Content and stealing it (re: fsckin)
I'm a constant reader of fsckin.com. I think it's a great blog, with sharp opinions, relevant, current news, and great reviews. So, apparently, do some other people. After Wayne painstakingly reviewed seven different Linux and BSD-based firewall distros, the review surfaced on two other sites (at dralnux.com and linuxcult.blogspot.com- which makes me sad to be on Blogger with them...). You'd think there would be some kind of credit to Wayne for a review that big...
They didn't even give him a link.
Let's get something straight: I don't endorse this kind of blatant plagiarism. If you didn't write it, you didn't write it. I use Distrogue's "Blog It" feature once in a while, but nothing like this. For the most part, all content on my site is written by me (except for the templates and such that Google puts on there), from the text itself to the pictures and PHP image generators I use.
These "bloggers" are not only making themselves look bad, but they're making open source itself look bad. People are going to look at this and think that writing something about open source means that anyone can just steal it as their own and put it on their site, saying "Look what I wrote!" This is not going to encourage people to write about open source.DistRogue
These idiots also teach an important lesson: If you use your post right, you can bring these plagiarists down. The review included a picture of the test PC. Now, since neither person bothered re-hosting it under ImageShack or Blogger, it says that the review was stolen, and shows instructions on how to report them for content theft under the DMCA. Signing your posts can also help (and working the signature into the rest of the article), since a person would have to go through it and edit it before posting. But that would be like a DRM for blogging, and we don't want that.There are subtle DRMs in here... And yes, I meant "Digg's 'Blog It' feature".
EDIT: Not so subtle anymore... Damn reskin. :-(
From Xubuntu 7.10,
The DistRogue.
They didn't even give him a link.
Let's get something straight: I don't endorse this kind of blatant plagiarism. If you didn't write it, you didn't write it. I use Distrogue's "Blog It" feature once in a while, but nothing like this. For the most part, all content on my site is written by me (except for the templates and such that Google puts on there), from the text itself to the pictures and PHP image generators I use.
These "bloggers" are not only making themselves look bad, but they're making open source itself look bad. People are going to look at this and think that writing something about open source means that anyone can just steal it as their own and put it on their site, saying "Look what I wrote!" This is not going to encourage people to write about open source.DistRogue
These idiots also teach an important lesson: If you use your post right, you can bring these plagiarists down. The review included a picture of the test PC. Now, since neither person bothered re-hosting it under ImageShack or Blogger, it says that the review was stolen, and shows instructions on how to report them for content theft under the DMCA. Signing your posts can also help (and working the signature into the rest of the article), since a person would have to go through it and edit it before posting. But that would be like a DRM for blogging, and we don't want that.There are subtle DRMs in here... And yes, I meant "Digg's 'Blog It' feature".
EDIT: Not so subtle anymore... Damn reskin. :-(
From Xubuntu 7.10,
The DistRogue.
Labels: dmca, fsckin, lame, write your own content
posted by DJ Gentoo at 10:18 PM
2 Comments:
Personally I've licensed all posts on my blog under a CC-BY-SA license, so I don't really mind if people copy my work - *as long as* they provide an attribution link. There's one site that automatically aggregates my posts but does include a link to the original post, with which I'm totally fine. In fact, I'm honoured that I didn't have to submit it myself like I did for several planets :)
However, if the author has not provided any comment about how his work can be used, then it is really annoying when someone does anything more than quoting.
I mind if people duplicate my content pages because some search engines will drop URLs that seem to be duplicates and I worry that my sites could get dropped if a better ranked domain redistributes my content...
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