Blogging is One Thing, But Stealing Content is Another
Posted by junger - 12/26/07 at 03:12:51 pmSlashdot picked up a story CE Pro ran last year (like, June 2006) on The Batcave Home Theater, a custom theater room up in Maine.
It's not new, but the link from Slashdot (a huge source of traffic) went to a site called Slashfilm (not related, as far as I know). So, Slashfilm was getting tons of traffic from content that they didn't create.
Normally, I'm okay with that — obviously, I'd like to get the traffic, but you have to live with the fact that sometimes you don't get what you want.
The problem, however, is that
1) Slashfilm didn't bother to link to the original article on CE Pro (a quick mention of the "June 2006 issue of CE Pro" was all we got)
2) They took the entire slideshow, cropped out our watermark, and posted it
The non-linkage isn't right, but can be easily remedied. On the other hand, taking the images and cropping out the watermarks is stealing content.
This is the second time in two weeks I've had to deal with people stealing content without proper attribution.
I emailed Slashfilm's editor, Peter Sciretta, asking him to add a link to our story and replace the images with the original, watermarked versions.
I haven't heard back from him (and it looks like his site is down now), but in reality, it doesn't matter if he replaces them or not. The images have already been cropped, our watermark is gone, and anyone who sees them can distribute them without attribution.
So, what are you supposed to do in this situation?
I emailed CmdrTaco (aka Rob Malda), who originally posted the story at Slashdot, and told him the story. It's not like I'm worried about bloggers promoting and sharing content we create — it's doing it without proper attribution and basically stealing credit for other's work.
CmdrTaco went ahead and changed the link in the Slashdot story to the original article on CE Pro, and now we're getting the influx of traffic.
What's the moral of the story?
Don't steal and properly attribute or it will come to bite you in the ass.
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