I've often wondered why people steal Web content

Because they can with small risk, just like downloading mp3’s illegally, or copying CD’s, or putting a copy of a software program on a new computer without paying for a new license, etc.

Not very long ago, the major search engines rewarded sites that combined lots of content with other SEO tricks.
It didn’t matter if the content was stolen, or if the person doing the stealing was a DMOZ “editor.” Grabbing someone else’s content was a quick way to good SERP placement.
Once G started penalizing duplicate content (and I am speaking only to my experience with text content), the number of sites stealing our content bottomed out. That’s my personal experience anyway.
There are no doubt lots of reasons why people steal content, but from 1999-2005, getting a high SERP position was the overarching reason, in my experience.
I hope that stealing content to get better search placement is a thing of the past and I am interested if other people think that this is still a problem.

One should never steal content. Agreed. But being the internet, it does not and should not adhere to normal laws. Once something has been posted on the net it should become free for public use and reuse. If one has written an article relating to birds in Asia, then one must accept that (if the article is popular) the content will be distributed, modified, reused and reinterpreted. If you feel that the info is private, or yours and yours alone then use password protected PDFs or force people to pay for the service. Possibly a minimum requirement should be the crediting of the author by the people who are using the so-called original content.

I agree with the Message from brad in 100%.
Great and short!

Wow! That is one of the most interesting articles that I’ve ever seen on the subject. I have personally heard at least four of those exact same excuses from people stealing my content. Your responses were fantastic!

It can become a full time job just trying to keep up with sending notes to all of the ‘thieves’ out there. Just wondering…what can we do if the blog has no contact information on it whatsoever?

Brad and Sven: I’m not really sure how your logic plays out. It sounds to me as if you’re saying that because someone posts content to the Web they should be willing to do without any remuneration. What makes the Web so special that Web writers and content developers are not allowed to feed their kids in your world? Or are you just saying that because they post to the Web they should only be allowed to make a minimal amount of money, perhaps $250 per episode or article? While anyone else who can get access to that content should be allowed to make money off the content simply because they are capable of hitting Ctrl-C then Ctrl-V? Why are books and magazines exempt? After all, I have a scanner, I can photocopy books and magazines in just a few more minutes than I can steal Web content… Because it’s easy, does that make that okay?

Diana: Blogs with no content information can be challenging. I usually take the provider approach in that situation. For example, Blogger and Blogspot have wording in their Terms and Conditions disallowing copyright infringement – so I write to Google to get the site taken down. Many blogging services have similar rules. If it’s a private blog, you can usually go through the DNS provider or ISP to find out who owns the blog or simply ask the providers for assistance in removing the offending content.

Brad’s logic of “The Internet should not follow the normal laws” is what gets content stealers in court all the time, and juries seldom agree with his position.

I have a number of personal sites, and it REALLY irks me when people link directly to my copyrighted images for use on their own sites. When my statistical reports show a high number of hits on an image from one site, I always find that this is what’s happened. Then I have to rename the image, fix all the links to it, and take down the original.

One site that found I had done this even went back and linked to the image with its new name! This time I called the new image “dontstealmybandwidth.jpg.” We’ll see if they do it again.

We, Art Science Research Laboratory (http://www.asrlab.org ) have a journalism and ethics program that studies flawed reporting. When we criticize many reports they suddenly–whoosh–disappear from the web, just as if the article were fingerprints wiped off a smoking gun. Because people want to hide their mistakes or even wrongdoing, darn toot’en we have learned to save the original full reports on our servers before the evidence disappears from the public’s view. The public deserves to see the original text that the culprits are often trying to destroy.

The public has a right to read what was first published to glean the full and complete story without interference. Truth. http://www.stinkyjournalism.org

There is no requirement for transparency. Plagiarist , fabricators, liars and incompetents love your unqualified idea that under no circumstances is it within the law to copy and post with proper attribution whole works.

Fair use is more complex than this. If a whole article or whole book is relevant for research and study,and the whole context is required for discussion, darn right you can post it for your freedom of speech.

