Performancing is a perfect example: When Nick put out a call for authors, I emailed and offered him some of the articles from one of my blogs. Not all the articles wind up on Performancing, and when they do, there’s usually a bit of rewrite involved. It’s a good relationship that works for both of us, but it’s a lot more like a syndicated column than syndicating a feed.

Syndicating entire feeds without contacting the author(s) first is not only wrong legally but also amounts to nothing but a splog. There’s a big difference between spam blogs that use content without permission and blog networks which aggregate content by permission.

Basically, fair use allows you 300 words from any collected works, overall. If you apply the term “collected works” to a blog, then you can never print more than 300 words from it, total, without permission. So I beg to differ about the term “steal” when someone reprints a full-feed. Summarizing other people’s content is one thing, republish it full-feed is another. It’s not justified just because you link back.

That doesn’t mean that everyone minds, but I want someone to actually ask me if they plan to profit off the hard work I put in writing articles. Still, if you are republishing that many feeds, you might do due diligence and contact the owners of the sites you are republishing and see how they feel.

From a reader point of view, if I visit your site and see a full-text article, I’m not necessarily going to know that you’ve republished it. So why would I follow any link? I don’t agree with your hypothesis. Republishing full feeds without permission, explicit or implicit, is simply not justified. (I hold to this viewpoint so strongly that I decided not to write an ebook about how to do this, that someone requested of me.) I give people the permission to republish some of my content, but certainly not all of it. Similarly, if I publish articles at an article directory, I’ve given my implicit permission to republish.

The argument, in my opinion, is equal to saying that the door to someone’s house was open, and because it was raining outside, you decided to go in.

I have a site that aggregates a dozen+ feeds and 100+ articles a day. It benefits me, and it benefits the sites I aggregate. I am not stealing, and I respect the wishes of any feed owner that contacts me.

How it benefits me:
– it adds content to my site
– it drives more traffic to my site
– I of course monetize what I can with adsense

How it benefits the feed owner:
– I link back to their site for every post (more backlinks for them = greater pagerank for them)
– I have a master page with all their posts and link back to their site with description of what it’s about (increased branding)
– they can place advertisements in their feeds, and they’ll show up on my site increasing their revenue

The relationship of how the feed is produced and how it’s aggregated and used is tricky at best. Both parties have to be aware of their options.

I’ll give you some examples…

I aggregate feeds with both partial and full posts. Full posts of course are great as I get more content on my site. But a one line post (like digg.com posts) of course greatly increases the ‘bounce rate’ of users visiting – and then quickly leaving within 30 seconds. So, when I choose a feed to aggregate – I read it for awhile to see if their posting format will fit my site.

Many of the feed owners place either random or intermittent ads in their RSS feeds, which are anything from text links to full banner ads. It doesn’t bother me that their ads now appear in my site – because they are finding a way of monetizing their content as well. As long as it doesn’t deter from the format of my site, I will never care if feed owners place ads in their feeds, but this is still semi-taboo with many users who despise ads in feeds.

In the feeds that I aggregate I’ve found that many feed owners are getting smarter with their posts, and what they’ll do is put the name of the blog and the post author at the top of the post, and then put links (back to their site) to comment or reply, or even similar tags and categories. I don’t mind any of this either – as long as I’m still getting quality content from their feed. I’m sure some of my visitors click those links and leave my site to go to theirs. But the trade-off is worth it.

I’ve also seen a really weird side effect of all this though…and it’s when an RSS feed is aggregated into another site, and then that site’s feed gets aggregated (and that site is aggregated, and that site is aggregated) that problems occur. I call it the ‘regurgitation factor’.

Let’s hypothetically say that on my site I aggregate the feed for Gizmodo. I like their content and it fits my format. I aggregate 6 other tech-type feeds as well. So people that read my RSS feed get posts from 6 tech sites I like + my original posts. My hybrid feed should be able to pull in some good subscribers, and results in sending both visitors and subscribers to the feeds I aggregate and link back to. Then – bigbadtechsite.com starts aggregating my full feed into his site. So a users reads an article about the new Treo on bigbadtechsite, and clicks through to my site, and then has to click through back to Gizmodo. Imagine if the bigbadtechsite.com feed is aggregated into yet another site? I think if the ‘regurgitation factor’ is more than one – you’ve got a problem.

I know lots of people will have tons of issues with doing this at all – and all kinds of unscrupulous people will read this post and brainstorm ways to create the ultimate spam site based on only RSS feeds.

Whatever you do – be considerate of the feed owners wishes, be professional, and be careful when either choosing feeds to include in your site – and in the ways that you publish and make available your own RSS feed.

I’d wager, in large, that it is an attempt to shield themselves against lawsuits from unhappy partners that get their revenues yanked due to copyright complaints. Still, I don’t know how that would work.

All in all though, it is the best way to handle Bitacle since they are located in Spain and are immune to regular DMCA notices.

Still, remember that DMCA notices to Adsense MUST be faxed or mailed and MUST contain a handwritten signature. Very important.

If anyone needs a DMCA template, I’ll gladly share mine.

Copyright © 2006 Inhabitat. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. If you see someone deliberately infringing our copyright, please email legal@[blog].com to alert us.

Although this wouldn’t stop people from hijacking content via RSS, it does make them look bad when they do.

Also, if you worded it very specifically, you could use it to do a search to find offending sites.

Unlike AntiLeech (which is great!), this plugin does not aim to prevent spam, but attempts to make blog owners more easily aware of potential problems.

The plugin is called Digital FingerPrint — [full disclosure: personal link]

I too have struggled with scrapers that republish my full posts with photos (hotlinked, thankyouverymuch) – I’ve found that in the instances so far step one works just fine … if I can find a contact address on the site. (I had problems with coollect.com).

The other piece of advice is if the site has ads, report the abuse. Adsense is great at suspending accounts when it’s a site made up of scraped content. Take away the money and you’d be amazed at how quickly they cease and desist. I’d put that right on par with step 1 … even if they remove your content, it’s doubtful that they have permission from all the other sites they’ve scraped from and should lose their profit from it.

His plugin is called AntiLeech.

These are sites like Gerard Butler fan sites, or Korean film fan sites, etc.

It’s annoying, but it’s helping me. For example when I ran a review of the Korean film The Host, Korea went mad for it, and my traffic that month doubled. There were several Korean sites with my entire review in them and a source link, and although it was annoying it was better to have that advertising than not.

Sure it’s an extreme example, but with the Butler sites it’s the same issue but a much smaller scale. They’re still giving me a few people a day for a few weeks. Surely even that’s worth it?

The second issue I’m having is a huge grey area. Most of the daily posts I make are reporting and commenting on news stories from other straight news sites. So, for example, I’ll comment on a press release or rumour carried by another site.

Sometimes I find these stories before the rest of the film community does and I write about it first. Within a few hours the story is appearing on a number of other film sites, some crediting you as a source or “via”, while others are either giving no source or ignoring the fact that they found it through your article.

In one case I even know a site that is looking at my stories, rewriting them, and then just quoting my source. This site is known within some areas of the film blogging community for doing just that.

It’s very difficult to prove and a very grey area. After all there’s no need to say that the story was found on a certain site, just what the original source is.

Yet it’s the same outcome, these sites are using you as an aggregator, using your hard work sourcing and writing content to produce their own, and therefore make money.

This is much harder to deal with, and is perhaps impossible. I certainly don’t know what to do about it.