Yesterday I published a post in regard to a company that was republishing our content on their corporate blog without receiving prior permission to do so. Several other blogs were also being scraped to such a degree that today - after all content from other sites has been removed - 4 posts remain out of over 200 on the company’s blog.

The company in question responded today, both in a comment on our site and in a post on their own blog.

In a nutshell, the company assumed that any content published via RSS was free for all to be republished at will. Citing several sources, the case is made that RSS content is not only open to be republished freely, but that any publisher publishing content via RSS should just expect their content to be republished.

Perhaps that should be expected. As I said, this isn’t the first time our content has been scraped. But it’s never been scraped by a company that not only does business online, but who’s business revolves around the Internet. I would assume that any company doing business online would know why most websites publish RSS feeds.

However, if you’ll notice, the bottom right corner of our site contains the following line of text:

© 2006 - 2007. All Rights Reserved. Internet Marketing Monitor

Although the phrase is not even required anymore - after the 2000 Berne Convention that gave content producers copyright protection without specific notification - we decided to include this line for the simple fact that we didn’t want there to be any confusion over how our content was to be handled. We reserve all rights granted by copyright law over the distribution of our content.

The company would like to know what people think about this situation. We did too! So we put a call out to the other sites having their content scraped as well as a handful of other popular bloggers to see what sort of reaction they would have to a similar situation:

Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief of the ClickZ Network (which operates the SES Blog that was being scraped), had this to say:

This happens to us constantly - as in several times per day. Our procedure is to send a cease-and-desist. If there’s no contact info on the site, you can always do a WHOIS lookup on the domain.

Thanks for calling this one out.

Ashley Friedlein, the CEO and founder of E-consultancy.com (another site that was being scraped), left this in the comments of the original IMM post:

Yes, we do get this quite a bit. It’s relatively easy to deal with when they are real companies based in countries who have any sort of jurisdiction that has any teeth. Dealing with our friends in Russia and China is somewhat harder (well, impossible actually).

Depending on the company we usually point out to them what they are doing and request they immediately stop and remove all the content they’ve taken from us from Google’s cache. Or we will sue them (and we will).

However, for search agencies taking our stuff we’ve found an even more effective method is to get them completely removed from Google. That doesn’t help their business…

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger had a similar suggestion:

My response to them would be:

1. contact them and ask them to stop
2. if they don’t send a DMCA to their web host
3. shame them publicly

I find in most instances that whether it be a company or individual
that it usually is resolved in point 1 or 2 and rarely gets to the
3rd stage.

Patrick Schaber of The Lonely Marketer was in agreement:

I haven’t had that happen to me (at least not that I’m aware of). I think you’re going about it the right way. I’d maybe try contacting them first to see if they get scared off. If that doesn’t work, I’d move to a bit more of a public method such as your doing.

A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to respond and offer us some advice - it was greatly appreciated!

These responses are all in addition to other comments left on the original post and a couple of emails that we received. I’m still waiting for a couple of responses. But I’ll continue to keep you updated on what others have to say in this on-going debate.

It is entirely possible that the entire situation can be boiled down to lack of communication. Could we have contacted this company prior to publishing the article? Certainly. My personal feeling was that since we were not contacted prior to having our copyrighted material republished on a corporate blog, this was not a company that was fond of communicating. Perhaps it was an invalid assumption.

That being said, nothing in my original article is untrue in any way, despite suggestions from this company to the contrary. I full acknowledged that they were linking back to our site (I even included a screenshot of those links). But I also captured that screenshot to illustrate another point: the word “contributors” - which was used to describe the blogs who were being scarped - suggests some sort of agreement was made between this company and those sites. A contribution is something that’s given… not taken. And from the response I received from the other sites in question, no such contribution was agreed to.

Hopefully all parties involved have learned something from the situation. Mistakes happen. But as long as we learn from our mistakes, they serve a valuable purpose.

What did I learn? Maybe I shouldn’t jump the gun as quickly with public shaming ;) Thank you to all of the great suggestions and advice from the blogging community. I have taken your suggestions to heart and learned from them.

What did the company learn? Hopefully that, despite what their sources have said, the majority of content producers out there do not publish RSS feeds for reproduction on other sites. They publish them to make it easier for readers to stay up to date on what’s new on a site.

Oh… and that communication is a two-way street. Don’t expect communication from someone that you’ve offered none to ;)