I know many bloggers face this, and it seems some of my content became the victim once again. Much is due to the inherent nature of RSS and the multitude of automation tools available to grab these feeds and make posts from them. I do this myself for SpikedStudio Productions, the new podcast network, but the feeds are either mine to begin with or authorized content.
Once before I had content taken from EverythingTwitter and republished. The author of that blog responded promptly and sent a wonderful apology letter explaining that they were unaware of how the plugin was working and posting the content without attribution to the source.
However, it has struck once again. I noticed it a few weeks ago on a new site that was registered June 15 2009 under the name TwitTrix.com with the registrant/administrative and technical contact being in England. The site itself was registered in Jun of 2009, and content started appearing soon after.
With the current tools available for aggregation, it is tempting to take non-attributed and linked content for easy republication. This moves beyond aggregation and into copyright issues.
Bloggers work hard for unique and valuable content, and often rush to be the first to have an article posted on a subject. With this comes the responsibility of finding the right sources to give you ideas and generate topics, not a full copy/paste or import.
Some sites have taken a firm stance on how to deal with someone on their service that might have copyright material, like Blogger by Google. While those of us that find content on self hosted servers do not have much leverage except to ask first.
So I turned to some sites that offer suggestions and advice on how bloggers can protect their content. Plagiarism Today had 5 steps each blogger should take to protect content. I suggest we all get to reading. DailyBlogTips also had 12 Do’s and Don’t to follow which were good to add to the list.
Finally the place where I go to begin to even grasp how to blog effectively, ProBlogger and his excellent articles. Including this one on protecting your content.
