[twitter]I got into a very heated discussion today with some editors and manager types over at Urban Vancouver.
The site is an aggregator of blogs from across Vancouver and the web. They access the RSS feeds distributed by the blog and repost the entire blog entry on their site. I call it scraping, they call it aggregating.
Some tried to defend what they do by likening it to a mashup. However, mashups, as they are commonly found on the web and in music today, take an original work, combine it with another and make an entirely new product.
Taking my copy, republishing it on your website, with a unique url to your website, and linking back to the images from my server is not an entirely new product. It’s theft. It’s plagiarism. It’s wrong.
“It’s theft.”
Copyright infringement, not theft because nobody has been deprived of anything tangible. Although I agree with most of your post.
@Simon thanks. as I said, I’m a pretty emotional guy.
Legally it may be an infringement, personally it feels like a theft.
Thanks for the comment and clarification.
“It does indeed drive traffic to the original URL.”
I use RSS readers to read blogs, and if Urban Vancouver has someone else’s entire article on their feed there is probably very little click-through to the original page.
What kind of referral traffic have you had from UV, if any? I believe they also have my blog up there (though it’s less of a deal to me at this point).
I noticed my food blog on Urban Vancouver 2 months ago, when I did a vanity search on Google and found one of my posts, with an Urban Vancouver URL, in the #9 spot. Promptly asked them to remove Tiny Bites and my personal blog (which I never hope to see syndicated again)–a request they accommodated straight away.
Before I sent the request over, I checked my web stats to determine whether I was actually getting referral traffic from the site: nope.
@david no, i dont get any traffic from UV. i do suspect, however, they get quite a bit of traffic from gaming other people’s content. in essence they siphon off your traffic to their site as all the keywords, links, and seo you assign to your post magically get assigned to their site as well.
fun how that works, isnt it?
Depending on where they are taking your feed from I guess depends on what you can do physically to stop people from scraping your feed.
If they are taking from your domain feed (http://yourdomain.com/feed) or something similar you can use an .htaccess file to block various IPs/Domains etc.
If they are taking it from say Feedburner, not sure what you could with that. Not sure if Feedburner has an option to block people from reading your feed, they should if they don’t.
(their website is currently timing out on me so I can’t see it lol)
Oh I forgot to mention, creating an excerpt is really not hard to do. If you have programmers that are smart enough (lol) you can easily substring the full feed to like 100, 150, 200 or whatever amount of characters and then just hyperlink that back to the original source.
I have a site that I run that reports on other sites content. I don’t scrap them, I manually read over their content and create my own posts and then quote a small portion with a link back to their original article.
[…] Another Edit: Buzz has posted about it here. […]
I think intent matters here, Buzz.
UV has been running since April 2004. There was nothing else like it (pretty much anywhere) at the time. It was part technology demo, part community research project.
It is meant as an aggregator of all Vancouver content. People can come to one place and (through a browser) read a ton of content. And of course, people can post events, blog, etc. — not so important today when that functionality is available everywhere, but back in the day, there were few places you could easily / cheaply do this.
The links in the right sidebar? Recent posts, they all go straight to the blogs in question.
Want to read via RSS? Great, go the sources page (http://urbanvancouver.com/aggregator/sources) scroll to the very bottom, and use the OPML file to get a list of all blogs. Drink directly from the Vancouver blog fire hose. Which, of course, links to the original blogs.
People ask to be included. Others ask to be removed. We think it provides value, and our intent is not to steal or do anything malicious.
Commercial? I think it makes about $2 / month on adsense (I’d have to check .. it’s essentially negligible).
“Roland’s smug chuckle” — anyone that knows Roland knows that he is ANYTHING but smug.
Your blog got removed. What else would you like?.
@boris the solution is simple: ASK before you re-appropriate someone else’s content.
have it be opt in. send a notice to each and every author you currently scrape, notifying them of what you’re doing and give them the option to be included or not.
unilaterally reposting content without notifying the original authors can be anything from copyright violation, to plagiarism to simply inconsiderate.
if your team is adding feeds manually, they have the time and energy to seek permission from the authors first.
if this technology is well behind the norm, remove the site. build something else.
as for roland, i have heard anecdotal evidence from other bloggers who have asked to be removed that he was less than poilte about it. arrogant, smug, cocky, indifferent – take your pick.
