know they are doing something wrong or they wouldn't all be trying to defend themselves in their FAQ pages and in their emails. When you aren't guilty of something, you have no reason to offer excuses for it. All of these sites do. They immediately address the issue of fair use and copyright violation because they know their attempt is to just barely skirt the law so they can make a profit. I'm not in business to work my butt off so they can turn a profit from my hard work!

Do you publish an ezine? You'd better check and double check the so-called "original articles" that are being sent to you. You may be found guilty of publishing plagerized material if you accept these regurgitated articles. At the very least, your ezine could lose a great deal of credibility.

Take a few moments to look over these sites and you'll see what U.S. Copyright Laws protect, what is allowable and what is not.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

http://whatiscopyright.org/

http://www.copyright.gov/

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html#howmuch

Enough is enough! If these people spent half as much time at a real job as they do trying to steal from others, they'd be rich already. Give me a freakin' break! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/ranting.gif)

This post has been edited by copywriter: Mar 10 2006, 09:44 AM

[BobetteKyle]

Amen!

Not to mention, these kind of so-called "articles" often end up making no sense. Websites gain longevity - and profit - by having content that is useful, not a bunch of garbled and disconnected paragraphs.

[SearchRank]

Double Amen, Karon! I just blogged about this thread here.

One time a so-called search marketer in my own town stole my sales copy. Ironically, I found a thread he had started on some forum where he was whining about people stealing content from him. I jumped in there and embarrassed the hell out of him when I exposed him as not only a content thief but a hypocrite.

Another time a CEO of a leading SEO firm stole one of my articles and accredited it to himself. That one I couldn't believe. I called him on it and he removed it just before I was ready to go public with his crookedness.

There are things we can do. Of course we should first ask them to cease and desist and sic a lawyer on them if they do not comply, but other then that, contact their web host asking them to take their sites down; contact the engines to ask them to remove stolen content from indices and even expose them via blogging and/or public forums.

[OldWelshGuy]

A good while ago, Iwas checking referers for a client who owns a transport company, when I noticed some odd referers. I checked it out, and this company had just lifted our client site, and changed the logos and CSS to make it look a little different. They had left the links to many of his pages, as I hard coded most of them, including the sitemap.

Turns out this company had paid a company twice as much as I had charged my client originally for his site (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

It was great to see the referalls coming though. I mean how dumb have you got to be to rip off the #1 site for a major phrase like uk transport services (or whatever it was at the time). It is obvious to a blindman they would get caught.

In fairness though the owner of the site (once we had pointed out the links to the original site in his code) was understanding and complied. He never dealt with an offshore designer company again though (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Jill]

Out and out stealing content is one thing, and pretty much everyone knows it's bad.

But, Karon's point is different.

She's talking about those spam machines that claim to produce unique original copy. The folks that use these and those that create it try to say that it's not stealing, because they're only taking a sentence from here, and another one from there.

They're wrong. As Karon so eloquently pointed out, it is indeed stealing. And I think it's a great idea to make this common knowledge for all those newbies out there who just assume it's okay because the spammer software creator says it is.

It's NOT okay and if you have bought software like this, you need to ask for your money back. In fact, perhaps some of us should get together and attempt to get these software companies shut down.

[train99]

This is just the latest fad for the "something for nothing" crowd. These poeple are just fooling themselves.

The search engines already have duplicate content filters that can spot this cut and paste crap. They haven't rolled them out fully, but I bet in the next six months you'll see a lot of whining about sites disappearing after an update.

I saw blogger is now shutting down blogs for spamming if they suspect it's just rehashed content from other sites. I see a lot of my content on blogs. The ones I see are almost impossible to read. (I think they are machine generated in order to use keyword phrases, and just steal paragraphs from other sites.)

We've already gotten to the point that when we see a site for adsense we hit the back button. We are filtering out the scraper sites manually. The search engines can see that behavior. I don't know if they already use that to weight rankings, but it would be rather easy to see a searcher come back from a site quickly.

Think about it. When someone leaves a search engine and lands on a content rich site, they hang out. Crap scraper sites don't get long page veiws.

This will all blow over once the search engines clamp down on it. Then we will be left with hundreds of thousands of worthless sites on the web that attract no traffic. As time goes by they will come up for renewal and disappear forever.

Terry

[St0n3y]

I had an instance where another "SEO" firm took a news release of ours (about a new web tool we created), "rewrote" it and published it on the his site. Not only did they remove all the links to the tool but they even changed my quote in the release. It was the same gist of what I said but NOT what I said, and not good grammar. I called them on it and they removed it. I wouldn't have minded had they kept the link to the tool, but by removing that they were just stealing content for their own benefit.