Law suits go both ways–one side is freedom of speech and the other, copyright holders. Readers need to know both sides.

I believe that copy content for interesting useful stuf is essential for the web to function as a repository of information. I have a large list of favorites to fasinating or critical subject matter that no longer work because the site they point to has vanished. I believer that when stuff is copied the nthe original author should get credit. But he/she has already been paid for this stuff or decided to post it for free anyway. Lets not go there. Suffice it to say that I believe that once a work becomes unavailable for purchase (out of print, site goes down, publisher goes belly up, etc) then that work should drop into the public domain rather being lost forever.
Robert

Hi there again.

I think I’ve to be more detailed:

If someone want to get pay’d for something, they should prevent peoples
to get this without payment (crackers not included, of course).

Of course, if I use some content from other pages to show this from my own pages
I have to credit the Author and have to mark the content special,
so visitors dont think that I wrote the “stolen” content myself.

Older content, no longer found in the web, saved in an internal
local database, if i dont shure about the copyrigth-situation.

And it’s a realy bad idea to use images in an page from an other
website without permissions.

I don’t want to be a bad boy, maybe I have some mistakes by using
images (Icons and so on) in the past (realy dont know) on my website,
and if so we can talk.

If this hapens knowingly, there have to be an retribution.

I hope you now understand me in a better way.
(Sorry for my bad english…)

Sven

Actually protecting web content is impossible – (everyone gets a copy of the source downloaded to their computer when they view the page and even if that content is encrypted all that is needed to decrypt it is a web browser). The only protection there is for web content is copyright law.

The whole purpose of copyright is to protect work which may cost thousands of dollars (or more) to produce in the first place but which can be easily reproduced for significantly less (a few cents or even free). Copyright is therefore more applicable to the web than to other media where the difference between the original cost and the cost of copying is much less.

For those who think there is nothing wrong with stealing web content, consider how you would feel if you spent each week at work only to have someone steal all of what you had produced resulting in your not getting paid. Those stealing web content are doing just that to those whose job is writing web content.

It’s a little ironic to see this at About.com, the internet’s #1 content thief. I’ve seen About.com authors claim wikipedia articles as their own.

JimmyC: 2 things:

1. The same is true in reverse. Many Guides have found stolen content on Wikipedia that was written by About.com Guides.

2. If you find stolen content on About.com you have more recourse than you do on many other sites – because our editorial staff take this very seriously. Guides have been terminated for plagiarism, and the content is immediately removed.

If you find stolen content, you should:

- notify the Guide in question of the stolen content. This is standard, and it is what I do all the time when I find stolen content.
- if you get no satisfaction from that, send a note to About.com Customer Care http://webdesign.about.com/gi/pages/pform.htm including both the Guide page with the stolen content and the Wikipedia (or other site) page where it was stolen from.

I would appreciate it if you backed up your inflammatory statements with facts – such as the infringing content you’re referring to. It’s very easy to make nearly-libelous statements in anonymous forums like this without any basis in fact. I am not saying you’re incorrect – I know for a fact that some Guides have been fired for plagiarism. But I have NEVER stolen content from another site. Tarring me with the same brush as a small percentage of Guides is somewhat offensive.

I would assume that those who steal web content either do not have a web site that they themselves worked on or are very lazy in building a web site or both. If you have spent hours and hours – weeks and weeks – and even more on your web site then you understand why stealing from another web site is not an appropriate way to get material for your own web site. It’s only after those many, many hours that you realize the amount of work that goes into building a web site from the ground up, especially your first. Just because it’s on the web – it does not mean that I am happy for you to steal anything from my site, it means that I want to share (in the sense of letting you read and see, not take) the information on my web site with those out there interested in the same things that I am interested in. I am happy that people are willing to visit the web site that I spent so long working on – making it look attractive, readable, easy to understand, making sure that all elements of the site work properly, and that the information that I use is mine and correct, or the information is given appropriate credit. Stealing web content is just that – stealing.

Cool!