“Few people have heard of ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, but the provisions in the agreement appear quite similar to – and more expansive than – anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.” – If You Thought SOPA Was Bad, Just Wait Until You Meet ACTA – Forbes. Continue reading
Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen from from the RSS feeds of other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites. Source: Wikipedia
In her article How to spot a splog Lorelle says:
“Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than link farms, a bunch of text stuffed with links to whatever they are selling. The easiest way to identify a splog is when nothing adds up nor matches. The content doesn’t match the links. The content doesn’t match the blog title or post title. There is a signature or name in the article that doesn’t match with the name of the post author or submitter.”
Angela Swanlund is a new blogger friend of mine. She’s been a full time professional freelance writer for 2 years, and part time for over 7. She’s an Author for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, History and Culture and is currently retained on contract to research the 1946 unsolved “Moonlight Murders” that took place in Texarkana, Arkansas. True crime is her normal genre, and she has covered such notorious individuals as Ronald Gene Simmons and the West Memphis Three. On occasion she does freelance work for area newspapers such as the Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, a 3 state regional farming publication. She also owns I also own Rural Family Living, LLC, a small retail sales business.
Angela and her co-author Patti Ann Stafford, the Editor of The Music Rocks!, have an emerging blog. Angela recently had blog content stolen and she has shared some splog spotting tips that I’d like to pass on to you.
Copyright Law: 12 Dos and Don’ts – Click the title link and find 12 Do’s and Dont’s that will clarify what you can and what you can not do as an online publisher.
As the blogging phenomenon expands, copyright concerns become quite important. Technology makes it really easy to copy, modify and share information, whether we talk about text, images, audio or video. The problem is that the vast majority of people do not have a clear understanding of the Copyright Law, which might result in illegal and costly mistakes.
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Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved.
cc spectrum
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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MyFreeCopyright.com – protection for Literary Works Visual Arts Performing Arts Sound Recordings
How does the MyFreeCopyright process work? Registering with My Free Copyright is instant and can be proven in a court of law. MyFreeCopyright provides a third-party, non-repudiation, registered dating of your original digital creation. By using this service, you publicly associate your digital copyright and defined rights to you.
So, how does MyFreeCopyright date register my copyright? Every digital file has a unique makeup of bits and bytes which is its fingerprint. MyFreeCopyright captures your original creation’s fingerprint, stores the fingerprint in a database and sends a copy of the fingerprint to you in an email. The email contains the verified date; the fingerprint verifies the digital creation, and your email address verifies it belongs to you. (NOTE: You must keep the email with this fingerprint. This email is your date registered copyright proof and protection for your copyright.)
mfc protected
MyFreeCopyright stores the fingerprint as well, which allows you and others to return to this service and verify the copyright.
I wanted to let you know about an exciting new service that MyFreeCopyright is now affiliated with called CopyrightSpot.
CopyrightSpot allows you to discover all the spots where your licensed and unlicensed original writing lives on the web.
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Related posts found in this blog:
Content theft: The come and get it solution
Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
SplogSpot: Dealing with content thieves
Copyright: Fair Use Limitations
What is copyright?
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Although I do not get paid to blog, I take my blogging very seriously. I invest time and energy into researching and writing my posts. I have a strong sense of ownership of my words and that means I’m “attached” to what I write. I know that it is my attachments and aversions that prevent me from becoming a more open minded and generous person. And, I’m constantly working at breaking away from and letting go of the attachments and aversions that lead to the creation of negative emotions.
I have just read A Radical Solution to Blog Content Piracy and I’m mulling over what I read. Below is an excerpt but please click through to read the whole post.
Two big blogs, maybe more, have adopted a radical approach to copyright. You are absolutely free to copy, paste, steal, modify, and otherwise manipulate whatever you find at the wildly popular Zen Habits and The Simple Dollar. The content on both blogs is public domain.
come & get it
This decision by two notable bloggers, who have decided to “give it all away”, is one that is a 360 degree turn about from my current policy posted on my Copyright & Disclaimer page which states:
“All content in this blog created by the blog owner is the property of the blog owner and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and cannot be stored on any retrieval system, reproduced, reposted, displayed, modified or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise without written permission of the copyright owner except as noted below.
A brief excerpt of content (up to 50 words) may be quoted as long as a link is provided back to the source page on this blog.”
Part of that consideration is that my policy reflects how I treat the writing of other bloggers. If I were to change my policy how would I view those who do maintain the position that I currently take?
Conclusion: I’m not ready to change my policy at this time but I do want to know what my readers think.
Discussion questions:
Related posts found in this blog:
Splog Off! Dealing with content theft
SplogSpot: Dealing with content thieves
Copyright: Fair Use Limitations
What to do about copyright
What is copyright?
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The only time a complete post can be legally re-published is when prior written permission has been received from the copyright holder. In other words, the same rules that apply to the world of print also apply in cyberspace. Perhaps the most annoying thing about being a blogger is having to deal with the parasites who steal copyrighted material and post it on splogs that they pimp out for advertising income.
I previously published Splog Off! Dealing with content theft that lays out the steps to take to lodge a DMCA complaint but now there’s something new.
splogspot
What is SplogSpot?
SplogSpot is service that keeps track of spam blogs or Splogs. The splogspot spam database can be queried by anyone using the SplogSpot API. This will help blog related services, directories etc keep their sites clean.How does it work?
SplogSpot has automated software that can detect spam blogs. SplogSpot also accepts manual splog submissions, that are first reviewed and then added to the database.How to participate?
When ever you come across a Splog (spam blog), you can report it to SplogSpot.How it helps?
Maintaining a database of spam blogs will help us to avoid splogs whenever possible. Also, on request, the splogspot spam database will be made available to any good willed person or project :) And the most important of all, you can use the SplogSpot API to determine the genuinty of a blog, when handling blogs in your custom built application or anything like that. SplogSpot also provides a full dump of the Splog database (weekly).Several posts that I would like to recommend:
Five Media Hosts for Media Offloading
Are Creative Commons Licenses Confusing?
MyFreeCopyright: Free Copyright Verification
Protecting Content by Using Static Pages
Limitations of Fair Use
Reference
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