[randfish]

IMO, there are only two ways to solve this issue in the long term:

1. Dis-incentive the tactic - remove the monetary or traffic potential;
2. Remove the ranking ability; this is up to the SE's algo teams

Some combination of the two is probably on the horizon, but the easiest step to me would be to have Google AdSense actually review the sites it runs on. It's ludicrous to have them upset about spam, yet basicallly funding it.

[qwerty]

Not just funding it. They profit from it.

[Scottie]

I've been debating this issue with an email spammer who sent me an email promoting his software.

Dear SEO,
(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) for Search Engine Optimization
Time Saving - it is a well known fact that many search
engine optimizers pay students tens of dollars for
each article, and that many search engine optimizers
need many of those articles each month. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) saves
them these expenses: Search engine optimizers enter
their search terms, which fit the needed keywords, and
get an article which contains these desired keywords
in each paragraph. If the length of the article is not
enough there's always the possibility to add keywords
and get more paragraphs.
For the time being (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) is a free service.

Quality - Search engine optimizers can write many
quality articles in a very short time. The articles
will increase the traffic to their sites, because
people are attracted to good fresh and surprising
content.

White Hat - (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) serves White Hat Optimization
because it prepares Web pages for humans to read – not
for machines.

Placement – After using (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) for half a year I
presume that some of the good placements of my
articles in different search engines are due to the
quality of (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) retrievals.

No duplicates – (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) retrievals are unique: even if
one makes the same query twice a few days later he'll
probably get other results.

Fair Use- (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) obeys the rules of Fair Use :
"You may use short, direct quotations without the need
to obtain written permission from the copyright holder
provided that you give proper credit to the author and
sources. We define 'fair use' as excerpts under 400
words (or a series of excerpts totaling fewer than 800
words as long as no single excerpt is longer than 300
words) from one work."

Although he starts out saying this software is for SEO purposes and deisgned to create "original content" from the works of others, when I emailed him back, he changed his story:

I took up your advise and brushed up on copyright law.
I discovered -thanks to you- that since (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) 's
purpose is educational there's no danger of law
infringement.
...
In my blog
you'll see a notifocation to the readers to ask
permision from the owner of the article. The user is
responsible - (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) is just a tool, like rain - it
can be used for good or for bad. My intention is that
you'll use it to promote educational sites

Riiiight... oddly enough, none of this was mentioned in the original email spam. All it mentioned was automatically "writing articles for humans" and "not paying students" for SEO articles. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/puke.gif)

Gotta love the "I can't help what people do with my tool" defense... especially when that's exactly what you promote it to do!! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/thinking.gif)

[meta]

The excerpt length he mentions is so long that it wouldn't fly even for legitimate educational use. 400 words or 800 in several pieces? That is longer than most article published online.

[OldWelshGuy]

How about the search engines simply remove all reference to this software from their indexes? If it is illegal, then surely it is illegal to promote ilegality?

I guess that we are back to the situation of the software itself not being illegal, it is its uses?

[Randy]

Gotta love the "I can't help what people do with my tool" defense... especially when that's exactly what you promote it to do!!

I guess the author doesn't remember Napster being sued and shut down by the RIAA, hunh?

Dunno, but it seems like a pretty direct correlation to me. Napster tried to use the same excuse --along with some others-- and it didn't fly well.

[copywriter]

One that I know of is software that is sold for a profit. The other I'm aware of at the moment is more like a search engine. It's free to use. This is the guy Scottie and another moderator have been emailing with.

As for engines recognizing and eliminating the new articles created by these resources, that's highly doubtful. First of all, they are pulling a sentence here, a paragraph there, a section over here. It's not as though they are taking one entire article and just changing a word or two. It's like an auto chop shop. They hack up 6 or 10 articles and paste them back together into 1 article. I don't know of any engine that could recognize something like that. And that's not the job of the engines anyway.

Being used for educational purposes does not give free license. It does not mean he can pull excerpts of 300, 400 or 800 words and call them fair use. (And yes, whoever asked if most articles are that long in their entirety... they are!) That's an excuse this one guy is using. Notice how he changes his story as he is confronted? The mark of a true professional and an upstanding Internet citizen, for sure. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/nah.gif)

The other software is making a profit and that is absolutely against every fair use interpretation I've ever read. Fair use pertains only to those not out for commercial gain and for those who have obtained nonprofit status. The guy selling access to his software/database is certainly not a registered nonprofit organization. Not to mention, even for nonprofits, there are still limitations.

[copywriter]

Oh, and in reply to the spammer saying this was for educational purposes...

Just because someone else uses this for educational purposes does not mean HE is a licensed educational institution. Just as if he were going to use the nonprofit defense. HE would have to manage a registered nonprofit organization. It doesn't mean that a nonprofit can use his spammy engine and that makes the whole deal OK.