Really Simple Stealing

I heard that line yesterday from Jason Calacanis. 

Specifically, I said, via email, "check this out, somebody stole a post from my blog"

Jason replied, via email:

"welcome to my world! people are stealing out stuff every day.... it never ends!

RSS=really simple stealing.

It's pretty obvious to me what's going on.  Subscribe to RSS feeds, pump them into Typepad, viola, you've got a blog.  Put adsense and some other link farm stuff, and you've got a money machine.

Brad Feld talks how easy it is to do this in his More Feedburner Magic post yesterday.

This is officially now an addition to my Internet Axis of Evil.

Really Simple Stealing joins the litany of other Internet crimes:

The Internet Axis of Evil

• Really Simple Stealing
• Phishing
• Click Fraud
• DNS Hacking
• Comment Spam/Link Spam
• Adware/Spyware
• Spam
• Viruses

UPDATE: I think my post may have been construed to suggest that people will use Feedburner's services to do Really Simple Stealing.  That is not what I intended to suggest and in fact, it's not possible to use Feedburner as Dick Costolo explained in a comment to my post which I will elevate:

As you might expect, we (Feedburner) thought of this and we specifically coded buzzboost to prevent this sort of rogue use of the service. There is no search engine juice or any indexing at all of the content that can be achieved with BuzzBoost because it is pure javascript and contains absolutely no content or links to content in the code we generate for publishers. We specifically built it this way so that it could NOT be used as a service to "snatch" indexable content for the purposes of advertising matches or search engine juice. As we have released it, buzzBoost is an ideal tool for publishers and is of no use to spammers or those looking to drop ads into a page matching somebody else's content.

Comments

[Dan Marques]

Spam blogs are beginning to take over free blog hosting services like blogger, their purpose generally is to increase the search engine rankings of related ventures. Really Simple Stealing seems to be the next logical step for these thieves.

The question is how do you combat it? Litigation really is not worthwhile from a cost/benefit standpoint. Perhaps attacking them where their money is coming from...reporting them to the advertisers on their blogs? Of course would a move like that only damage the infant industry of blogs? Would it be possible for the next generation of RSS to support some sort of copy protection? This is definitely an area I will be thinking about over the next few days.

[jackson]

Don't worry, GW will smoke 'em out of thier holes just like he did to........sorry, never mind.

[Dick Costolo]

Hi Fred. As you might expect, we thought of this and we specifically coded buzzboost to prevent this sort of rogue use of the service. There is no search engine juice or any indexing at all of the content that can be achieved with BuzzBoost because it is pure javascript and contains absolutely no content or links to content in the code we generate for publishers. We specifically built it this way so that it could NOT be used as a service to "snatch" indexable content for the purposes of advertising matches or search engine juice. As we have released it, buzzBoost is an ideal tool for publishers and is of no use to spammers or those looking to drop ads into a page matching somebody else's content. We should be much more clear about that in our post, and we'll update it right now to reflect the time and thought we put into this.

[Bryan William Jones]

One of the other ways that I am seeing people constantly "stealing" content is on thousands of discussion boards where individuals link to image content on my site out of context from my original post/intent and without attribution. This brings up two problems: 1) It takes the image and places it in context other than what was originally intended without permission and 2) It is constantly sucking bandwidth.

I don't know the solution other than to monitor it and ensure that my images are not being used for someone else's profit.

[Abby]

Bryan,

I've never linked to photos, because I'm not that technically adept, and I think that you have to pay blogger extra. For a non-commercial enterprise, do you mind if people download your photos (some of which are really beautiful) and use them "out of context" but with attribution?

[Rick Klau]

Bryan -

You can protect your images from being linked to using htaccess - there's an example here: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml . Alternatively, a Google search for "htaccess image linking" or similar terms will give you lots of exmaples of how to do this. It's essentially a set of instructions to your server to ignore requests for your images that don't come from approved domains (i.e., yours).

Hope this helps,

Rick Klau
VP, Business Development - FeedBurner

[Bryan William Jones]

Abby,

Thank you. I really don't mind if people find the images speak to them and they want to use them for non-commercial purposes as long as the source is attributed. "Traditionally", a request is made for republication and I have granted those requests in the past. The problem of course is that the Internet has made publication easier and more available to a variety of folks who may not be familiar with publication standards. I realize that much of the linking is not due to any malicious intent, but rather it is due to laziness or not understanding the process. Sometimes it is downright rude such as when a site is Slashdotted, but most of us consider that a badge anyhow.

Rick,

Thanks for the link. The problem with that approach is the same approach that we have with comment spam though, right? Specifically, if your site is a public site (i.e. you want folks to be able to access it from around the world) you have to spend the time tracking where the bandwidth is coming from and isolating and preventing access from those IP's. I can do this from within my OS as well, but simply decided to let it go given my time commitments to my work. The real solution (unfortunately) is behavioral...

[Mike D.]

All the more reason to never offer full-text feeds. There's a good discussion of it going on here right now:

http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2005/07/10/figures.html#comment44

RSS is a format that is easily pulled, parsed, modified, and republished. One simple parser can parse every single feed in the world. It is this ease of manipulation that lends feeds to such theft potential. The best way around it is to draw a clear distinction between what is in your feeds and what is on your site. What is in your feeds should be everyone's. Let people pull/parse/republish/whatever, and let them do it with the assumption that it will bring traffic to your site. What's on your site, however, cannot (and will not) be parsed so easily and automatically and you should consider it *yours*.

Some people want to turn feeds into vehicles for full-content delivery, complete with ads and all the other monetization vehicles you see on webpages. I say let feeds do what they were designed to do: distribute themselves on as wide of a scale as possible and get people to your site.

[Andrew]

Just thought you would like to know that really simple stealing has been going on in Ethiopia for ages. Only here it is the newspapers that steal from blogs.

[Michael]

I had someone do that to me recently - they had two blogs, so my post ended up in both of them. Fortunantly, it had an image in there...so I noticed from the server logs where it was being copied and then changed the image to something "appropriate" ;-)

I think the only way around it (and it's something I've been experimenting with anyway) is to split your posts with a jump. Write a short introduction, then include a permalink back to the entry...plus this helps to deliver more relevent adsense ads to an entry anyway I find. As long as you write a captivating/relevent intro, people will still read it. The ones who don't would be the ones who'd skip over it anyway...

[Ian]

Peope shouldn't put full text feeds in RRS - keep it on your site.

[vaspers the grate]

These RSS and Google keyword blogs are vampires sucking our content.

I am tired of checking my Technorati tracking page, and seeing all these feed blogs that title a post with the title of my post.

[Swetlana Maßat]

Great and excellent article t’s realy helpful. Thanks again.

[Meble]

Thanks for this very good article … Can i translate this and insert on my site in Poland? … Thanks