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Content theft runs rampant on social media. StumbleUpon and Mixx are heavily targeted by sites which capitalize on stolen content. They use images and sometimes also text with no attribution to the original artist, photographer or writer. They make big bucks and they get away with it because nobody notices and everybody just votes them up due to the quality of the stolen content. In many cases these are duplicates found elsewhere on the same social site which were wildly successful before already.
Now I really hate that, as I’m an art lover for years now and I recognize many of the artists whose work has been stolen to be put on crappy “fun blogs” for advertising revenue and presented as “interesting images”. I will then add the original source in the comments or reviews but to no avail in most cases. It takes time to research the real source but people still vote the content thieves up.
To make things worse I recently submitted a stolen content piece myself and made it popular on 3 social news sites without noticing on time. On the weekend I noticed that even one of social media’s most fervent power users, hdar3415 (He’s on Mixx and Digg mostly) had done it too. When I notified him of the stolen content piece he vote up he replied
I had no way of knowing that.
That’s true, people are not ignorant, they just don’t notice that content is stolen. So I decided to set up a list of 10 signs that in many cases allow you to spot content theft on social media and elsewhere. In most cases at least 3 of them apply.
- Blog hosted on blogger.com/blogspot.com or another crappy free blog hosting platform
- Site full of ads above the fold, you have to scroll to see the actual content
- Large list of images from one source apparently
- No attribution to artist or source, or something like “Images found at Flickr” with no links
- Very broad description like “interesting images“, “fun stuff”, “cool art”
- No name of blog author or journalist to be found
- A Google search for the title or a sentence in the first paragraph will show several identical submissions on social sites like Digg and Mixx as well as several sites with the same title or sentence
- Site submitted to social media numerous times already, by the user or group of people, often users with no avatar or real identity
- Spelling errors in the description
- No context, seemingly random posts that have no real connection to each other on the blog
If you spot content which shows these signs of being stolen just don’t submit it or vote it up. Of course not all bloggers who use blogger.com are content thieves etc. but Wordpress.com e.g. is much more strict in the case of content scraping or manual copying.
My next post will deal with how to find the original by the artist or author and to submit it instead. If your content has been stolen you might also want to read the 10 ways to fight back content thieves post.
As the Mixx experience has been considerably degraded by these content thieves I created a group to deal with that problem. Join me if you care for the stolen content issue. Nonetheless it’s a much bigger issue on StumbleUpon. Stolen content pieces get hundered of reviews there and nobody seems to notice or care.
This thing has 8 Comments
We’ve had our content stolen on more than one occasion, often with circumstances similar the ones you mentioned - like no way of identifying who they are - or above the fold etc…and we were never credited.
While we cover our fair share of stories that have been covered elsewhere, we always link to the sources and make mention that we read the original article on what ever site. But we always write our own version of events - we never copy/paste articles taken from other sites.
And as we write our own original content, having it stolen is a bit of a downer. So it inspired me to dream up this method which will certainly discourage copy theft.
http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=1860
‘Plagiarism Today’ even thought the idea had good potential and they blogged about it (http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/06/12/using-css-to-thwart-content-theft/)
I just stole this
Hi
Your blog is very informative and helpful. keep it up
Thanks
Jason: What about simply citing and attributing the source? Very simple measures every blogging newbie is able to master.
seema: Thank you, try to add some value to the post next time instead of just flattering as you sound like a bot. I will delete your comment tomorrow unless you prove that you’re not a spam bot by writing something less bot-like.
Content theft is indeed a major issue on social news sites. Fortunately, there are several things to consider.
First, all major social news sites have a means to report and get such articles removed. Though that requires the copyright holder be aware of the infringement, it can be done when needed. That makes it important for copyright holders to track their own work and be active in getting said content removed.
Second, you are right that the best method is to simply not vote for infringing works, but it can be very tricky, especially when some small blogs are able to post great content. However, if there is a suspected case of infringement, I encourage users to report not just the site and the link, but the person submitting it to higher ups at the site. Even if they don’t take action, they area aware of the concern and can follow up if it continues to happen.
Some users make it their livelihood to spam infringing links to these social news sites and that hurts everyone.
Finally, I don’t think that the problem is limited to SU or Mixx. I’ve seen it heavily on Digg and other sites as well. Anywhere there is traffic to be gained by reaching the front page, there are spammers and scrapers trying to exploit.
Thank you for the great article on this topic!
save images i like > upload them to my site > post it without permission & add original source in the post
this process is not stealing right?
Yeah Pat, exactly, among others. Sometimes you can’t get permission quickly enough but an attribution with a link is always a way of fair use. Also you might take just one image and make it smaller instead of taking a dozen and “making money online” off it with Adsense and lots of crappy ads.
I notice that whenever I submit one of my post to Digg, it ends up on a splog. I figure it is not worth the effort any more since I really do not get too many visitors from that site even though I try to “play by the rules” and vote for good content myself.