Why would anyone want to make their website look like windoze bubble land? It is just too ugly for words!

If they are using your feed to create their own static content, then that can be construed as Copyright infringement and reported as such. And by this I mean recreate your content without accrediting the true author(s) and source. i.e. Making it appear that the content is theirs and theirs alone.

If that is the case, then you can report them to various organisations, Google being one of them if they are also using your content to drive traffic to their site.

But be careful about thinking it can drive traffic to their site rather than your own. Google for example, are quite good at working out where the original content comes from.
Also, if the external site is using a Dynamic script to output the content of the feed, (such as Java), then Google won’t even see the content on their site.
(You can use a site like copyscape.com to check for sites that are stealing your content).

But unless you have instructions on your site has to how and where your feed can be used (i.e. something like “the content on this site can be used but not for profit”), then there isn’t much you can do legally (since you are quite openly providing a feed which is designed to be syndicated by feed readers and web sites as they see fit).

What you can do though is add one line to your web servers .htaccess file and block their ‘crawlers’ from fetching your content.
(In fact one trick is to not only block their ‘crawlers’, but redirect them to a specially made feed, that contains lots of stuff they don’t want to use. Depending on how evil you want to be, determines what content you want to put in their ‘own’ feed file).

You the blogger / website owner are responsible for your feed and also how people use it.

On my customers sites I tend to create several feeds:

1. A digest (first n characters or summary)
2. A complete feed with embedded adverts.
3. A password protected feed (with no adverts).

A website cannot modify the content of the feed, because that infringes my copyright, so if someone wants to display the full feed, they have to display my adverts, OR, they pay me a fee and I give them the password protected feed.
Websites don’t tend to show my full feed because it makes me money and not them.
But they will display my ‘digest’ because that provides a service to their own readers, but it helps me in giving me a source of inbound links. (9/10 those inbound links won’t help my PageRank because they are hidden by NoFollow OR by dynamic content generation such as Javascript which search engines cannot read).

The reason why you publish a feed is to allow other people to use your feed in order to bring new traffic to your site.
Whether it be your visitors reading your feed in their favourite feed reader, or whether it be some ‘random’ website putting your feed on their site, it brings traffic to your site.
You cannot pick and choose which site can and cannot use your content.
You can only choose HOW they use your content by the selection of a suitable ‘licence’.
You only have “Maman Poulet © 2008 All Rights Reserved.” at the bottom of your page template, but the “All Rights Reserved” doesn’t actually carry any legal weight, because it’s on your web page, NOT your content which is on a different URL. You need to have something like a Creative Commons Licence or similar.

Good search engines know where the original content came from, so the external site ’should’ gain no “keyword” gain from using your content, unless, they specifically set up their site to do so, which again, is in violation of your copyright.
A simple email to the search engine will alert them causing that site to be penalised if found to be true.

But to repeat one thing I said above, if you don’t want something.ie using your content, and they refuse to take it down, then block them at your web server.

I can guarantee you 100% that you content will be syndicated on much worse sites than this one. Not only that, your content will probably be appearing next to some dodgy porn on a site based in Russia. The only way to combat this type of abuse is by banning the ‘crawlers’ and ’scrapers’ from being able to access your web server. Sending an email to a web site that is using your content and asking them to stop is about as effective as a chocolate fire-guard.

I tried to keep it short (and failed), but there is a lot more to this discussion than I’ve mentioned above, so feel free to drop me an email if you want any more information or tips on how to combat this.

Regards

Chris

A few days ago Damien Mulley and Maman Poulet posted that Something.ie was stealing their content. I didn’t pay much attention at the time but at first glance it seemed like they were complaining about their RSS feed being syndicated. RSS feeds a…

1. We only published an extract of the post.
2. Clearly labelled you as the author.
3. Linked through to your website for the full post.

It was never our intention to try and describe your content as ours and I don’t believe others would have been confused into thinking so.

Like politicsinireland.com, our intention was to aggregate various content from around Ireland. It happens all the time, places like CNN and WSJ do it and I don’t believe it is correct to label us as ‘thieving’.

What bothers me most however is the fact that the story was picked up by other Irish bloggers and thrown around without any real analysis and we were denied the right to reply. Our comments (and apology) on well-known blogs remain unpublished.

As Sabrina points out, don’t be surprised if people syndicate your content when you use a Platform called Really Simple Syndication.

As Skinner points out, a simple email could have sufficed.

Again, please accept our apologies.

We have in no way attemped to create any impression that we were the authors or owners of the content. As Sabrina points out, if you use a platform called Realy Simple Syndication then you can expect your content to be syndicated.

Had we republished your post as ours then you could rightly have described us as ‘thieving’ and mulley and others would have been justified in stoking up the fire on their blogs.

What annoys me most about this is that I feel that many of Irelands most respected bloggers have jumped on the story without realy taking a look at what was going on and more importantly, denied us the right to reply by failing to publish our comments on their posts.