You work hard on your posts…
So you get an idea for a blog post. You mull it over, finally commit to it, and start to get down to work. Now that you’re in it for the long haul there’s probably a good time sink involved. Depending on your writing style your work involved might be something like:
- Researching the topic so you understand it really as well as you think you do.
- Thinking about the points you are going to make, what order makes some sort of sense.
- Collecting and wiring up good outbound links to more authoritative, encylopedic reference for your readers to continue on with.
- (HOLY CRAP, DON’T READ THIS!!!) Thinking up a good magnetic headline to grab some interest.
- Thinking about how to break up your content into manageable, scannable bits.
- Searching for / creating / farming-out some for some pithy images to break the monotony of endless text.
If you are into copywriting, a slow worker, disturbed by animals, etc, this process may be long and soul crushing.
And the payoff is….
You birth your creation into the wild. You lord it over your friends, shamelessly promote it on a few social networks, get your mom to check it out, etc. As people add comments and you watch the visitors count in your analytics, you get that satisfying ego-boost you had hoped for. You can feel your social capital on the rise. Rad.
And then, YOU ARE RIPPED OFF!
Ok, so here’s my story. As avid readers of www.mikeduncan.com you’ve undoubtedly read my scintillating post SQLite on .NET - Get up and running in 3 minutes. Catchy, isn’t it? It was birthed into the world as the timestamp clearly reminds us on January 15th, 2008. People seemed to dig it, a good time was had by all. Maybe *too good* of a time.
TWO DAYS after my post was out in the wild, I started seeing some interesting inbound links coming in from InfoQ, a tech news - paid story aggregator type site. While not somewhere I go often, their site is indeed large, thriving, and as it turns out, morally bankrupt. It seems that one Robert Bazinet has a story on the front page of the 250,000 unique visitors per month, page rank 7, mega-site that is InfoQ.com cleverly titled:
Up and Running with SQLite on .Net in 3 Minutes
Come on,…… really? That’s really what its called? You bet. So what do we find in this lovely post? You got it, exactly my post, just stripped of its sexy mikeduncan.com voice and replaced with a few business buzzwords.
- The steps of what to do are the same.
- And in the same order.
- And the arbitrary number of minutes is the same.
- And the links to the further sources are the same.
- And the footer says "InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2007" !!!
Ok, to set the record straight, they do give a shout-out to me briefly mentioning I have a post similar to this on my site, and if you bothered to go to my site, you’d see that they are maybe-admittedly re-hashing my post? Or maybe you wouldn’t.
The Pros and Cons of this intellectual larceny…
So let’s see what to make of this situation in inverse pro/con order (to build suspense)
Cons:
- My personal work and time invested in this post is being leveraged for InfoQ / Robert Bazinet’s big-uppance.
- Organic search traffic relating to SQLite on .net will ultimately be split between mikeduncan.com and InfoQ. As a corporate, constantly updated entity, they have a lot of page rank that will flow down into their version of my story, probably trumping mine in the SERPs in the long run.
Pros:
- InfoQ will send me some traffic I might not otherwise get from regular infoq readers who don’t already know about my post from DotNetKicks, Google, my blog feed, etc.
- I gain greater *perceived authority* (if thats even possible) by being linked to from a supposedly authoritative, news publishing source.
- My ego still gets boosted in some small way in that someone thought my post was worth paraphrasing and submitting. Perhaps they got $20 out of it.
The *real* pro though, is I have now have this very topic to write about on mikeduncan.com, which I’m sure will be identifiable to a lot of other folks. Looking through InfoQ, there are indeed many stories just like this one that are just paraphrased versions of other bloggers hard work. Many other people are knowingly or not, in the same boat. (Maybe it’s time to do a search on InfoQ ey?)
You WILL be next!!!
Clearly any blog is up for thievery a source of inspiration. If indeed you as a writer get a kickback for stories are accepted on InfoQ, why not scan DotNetKicks, maybe DZone, looking for catchy stories you can paraphrase into cold, hard Jacksons? A quick look through Infoq shows a number of posts that are similarly just paraphrased summaries of bloggers work. Just picking the first one on the front page that that I recognized by the title,
Implementing NOLOCK with LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities for instance is just a Scott Hansleman post rehashed. Again, Scott is quickly credited, but then pretty much his whole post is just copied over into the Infoq system. Scott, on one hand, being in a tech evangelist role and all around Dude, is probably fine with getting the word out however he can. On the other hand, Scott does have advertisers and runs diabetes research fundraising campaigns through his site. A part of his fundraising ability relies upon the popularity of and traffic to his authoritative site based on his original content. Maybe Scott is OK with this, maybe not. Either way I doubt InfoQ told him they were rehashing his posts.
My direct boss and good friend is a lawyer, but does not play one on tv. He advised me that I could certainly send them a letter asking for the post to be removed, but would probably not really be worth his time as he had compelling video games scheduled to be played. Thinking about the above mentioned pros and cons I think I’m ok with the net gain on this one.
What do YOU think?
Ok, the internet is all about learning, communicating, extending what has come before, standing on the shoulders of giants, blah blah blah. I’m not really trying to push for some sort of copyright policing, I like the wild west days we are in. At the same time, when it happens to you, it’s kind of phony / corny in a Catcher In the Rye way. Particularly the InfoQ.com and all content copyright © 2006-2007 footer.
