Robotcoop ignores copyright
I just got a referrer from 43people.com. They’re publishing my blog - somewhere else. Yep, I said, my blog. The whole posts. I must have forgotten to bring the copyright infringement notice over from my previous host, because it’s not there. But they obviously haven’t read my copyright notice either (it’s at the top of the right pane on the main page), because it says outright that what they’re doing isn’t allowed.
Some thought went into this, because they have my photo and a short bio as well. It’s like a small website. Now that I don’t like. My website is here, not over there.
So, what to do. I guess I’ll let them grab this post, and then think about blocking.
So, how to block…
Their robot has this user agent:
http://www.robotcoop.com
And the IP number is: 65.61.137.66
And to the one user who’s accessing my site through that service: Sorry, you’ll have to find another aggregator.
Update: So why don’t I like websites syndicating my site, unless I’ve OK’d it in advance? Two reasons: 1) Some of the syndicators are ad driven. I don’t want someone else earning money on my work. 2) You don’t see the comments if you only read the syndicated stuff on another website. This is different from syndication software, that tells you when something’s new, and often gives you a shorter snippet.
Syndication software and websites like bloglines are great, because they enable you to keep up on loads of websites. But I don’t like being syndicated on someone else’s website unless it gives me something valuable in return. Some have gotten my blessing to do it, but those OK’s were usually in place prior to 2006.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Hey there!
I am reading your blog through LiveJournal… It is syndicated here:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/spamhuntress/
Referrers will come in thge form of USERNAME.livejournal.com/something where USERNAME is the LJ Username of the person accessing.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Hi Brian,
Yeah, I know about Livejournal. That’s been happening for some time. The guy who originally added the feed got my OK at the time.
There is a problem though, you don’t get to see the comments unless you actually go to the site. Sometimes the comments are the best thing, you know?
August 15th, 2006 at 9:01 am
That’s a Rackspace IP. In my experience, they’re not spam or abuse friendly. Are their policies hostile to such sites?
August 16th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
I noticed a similar type of thing in the knitting corner of the blogosphere. If you visit
http://www.reknit.com you’ll see many, many blogs “reblogged”.
Evidently, one can now download “reblogging” software to make this all very convenient. See http://www.reblog.org/ .
I have to admit, I was a bit perplexed when the person running the reblog posted this:
http://www.reknit.com/2006/08/a_plea_for_mercy_from_your_edi.htm
(A complaint that the people writing the original blogs are making her job difficult by, well, including stuff she’d prefer didn’t in her reblog!)
August 17th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Hi Ann,
I read you blog on 43people and/or on google.com/ig. I’m not quite sure why you publish an RSS feed if you don’t want other sites to agregate it. Some subscription feeds require a unique key in order to access them.
For web agregators, in which you can add any RSS feed, it would seem to be impossible for the site owners to read the copyrights the feeds they receive. In the case of your feed, there is not copyright in it. Google and every other search engine will index your site, and sell ads on their website, unless your robots.txt file forbids them from doing this.
FWIW, 43people doesn’t have ads on your syndicated page, and there is no reference to a copyright inside your RSS feed. People who want to read and/or leave comments are going to come to your site anyway.
If you simply don’t include the rss link in your site, most people are not going to know it exists.
August 18th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Brian, the problem that Spamhuntress is concerned with is not users reading her feed in a feed reader. What bothers her an other content writers is that other people are taking their posts without permission and using them to build their own site.
Normally Spamhuntress’ posts have a very obvious copyright notice on each post, her plugin must not be working after the server move recently. But even without a copyright notice in the feed that doesn’t give others permission to steal it.
August 21st, 2006 at 8:13 pm
*ahem*
http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_Feeds
http://www.feedburner.com
Syndicate what you don’t mind people republishing, don’t syndicate what you don’t want them to republish. Embed a link to your site in every feed post if you want. Embed your whole damn copyright if you want. Syndicate only the first 5 words if that’s all you can part with.
The power’s in your hands, huntress. Your time might be better spent learning how to control the situation instead of conspiring to bring down those who take advantage of your carelessness. They are merely syndicating your syndication feed, after all.
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Plagiarism Today recently posted on this topic.
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Courts have held that the implied license of an RSS feed is the same as the implied license of a Web page, the license to view, cache as needed for personal use and save to one’s computer. It is NOT to republish.
In short, they’ve held that an RSS feed is just another Web page, one meant to be viewed in a different browser. Considering that so many RSS feeds are published without the owner’s knowledge, it would be hard to hold that every person who publishes one intends to give the world the carte blanche to redistribute it. An implied license, by law, can only go as far as people would have likely negotiated a formal contract themselves and most would not have opened up their content for all to use and abuse.
There are plenty of reasons one would want to publish a full RSS feed without allowing resyndication. The big reason being not wishing to inconvenience the majority of site users based upon the actions of a very small minority of visitors.
After all, even a site with a tremendous RSS scraping problem will find that less than 5% of all visitors actually do anything fishy with the feed. The vast majority are always legit.
Just because one has the technology to do something with a piece of copyrighted material does not make it legal or ethical. “Taking advantage of… carelessness” does not make one’s actions rights. If I leave my car unlocked at night, that’s careless, but it doesn’t make it acceptable to steal.
As far as wasting time goes, I’m sure the huntress knows how easy it is to get such sites shut down and to protect one’s works. I never spend more than ten minutes on a case of plagiarism anymore. She probably spent a great deal more time writing this post than she did handling the matter.
On that note though, thank you for the heads up. I greatly appreciate the information.
August 24th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Sorry, I just fail to see how a site like Eyebeam Reblog posting RSS-discovered posts their editors find of interest is any different than Joe Schmo posting something on his blog saying “I saw this really cool post on SpamHuntress today, she said this and this. Here’s a link to it.” Are both prosecutable? And does no one see the benefit of this type of republishing, i.e., free advertising? Getting syndicated is the nirvana for serial media creators like cartoonists and talk show producers. Shouldn’t a blog author be glad they’re getting more readership exposure with ZERO effort? As long as the republisher clearly credits the author, links to the original, takes no credit for the post, yadda yadda… where’s the harm?
August 31st, 2006 at 2:22 pm
SEW has posted The Taming of the Bots, an article explaining many of the reasons scraper bots are unwanted by site owners.
August 25th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
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