How To Split An Atom

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If you haven’t had your content scrapped by some malicious RSS-bot at one time or another please raise your hands. No one? Good, now that we have that sorted out, lets move forward. Erick over at Techcrunch raised a great point about just how prevalent the fine art of stealing and re-purposing blog content is. He said that a single Techcrunch article was copied, without attribution, some 150 times.

Pirates Of Silicon Valley

That seems about right.

The conversation has caused many to draw a correlation between the angers that bloggers (who are generally against strong copyright enforcement) feel over splogs with the similar anger felt by the RIAA and MPAA when it comes to their content being stolen. I think this is a fair correlation, which is why while I think that splogs are incredibly frustrating — I am not about to start a war against them.

From personal experience, “University Update” along with about 2 dozen .info sites have been pulling my full feed and wrapping it in Adsense for about 6 months now. Unfortunately, it is just the landscape that we exist in. RSS is a use agnostic distribution system for better or for worse, and anyone who uses it in their publishing process will have to take the good with the bad. Would it help if Google killed off the splogs? Sure it would but in the intellectual property war, content producers will always be on the losing side of the carnage.

As publishers, unless we want to go down the road the RIAA did and try to litigate every .ru top-level domain that runs a splog-nest then all we can do is innovate around the copying. Having taken a look at some of these splogs, I’ve decided that they probably make a nice chunk of change in aggregate but the damage being directly done to me is almost inconsequential.

Web 2.0 Roundup

While I think we should do things to minimize the damage that unattributed copying leads to, getting into an arms race with sploggers is just a form of ego stroking. What we should all be focused on is providing value that others can’t easily copy. There is something to be said about the conversation that authors bring to the table. Content is cheap but personality can’t be as easily ripped off.

All I can hope for is that we don’t get so up in arms with the sploggers that we start sounding like the music industry. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

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