I was a small part of some of the discussions yesterday, mainly because this is an area (especially with regards to photography) that I have a vested interested in. I’ll also go on the record and state that the guys at Urban Vancouver have helped me get into a few high profile events based on the traffic of Urban Vancouver, which was much appreciated. That said, I was always under the impression that all the content on UV was opt-in, not opt-out. But given what i know about Boris, Roland and everyone else involved, I don’t think there’s anything malicious or devious going on (at least with regards to intention). But, I think in in the future the perception might be better if it is moved to opt-in, or as you suggested, sending a polite notice to someone when their blog is included. Just my 0.02.
@duane thanks so much for weighing in. i agree with it all.
my main issue has been, and will remain, the negative option they use for the content. the refusal to properly explain their actions, or explain why they act without permission is what frustrated me to no end yesterday and continues to bother me today.
they may provide a useful and valuable service for those who need seo help, but they shouldnt plunder through the feeds of every blogger in the city and repost the content at their own whim.
hell, even the spambot comment pages and link farms i see still only excerpt content when they scrape it.
the full scale reposting of entire blog entries including art and images without permission is the issue.
I, for one, am okay with the fact that Urban Vancouver aggregates my site content.
I was very careful to set up my Creative Commons license in this way, so that other sites could use my content in exchange for full attribution with link. When the site linking to me outranks mine, and my words and pictures are exposed to that bigger audience (not to mention the SEO boost from the link), I consider it a win.
In this regard, I am not alone. It has become commonplace to license content in this way, and Richard is guilty of having missed the variation in Buzz’s license. It’s likely that this has happened more than once, but never with any malicious intent, I’m sure.
Buzz, I almost understand why you prefer to stunt the growth of your blog by remaining a human gatekeeper of the use of your content, and it’s easy to see how you could be so incensed by the misuse of your content, in violation of your license. But your tone throughout has been less than gallant. You could have handled this calmly and actually educated a lot of folks on fair use and started a lively debate.
But you dared to imply that Roland was anything but a gentleman, and I here I am on the record in his defense. While I wasn’t there, I’d bet my hat that his chuckle was meant to try to disarm you in his almost trademarked jovial way, and you misinterpreted it through your seething rage.
One other thing .. buzzbishop.com/blog was also being scraped by UV. right on the front page of buzzbishop.com there is a notice:
“all site content copyright cyberbuzz media. no unauthorized use permitted.”
authorization guys.. that’s what you need AUTHORIZATION
@jordan thanks for the comment.
i agree my tone has been less than cordial, that can happen when you’re trying to have a problem solved, and those who created the problem refuse to acknowledge the problem.
i stand by my impression of the phone conversation, i appreciate others have a different impression for knowing the man personally, i’m speaking to a 2 min conversation i had where my request was treated as frivolous and my opinion of the situation deemed ignorant.
THAT is what elevated my temper. the simple fact that there has been no admission of inappropriateness and that those who make the requests for removal are somehow ignorant to the system and a burden on their day.
it can be very frustrating.
I will leave the post up here so the comments and thoughts are on the record.
I just got off the phone with Kris from Bryght/Raincity. He’s a passionate guy about building and sharing and collaborating. Those in the community buy in to that process as well.
We had a great chat, and I’m sure the work that’s done by UV was with the best of intentions.
I, and others, kinda just wanna be asked before our stuff is fully republished.
And that’s that.
Way to stand up for your stuff.
Buzz, if you really want to prevent this sort of things from happening, I’m doing some research on copyright law in regard to bloggers. I’ll probably bring it up with everyone at Dot Com Pho in a few weeks.
I know our blogs get scraped. Mine does sometimes. Michael’s does too…and John is scraped by several scraper blogs. I’m looking into what we can do about it…since I find it annoying that someone takes our content.
[…] Some bloggers, notably in Vancouver, openly admit to this sort of gaming of the system. Boris Mann of Urban Vancouver has defended his site’s scraping and republishing of content by saying it was a means to help bloggers gain access to events. “Many people benefit from the ability of UV to help generate “press” credentials, for everything from music awards to the Olympics,” he said. […]
[…] not news, I was on about this last summer as well: Actually, it might not be the bloggers they’re getting over on, it’s more […]