First SOPA and PIPA now ACTA

Posted by timethief — January 26, 2012

ACTA “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 →

Spotting a splog

Posted by timethief — October 14, 2008

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

Steals blog content with no notice to the original authors or accreditation.
Fails to provide a means of contacting the site owner (often the contact and about pages are broken links).

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.”

: spyglass

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.

Continue reading →

How to copyright your digital works

Posted by timethief — October 7, 2008

stick'em up

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.