You’ve seen Splogs before.
Short for spam blogs, splogs take and use content created by someone else to attract search engines in the hopes that users click their site to increase traffic (and therefore ad revenue). Here area couple examples of splog.
Now wait, tommy – you are constantly linking to real journalists. Isn’t that the same thing?
Not quite. I certainly do link – often – to real journalists, and I also grab a few lines in stories from traditional media. But in most (if not all) of these, I add my own thoughts or findings. “Fair use” is what we’re talking about, and this is what allows parody, satire, and opinion to flourish.
The trick is that to be considered fair, the US Copywrite Office says the new work must have a specific purpose, “such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research” (read the part about Section 107).
To be sure, “fair use” is somewhat subjective. Over the past year, the Associated Press has been aggressive in trying to expand intellectual property rights in an attempt to give their member newspapers greater protection.
In some cases, individual newspapers are sending “Cease & Desist” letters to bloggers if they feel those bloggers unfairly use their information.
All of this will wind through the courts eventually, but in the meantime, it’s been made pretty clear that we bloggers can’t simply cut & paste an entire article and stick it on our website without express written consent. This should be true even if we announce “This article was originally written by A. Real Journalist at Ye Olde Newspaper,” AND we include a link to the online version.
Yet TBO.com has been doing that to bloggers.
In June, Michael Hussey noticed a post of his was republished on TBO.com. And then just last week Alex Pickett and zencomix Dave – a couple of other writers from the Pushing Rope blog network – found their posts being lifted in their entirety and published on TBO.com – without permission. We found the same thing was happening with Sticks of Fire, Lakeland Local, and plenty of other blogs.
So on Friday, I wrote to TBO’s director of online content, Loren Omoto, asking for an explanation. In an email response, Loren said that he never knew about it:
don’t know of any place on the site where we’re publishing complete blog content — or anything beyond a headline, summary graf and link to the original post. If that’s happening, it’s unintentional.
This has been going on at TBO since late April. And TBO’s Director of Content claims he was unaware of the content on TBO for over four months. His defense is that they are not evil, just stupid.
I replied back saying that wasn’t good enough. Even just a “headline, summary graf and link to the original post is not enough to constitute fair use – at the very least, you need permission.”
At 9pm, I got another email from Loren saying that they had:
… turned off all incoming content until we can get this to display the way we want, and the existing items have been truncated…
Apparently, Loren still doesn’t get it. It’s not about properly displaying the work of others. It’s about a supposedly ethical multi-million dollar entity stealing the work of others.
In that regard, Pushing Rope’s Michael Hussey started a facebook group: Tampa Tribune: Start Paying Bloggers. Join the group if your writing has been used without your permission.
I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the coming days.
zencomix
6 months ago
I’ll be generous.I won’t consider it stealing until they’ve refused to pay me. They haven’t agreed to pay me, yet, and they haven’t refused.
I got a similarly weak response from Loren Omoto claiming that their running of my comic strips was unintentional. Sorry, but comic strips don’t just magically or accidentally appear on a newspaper’s website.I’m patiently waiting for a follow up from Loren, but don’t wait too long, Loren, those late fees are killer!
George
6 months ago
TBO did show one of my blog posts (http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/may/11/4wd-school-bus-11229/) on their site via TampaBlab, but there is a MORE link that takes it to my blog. However, the inital story on TBO did not give any kind of credit (and thats all I really want, at this time) for my post.
Being relatively new to bloging, I wasn’t sure if I should have been concerned about this. I have found several other blogs using some of my images without giving credit, but after a email requesting same, all apologized and added a link and gave me credit.
I guess with TBO, I was so enamored with the idea of getting attention from another source, that I let it slide.
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
6 months ago
Simple, obvious solution: they use your material, beyond a hed/lede/link (what Google News does), you bill them. Make sure you get (and date) a screnshot of the page. And if they don’t pay, take them to small claims court. Professional freelancers have taken nonpaying publishers to court for years, and almost always win.
John
6 months ago
George, they had taken TampaBLAB’s feed and we set it up on the BLAB to truncate (cut down) posts automatically. Everything at TampaBLAB is also opt-in: Meaning you willingly share your content.
This was not truncated, and this was not opt-in.
There were sport posts from Draysbay.com and Bucem.com that probably trumped their own coverage of either team that they were copying in full. Other sources were being copied in full… No request, no truncation… That were sticking a link at the very bottom of the post and not giving credit where it was due besides a greyed out source title at the top of each post.
I find this as deliberate as them not allowing you to embed WFLA videos on your web site… They want to keep you at TBO.com any way possible and if the content is out there for free, it’s a fantastic way for them to achieve it even if it’s illegal… just as long as no one notices.
Michael H
6 months ago
I just want to play devil’s advocate here for a second, especially since I have spent many, many years making sure both Fair Use and intellectual property rights are protected online.
