Copyright 101

Over the past couple of days, I've had a rather unfriendly e-mail exchange with these not-so-nice and not-so-honest people who think that they can freely use the content from random strangers' dog blogs in order to create their "own" blog, which makes them money by means of Google AdSense.

What makes this whole situation and the email exchange that followed so funny-ironic is the fact that I don't actually mind if people repost things I've written on my blog, as long as they're passed on with proper attribution to me. If you look at both this blog and my dog blog, you'll see that I have a Creative Commons notice on the upper right, which explains in very simple terms how and why my content may be used. (Click here to see that explanation.)

I don't even particularly mind if a blog consists of nothing but feeds from other blogs. However, when it goes from using someone else's content to abusing someone else's content, that's where I draw the line. There are ways in which the use is mutually beneficial:

For example, a blog that uses nothing but feeds publishes only the first paragraph of the feeds, then places a link to the original blog. This gets the original blog where the content came from more hits, thus reaching a wider audience. Mutually beneficial. However, when a blog that uses nothing but feeds publishes the whole content, including all pictures, it's no longer mutually beneficial. Why would someone go to the original blog if they can read all the content on the other site? That's what constitutes an abusive use of feeds.

This is what was happening in the case of the "friends" I mentioned above. Their entire site consisted of nothing but blog feeds from various dog blogs - full text, photographs, videos, and everything else included. Only at the very bottom of the full post did they have any kind of "link back", and certainly no mention of copyright or licensing. Heck, I wouldn't even have known this has been going on, were it not for the fact that another dog blogger happened to find them. I certainly never got any hits from that site.

I decided to send them an email and offer them terms under which the use of my content would be acceptable to me. I gave them two options. Option One: post only the first paragraph of an entry, along with a link to the original entry on my blog. Never post any photographs, images, or video from my blog. And, if that option seemed objectionable to them, Option Two: remove all of my content immediately.

They actually emailed me back and tried to justify their theft of my content. No apologies, no suggestions for reaching a happy medium, just trying to justify why they have the right to use my content. What the fuck? Below are some of the "reasons" they've sent me via email:

Your blog publishes both RSS and Atom feeds for syndication by aggregators like ours, and you provide pointers to it for search engines in each page. This is generally an indication that you wish to syndicate the material you are providing, and neither of the feeds contain any copyright information.

Let's pause at that last sentence for a second, the one about copyright information. They're laboring under the delusion that lack of copyright notice means that there is no copyright attached to the piece. However, had they bothered to consult with a copyright lawyer, or even read up on the Myths about Copyright, they would know that the Berne Convention makes copyright automatic. In other words, I write it and it's automatically copyrighted to me.

Which is all kind of a moot point because my blogs have a very clear Creative Commons notice that specifies exactly how things may be used. Of course, they'd only know that if they'd actually come to my site before posting my feed.

You are in control of how much of your posts are in the syndicated feeds. Most blogging software and sites have a setting that allows you to specify whether the whole post, or just a "teaser" are put into feeds. You may want to check this setting.

Don't you just love how they are trying to turn what they're doing wrong (abusive use of feeds) into what I'm doing wrong by providing a full feed so that people can read my posts through a feed reader, such as Google Reader? Incidentally, that's how I read the blogs of everyone on my reading list. And that's exactly the purpose of feed readers. Maybe I missed the part where they were created so third parties could make money from other folks' copyrighted content?

It quickly became quite obvious that these people didn't have the common sense of your average amoeba and knew about as much about copyright as the average pile of dog poop, so I asked them to immediately remove all of my content from their website. I also pointed them to a couple of websites explaining Creative Commons licensing and copyright and recommended they consult with a copyright lawyer before they find themselves in court.