Posts from my blog tend to appear on other sites
April 20th, 2008
Actually, I am fine with that. I have copyrighted all the posts on my blog, but I have also licensed all of them with a Creative Commons license (unless you see a specific notice stating otherwise). In other words, if you are one of those who is aggregating my posts and reproducing them on your site, that is okay with me, as long as you do the following things.
1. You retain my name and copyright notice on all posts, and you include a link to my main blog site on your site or in the post itself, preferably both.
2. You do not make any money from my work without talking directly to me and getting my permission (and preferably offering some sort of royalties).
3. You do not change my words or modify my information without saying you have done so and releasing your derivative work under the same license.
I know a lot of people who have been complaining about this sort of thing, and I understand their frustration. Instead of fighting this, I am choosing to embrace it. To help those who wish to use my content to comply with my wishes, I am now including an automatic copyright notice and link at the bottom of each of my rss feed entries. If you are using WordPress, you can do the same thing with the Simple Feed Copyright plugin.
Entry Filed under: General
11 Comments Add your own
1. Azrael Nightwalker | April 21st, 2008 at 10:28 am
Most of such sites are splogs (spam blogs) which need to have fresh human generated content to boost their pagerank. They’re used for Search Engine Optimization or for making money using Google Ads or such. I don’t think any of their owners would bother to ask you for permission to steal your posts. You can at least report the googleads thieves to Google. SEO-thieves are pretty much unstoppable. Unless you’ll poison their content.
2. matthew | April 21st, 2008 at 11:02 am
You are helping me support what I am doing. Why?
Well, you confirm that there isn’t much that can be done to stop this, and that it isn’t likely that any of these owners are going to ask for permission. You also note they are not likely to stop unless the content is poisoned and that they do it to help their own SEO.
Okay, so by putting a link here in each post that is “borrowed,” I get a link back to my own site. That helps my search ranking. If the “borrower” don’t like that I have done that, they can remove my blog from the list of the ones they aggregate content from. Either way, I win.
3. RainCT | April 21st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I just wanted to let you know that “©” by itself has no legal value (but “Copyright” does). I don’t know if it matters though as afaik everything you write is copyrighted unless you state the opposite.
4. matthew | April 21st, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Thanks for the info!
5. Sridhar Dhanapalan | April 24th, 2008 at 6:30 am
I’ve installed and activated the plug-in, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. How can I tell it what licence I want to put on my posts? Thanks.
6. matthew | April 24th, 2008 at 6:46 am
In your admin panel, click “plugins.” Look at the list and find this plugin. Make sure it is deactivated, then click “Edit.”
In the edit window, adjust the message in the html/php to include what you want. Click “Update File” to save.
Go back to the plugins page and activate the plugin. You won’t see anything different on your site, only in the rss/atom feeds, so load one of those to check and see that it is working.
7. Sridhar Dhanapalan | April 24th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Thanks Matthew. I misunderstood what the plug-in was supposed to do. I should’ve just looked at the source
I think I’ll hack it to mention the exact licence I want to use (CC BY-SA).
Cheers!
8. matthew | April 24th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Sridhar: to put the info in the page footer, I just modified the footer.php file for the current theme.
From the Admin control panel, choose:
Design -> Theme Editor -> footer.php
and when done, click “update file.”
You probably know what you are doing, but others reading who may not be comfortable or skilled with this, just make a backup of the file first so you can restore it if you make a mistake.
9. Sridhar Dhanapalan | April 24th, 2008 at 10:36 am
I’ve now got my footer.php and Simple Feed Copyright plug-in to state the exact licence I’m using. It would be nice if Wordpress had some licence management functionality, so that you could manage licences for your blog or even for individual posts/pages. Then I could just define a parameter like get_bloginfo(’licence’) in the php, and have the licence name show up on the page.
10. matthew | April 24th, 2008 at 10:48 am
I agree. That would be great.
11. matthew | May 13th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I’ve had this up for several weeks, and I have been thinking about it. For me, this is probably overkill, so I’m disabling the plugin.
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