If I publish something online, say it was a 10-paragraph story, and any other site wants to pick it up … if they publish the headline, even a couple paragraphs (or their own written summary) and a link back to my original story … how exactly is that theft? Some of us call that referral traffic.
My first Web site 11 years ago was built on the content referral concept, and saved a lot of money in advertising and marketing. We always encouraged (and still encourage) people to do exactly what you described in this post — publish a headline, a paragraph or two and a link back to the original — as the referral traffic is amazing, and you basically are getting a free ad from wherever this was re-posted.
When I get upset about something and take action is when someone publishes so much of a story, there is no need to use the link back. The idea is to put a teaser out there, and get people to visit your site. If you are getting click-thrus to your site, what exactly is the issue?
I am not defending anyone here, and maybe there is more to this than I realize. But even in the case of re-embedding video. My sites recently started to include its own media section, including our own videos that we’re posting, or given exclusive access to post. We use a video stream player that we can sell ads on, and we encourage people to lift the embed code from the video and place it on their sites and blogs. When they do that, the ads that would’ve played on our site will play on wherever the video is embedded. So we get eyeballs for our advertisements and such even off our site.
Like I said, maybe I’m not getting the whole story here. But if they are simply picking up a headline, a brief summary, and a link back to you, then there has to be other things to be upset about.
Fair Use does NOT require you to add more content. It only requires that you are not using so much of a particular property that you give the reader no reason to visit the original.
In terms of sending this company a bill, I’m not sure how well that would work either.
Let’s say Sticks of Fire picks up a story from my site, and they use more of the content than I would’ve wanted them to. I write Tommy and ask him to scale it back, but for whatever reasons he chooses not to (no worries, Tommy, this is completely hypothetical, lol).
I then send him a bill for $1,000. He refuses to pay it, and then I take him to small claims to get payment for that bill.
What will happen? I’m not a lawyer, but I can guarantee you that I won’t get $1,000. In fact, I might get my case dismissed.
Why? There was never a contract between Tommy and me that he would pay me $1,000 to republish my story. Even if I can show that I have successfully charged others $1,000 to reproduce the content, thus establishing a value, that’s not the issue: small claims court is about enforcing contracts, and no such contract existed.
In regards to freelancers taking publishers to court, I am not sure what cases the commenter is referring to, but I’m sure it has to do with someone who was commissioned by a publisher to produce a piece, the piece was produced and published, and the freelancer was never paid. In that case, the court is enforcing a contract.
Now I could sue on copyright infringement grounds, but that’s a whole different animal. There I would have to show that the amount of material used was so great, it actually created damage to me financially. And I have to prove that.
If there’s more to this than what I’m seeing here, my apologies. But there is a real high threshold before you get to the “permission” stage not because the government hates content creators, but because the Constitution loves a free press.
Jordi Scrubbings
6 months ago
I’ve found a few of my posts on there through TampaBLAB. At first it was nice for the publicity, but then I realized neither my name nor my site were on the page. That’s when I got mad.
Michael H
6 months ago
But did it link back to your site, and only provide a small smidgen of your original post?
If there was just enough there to tease someone into pressing the “more” link, and that link led to your original content … shouldn’t that be treated the same as an aggregator?
George
6 months ago
John,
I see your point on the feed from the aggregator. However, my written posts are usually just a short blurb, then the image. Even when it’s truncated, if it is showing the image (which TampaBLAB does not do, but TBO did do), then it’s pretty much the whole post. But, to play the flip side of that, people won’t know that until they click on the MORE link and visit my site. So it ends up being a wash.
zencomix
6 months ago
Michael, in regards to you playing devil’s advocate, in my case, they published my entire comic strips without asking me, paying me, or notifying me. If they had just published one panel with a link back to the rest of the strip at my site, then yes, that would have been fair use, and I would have been totally cool with that, but that’s not what they were doing.
They were filling up space on their website with complete content they lifted from other sites, not just giving a teaser with a link. They infringed on my copyright by publishing the strips without getting my permission or paying me. If they do not pay me for publishing my strips, then they have infringed on my copyright and I will take them to court. I have taken people to court before for copyright infringement and I’ve won, and I will win again.
Peter Schorsch
6 months ago
I am sending the Tribune an invoice for the 40 – thats right – 40 articles they posted on their site without my permission.
Michael H
6 months ago
Zencomix: If they published entire panels of your work, then you definitely have a beef with them.
My approach would be to contact them and demand their removal. If they don’t do that, then I would involve an attorney to write them a C&D on it. You definitely have something you should be angry about.
Peter, I’m not a lawyer, but I would suggest you take a similar approach. You won’t be able to back up such an invoice in court, and you’re really just wasting time when you can simply have a lawyer write them a C&D.