Steal This Blog Content
SMB Research, where I spend much of my time these days, has now had our blog content illegally copied multiple times, and we are, sadly, hardly alone. It seems apparent that too many people either do not bother to learn the ins and outs of intellectual property and copyright, and how to properly blog, before they start blogging, or people are so utterly incapable of creating their own website content and disrespectful of other people’s intellectual property that they simply covet and steal other people’s IP.
As I have had to say now multiple times, to my great surprise: it is not only not OK to copy someone else’s blog content onto your website – it’s illegal.
Clearly, part of the issue is simply ignorance. In one of the recent instances of my blog content showing up in its entirety on another website, a representative of the other website plaintively asked, “I cited your article, but how do you want it done?”
This person believed that so long as you “cited” where you were stealing the content from, then stealing it was OK. Never mind that this person did not apparently know what a citation was, or what a copyright is, or what fair use is. I was, frankly, more than a little annoyed to have to explain that it was simply not OK to copy someone else’s blog in its entirety and to paste it onto their website without prior permission and proper attribution. Surely, they still teach this in school, don’t they?
I will not attempt here to address blogging “Best Practices”. Frankly, I am not that good yet at either blogging or writing; there are other people and resources on the web far better qualified than me to address this, and you can easily find many excellent references on blogging Best Practices.
But that is not the point, is it? The fact of the matter is that no matter new or inexperienced you are at writing or blogging, you have a responsibility to do it properly even before you do it well. There is no excuse for not first understanding what intellectual property is, what copyright is, and what fair use is.
New or experienced, you may find these excellent resources, articles, and links useful:
- What to do when people copy your blog content?
Anil Gupta, March 18, 2010, on Shoutmeloud.
- Bloggers Legal Guide, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal
- Intellectual Property. Bloggers Legal Guide, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/IP
- Lorelle VanFossen, October 29, 2005, “10 Things You Need to Know Before You Blog“, on Lorelle on WordPress.
- Lorelle VanFossen, October 29, 2005, “What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content“, on Lorelle on WordPress.
- Copygator, http://copygator.com/
- Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts
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See Jeremy Blanton’s article: “Do You know When Someone Is Stealing From Your Site?”, at http://210consulting.com/2011/01/03/do-you-know-when-someone-is-stealing-from-yo/