How many people do you know think it’s okay to reproduce an article from a web site? Most, including you? Wrong: it’s illegal unless you’ve asked and received permission, and it’s getting easier to chase people who steal material. This includes spam bloggers. If you think spam is limited to e-mail and blog comments, or you think you can’t be hurt by spam bloggers, read on. For my part I only realized a few days ago that spam trackbacks exist, people who hope you’ll list them as linking to your site so they can sell more viagra or worse.
I recently asked a group in Geneva to remove an article from GenevaLunch that they had posted, with the best of intentions. In fact we work together as much as possible. They were surprised until I explained that a link to GL to read the article would be helpful and I would be happy when the article is older to give them a PDF copy for their news archives.
We don’t give away our product anymore than you would expect your dentist to treat your teeth free of charge. We like people to share what we write, but by adding links that bring traffic to our site, which helps us sell advertising. It’s not a complex formula. We use a Creative Commons license which you can see at the bottom of our GL pages, which means that we strongly support sharing and want to make it easy to do this.
GenevaLunch, like many companies, regularly trolls the Internet to see what is being written about us and who is linking to the news and feature stories we produce. Over the weekend I was startled to run across a relatively new blog that carried, in its entirety, an article originally published on GenevaLunch. It was a Chinese travel story by Liam Bates, who occasionally contributes travel stories to the site.
Two things bothered me immediately: there was no link to GenevaLunch yet the article was reproduced whole, and there was a link at the end of the article to a Chinese travel company that could be seen as a competitor to a small startup travel and education company, called Bridges to China, that Liam Bates and a Chinese partner registered in China earlier this year.
My first concern was that GenevaLunch has a legal and moral obligation to protect the work people produce for us. As editor of GenevaLunch, which invites writers and photographers to contribute but does not pay them, I try to at least provide them a service by suggesting they create a link to their companies and/or blogs in their bylines.
I went to the About and Contact pages on the blog, which had an odd name like XYZWZY and not surprisingly the author had a nonsense name and said he was 87 years old, living in China. I looked at the other blog posts: not one scrap of original material. It was all stolen from other sites, no links to the sources provided. Annoyed, I sent a strongly worded letter to the Howard Liptzen at dada.net, the social network and blog host. I told him to promptly remove the post and suggested he remove the blogger.
To his great credit, he wrote back immediately saying that he had deleted the blogger, saying "It was obviously a spam blog with no value to our community."