It’s rampant. I have seen my work all over the place, and I’m not even a major blogger, so I can only imagine how irritating it must be for those ‘household name’ bloggers…
Lorelle says it’s time for action:
Lorelle on WordPress » Content Theft from Feeds – It’s Time To Take Action
Think he and I are single voices in the wilderness complaining about this?
Blogging Herald, Jason Calacanis, Micro Persuasion, CT Biz Blogs, Alex Barnett, GigaOM, Crunch Notes, VoIP & Gadgets Blog, and many others have been the victims of content feed thefts. We are not alone. Our voices are loud. When we all work together, the world changes.
Any suggestions?
For starters, we could bomb this ad on GetAFreelancer for a copywriter to rip off thread posts (via) for $1 an hour (25 people have begged for the job so far). Well, maybe that would be rude, but isn’t that the point?
My gracious, if you want to earn money writing, go over to Gather or AssociatedContent and write some original work. I do it all the time, for SEO purposes, and it’s easy and you have the satisfaction of doing a job well (and it pays better).
Someone much more cynical that I would point out that an Internet culture that encourages downloading of music and movies off of your local peer-to-peer network can’t be expected to honor authorship of any sort.
Luckily, I’m not that cynical.
-Dan