Today’s Focus :: Content Theft

The issue of how to protect one’s work online grows more serious to those it affects as RSS gets more popular. So how do you deal with the fact that a tiny portion of the population invited to syndicate your blog abuses it beyond all rational reason?

On the one hand, you don’t want to pay TOO much attention to the issue.

After all, what we focus on in life expands. And having content stolen from your site isn’t such a prevailing issue that most people will ever have to deal with it. It, in fact, places you into a very elite group, once you have people stealing content from you — most of the time bad content isn’t stolen on any regular basis.

And anyway, the vast majority of syndicated blog content and article reprints are 100% legitimate. Pretty much, if you see a live link back to the original content or content provider, you’ve found good content. And that’s most places, so online content theft isn’t out of hand yet. It may never be as bad as all that, who knows…

However, I thought I should dedicate a day to the topic. A few people brought some sites to my attention that others are using my content to profit from techniques I am against, some are fabricating testimonials from me, and one person even took an article of mine that was exclusive to an online newspaper I write for, changed about five words and republished the article as his own content. That wouldn’t have been a big deal if some major online publications hadn’t accepted the paper.

So what’s happening now is that people are writing to me and saying “Gee, Tinu, you’re this high-profile kind of person… if you’re getting ripped off, how do I know that it’s safe for me to write articles/blog/syndicate my feed?”

And that’s why I’m putting a whole day’s worth of posts about it.

For the most part, I can get someone to stop using my content by asking, and through a few other methods. If they didn’t, I could make a big, ugly stink about it if I wanted to, because I’m somwhat in the public eye.

However, the vast majority of the time, I let karma take control of the situation. Most of the time people who rip my feed and re-use it are only bringing shame upon themselves – and they stop when they realize this, or the fact that incorrect syndication of other people’s content won’t even get you an Adsense income, let alone better search results. And when using stolen conent for commercial puposes they find that people aren’t stupid – once they see that someone is stealing content, they won’t want to do business with them.

There are times, though, that the way people use content from my feed or my articles that are blatant misuse in ways that could affect my reputation. More importantly, if my instructions or information is taken out of context, they can be manipulated to occasionally people to use technqiues I strongly advise against, such as in the issue of blog and ping – which I am NOT in favor of at all. I don’t want to see people screwing up their sites thinking that they’re following my advice.

For all these reasons I’m going to spend some time today shedding light on different ways that you can handle the theft of your content – and not just from your blog.

Chances are this will never happen to you. But just in case…

Tags: free traffic :: blog promotion :: Content Theft :: plagiarism :: copyright infringement