In a medium as dynamic as the world-wide-web, the line between syndication / rebroadcast and cut-and-paste of someone else’s content to add value to your own site is a slippery one.
In any other medium, whether it be hard-copy publishing, sound or video content (whether recorded or broadcast), or research, the concept of reproducing someone else’s work, 100% verbatim, even with attribution would be at best questionable if permission were not sought and granted first. To do so in a value-adding medium pushes it a bit further.
In the web, however, common practice differs, and the de-facto definition of “fair use” deviates substantially from the legal one.
The original post is below, followed by a series of comments which tell a story. Although it has nothing to do with “lean manufacturing” I am going to leave this up intact as I believe it is just one small piece of a fractal, evolving landscape called the web.
I am still interested in hearing from others, authors and readers.
—– Original Post —–
I ran across an interesting blog this morning. Actually it isn’t a blog at all. Instead it grabs content feeds from other blogs, like this one, and reproduces it. It then uses the copied content on a page with linked ads to sell books.
While I have no illusions that anything published on the web isn’t, realistically, going to show up everywhere else, including bot-driven ad farms, the question here is an ethical one to me.
This site belongs to a consultancy. The big difference that I see between this application and, say, Gemba Research, is that Jon Miller keeps his (excellent!) blog separate, and it is his content, not other people’s.
What are your thoughts? Is this site value adding, or just plagiarism? Are they contributing or exploiting other’s work to create an adbot site?
———-
This post generated a few comments which I believe you should read to get the complete story. Even if you blow by the comments on other posts, please read the comments on this one.
8 Comments
Unfortunately plagiarism abounds in the blogosphere. I have suspected that columnists from various newspapers have used my ideas to develop “original” stories.
What I find interesting is that members of the consultancy do not identify themselves —- or did I miss that. I personally do not read any anonymous blog —- and I certainly would not patronize a consultancy that goes deep cover.
robert edward cenek, RODP
Thanks for the link. All articles reproduced in the web site are credited to their original authors and back to their original web sites, which is how you found it and how others find you and how we found your comments about us. The web is a wonderful thing.
This is what syndication is. If you don’t like it I suggest you don’t use RSS to broadcast it.
If you want us to exclude your blog just ask. John asked us to ensure we credited him properly because his RSS feed didn’t include credits, so we do.
We use the posts to promote discussion and when time permits we add our own commentary which our clients and staff find illuminating. There is no plagiarism. The benefits are mutual. We get high search rankings which you in turn benefit from because our visitors follow the links to your web site.
Thank you for reading our site. Please feel free to publish any of our articles but be sure to credit the authors.
You did miss my name Mr Cenek, as well as the point. I’m Keith Pincher
Well - this certainly generated a bit of a stir! And that is the *other* purpose of information sharing.
Keith - I think the only thing on your site which triggered my initial response was the use of the content from many feeds which are unrelated to your core business for establishing a draw for click-through ads.
I certainly *DO* appreciate sharing information. If I did not, I would not be writing any of this. To that end, I am NOT asking you to exclude this content, only to consider your intentions.
However the distinction between your site any any other adbot link farm is a little fuzzy.
Thank you for the response. I was honestly surprised to see one from you, and that certainly shifted my initial feeling a bit.
Hi Mark
Our intentions for the site are somewhat hindered by the time available to see it through. Our core business is process improvement consultancy and training, so I don’t see why you find it odd that we would want to include news and comment about the many facets of that core business, such as lean, six sigma, theory of constraints, marketing processes, project planning etc. that we think are interesting.
There is thought involved here. The site isn’t an automated link farm, rather the news section is made up of RSS feeds which we read and decide to share with our readers.
Our intention, and occasionally we achieve it but more often we get derailed, is to write our own observations on whatever is happening in the world as it touches our business and also to comment on postings from others similar to yourself received via our RSS feed. When we have time we do those things, often we just upload the links meaning to return to them later and rarely do.
The click through ads you refer to aren’t pay per click Google ads they are simply links to our bookshop where we showcase books related to our core businesses. If we sell a book we get a small commission and somebody somewhere gets a good book. Sounds like win/win to me.
Keith Pincher
Keith -
Thanks for your interest and dialog. That is what makes the experience worthwhile.
I appreciate that you take the time to read and select what you put up there.
I was referring to the totally off-topic things such as motion pictures and politics, but yes, most of your stuff is related.
There are a lot of automated link-farms out there which resemble your posting area, and many more that cross-post with spam-comments.
As you may have noticed, I have made it a point in the original post to refer specifically to the comments so that readers get the whole story.
I will further edit the original post later today when I have some time and reflect what I have learned through our exchange.
Hi Mark
I’m impressed that you found the politics and film pages which date back quite some time, are not updated and aren’t linked from our main site, though obviously nobody ever deleted them from the server. My excuse is that we do function in the marketing and design arena and that film is tenuously linked to that. Anyway we discontinued it a while ago for the reasons you state.
The political pages were there because we had an ideal example in Tony Blair of how not to manage anything properly and for a while we found much to talk about in his use of arbitrary targets as management tools, his lack of any consultation even within his own cabinet etc.
I think we lost the will to live with that one when he was re-elected and we looked forward to four or more years of the same, so we discontinued the political section in the interests of our own sanity.
The other links to The NHS, Marketing and IT are all areas where our services are applied and we try to keep them relevant.
As an aside, we use a program called Radio Userland to read and publish our RSS feeds. The program itself and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) were both pioneered and developed I believe by Dave Winer, possibly the first blogger. Radio has a button which we push in order to publish an RSS posting to our site if we like it. As a result, what we see in the feed is what gets posted most of the time, unless we feel compelled to edit it. Dave has a lot to say about syndication and web authorship and I point you to his blog at scripting.com
Keith
Mr. Pincher:
You are correct. After navigating through your site for about 5 minutes I finally stumbled across your Linked-In widget. I did miss your name. It took me to a very generic overview of your background. I can not seem to locate any substantive information beyond that at your blog (or website).
Was just passing along a tip. Market yourself more prominently. Welcome the feedback vs. tossing back a sarcastic comment that I missed the point. I actually did not miss the point. There is nothing unethical about what you are doing. It is a feature of the blogosphere. Many blogs serve as “aggregators.” I personally was referencing how some individuals (sans you) seemed to be using my ideas to generate their own “original” article.
robert edward cenek
Thanks for correcting me Robert. I apologise for misinterpreting you and for my caustic response.
Keith
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