What do you, esteemed readers, think? Should I just quit complaining and consider it flattery? Or is this something that as tech writers / bloggers we should be more in tune with. With Gawker Media type bloggers making 9K a month, perhaps this isn’t just bitching. Original content is certainly some kind of currency these days be it devalued US dollars, career credibility, or promoting charities. Tell me your tales!
If you don’t post comments, I’ll just cut and paste some from your blogs into here anyway, copyright 2008 mikeduncan.com. Man, you’ve read this far, if you feel like it, hook a humble blogger up with some diggs or whatever. Your awesomeness will be embiggened, I promise.
84 comments ↓
I recognize you’ve rationalized it by now, and I guess that’s probably good for your chances of getting any work done today and/or the amount of money you have to spend on prescription anti-depressants, but damn, bro — this sucks! That’s just poor journalism standards, not to mention sleazy laziness.
Maybe it’s not worth lawyer-time to deal with them on a case by case basis, but pulling together a few dozen examples might get some notice. Can’t say that’d really be worth your time, either, but it would help fulfill the revenge fantasies I’m having about them right now. #@(*&&@@!! bastards.
I wonder if this article will be copy/pasted/summarized on InfoQ too.
Crai more newb!
what’s to keep you from simply posting mikeduncan.com and all content copyright © 0-2008? And would it matter?
I know what you are saying, this has happened to me in the past. Simply email the author of the other post first and ask them to give you credit.
If this does not work, the do what you just did. Point out the action to the world.
Don’t you know that because your content can be copied easily it should be free. See http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/22/these-crazy-musicians-still-think-they-should-get-paid-for-recorded-music/
Dugg! http://digg.com/programming/How_YOUR_tech_blog_posts_are_RIPPED_OFF_while_you_sleep
@Derek, I figure this is pretty standard everywhere. Still mulling it all over.
@Anon, thanks for the Digg!
Dugg and Kicked. What a bunch of jack assess, ripping off your content like that. Well they gave me something to write later this evening too. Thanks, Duncan.
The highest form of flattery.
Whenever it comes to this sort of issue - I really don’t see the big deal. Why do we have such a fascination with owning the birthright to an idea - as though we owned the idea itself? I do get a unique bit of satisfaction when I realize that I have spread an idea from birth to some form of mild popularity, but it is vain at best. If the information you provide is accurate and valuable, then your credibility need not be called into question, regardless of the source. Attribution is very nice but it can only convey respect and modesty, it has nothing to do with fairness.
@Jason
You don’t see the big deal? Really?
It’s certainly great to give birth to an idea. However, when someone kidnaps that idea, gives it a different haircut, claims it as his own, and whores it out for a few dollars/props, it’s only *fair* to feel aggrieved.
I used to think InfoQ was kind of useful for awhile — until I started noticing that they were just summarizing other blog posts (I thought they at least had the author’s permission at that point in time).
I’ve had that happen before from sites that were obviously shady (e.g. It was nothing but my copy and pasted/text and a bunch of ads). It’s a lot harder to do something about it when it’s a site that “appears” to be reputable.
That sucks but it is to be expected. If you want credit to always go to you, make your blog private and only allow people you want to have access to it. Might be a stupid observation but once you post it on the net, it’s in the public domain and good luck eforcing copyright without tons of money. Did you try emailing the author?
@ Brian
I was serious, yes. I know it is a broad topic and I am in the minority, but it seems to me that the most common argument against this sort of “theft” is the feeling of violation experienced by the originator of an idea. What function does it even serve to be so possessive about them to begin with? There are plenty of arguments about there being no truly original ideas, but is there really any reason to worry about it? Does anyone care who came up with sliced bread?
My comment on the futility of worrying about this sort of situations ties in with #13’s comment. Consider the extremes. One one hand, everyone could copy the original author’s idea as their own. Many might attribute him, so many might still respect him. On the other hand, the author could protect himself by carefully guarding the information or share it with no one. Anyone may do whichever gives them the greatest satisfaction, but you can guess which scenario I prefer…
I think writers in any medium can reasonably expect their content not to be blatantly ripped off by someone else for profit. I’m all in favor of others furthering discourse and building upon previous ideas, but simple theft should be called what it is.
Does InfoQ portray itself as a scraper site to its advertisers? I doubt it.
Yeah infoQ does that a lot. I remember seeing my name in one of their articles and wondering what that was about and whether is was really me (I’ve yet to see someone else with my name show up on Google let along tech blogs).
Turns out it was me after all.
They were rehashing a blog post by Reginald Braithwaite (Raganwald: http://weblog.raganwald.com/ ) along with each of the associated comments and I was one of the people who had commented. Needless to say reading it was an utter waste of my time since it was just a vague watered down summary of the discussion that had taken place. Pretty pointless really.
I’m sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It’s becoming more and more common I’m afraid, not just in the tech world, but pretty much all lines of blogging it seems.
As someone who has handled over 600 of these types of cases, I can say with some certainty that there is no need to hire an attorney, taking these guys down is a pretty simple matter. In this case, you should be able to send a DMCA notice to their host by using the email address legal at contegix.com.
If you need any help with that, let me know. I’ve got stock letters on my site and I can help draft it if needed. You can also send the notice to the search engines as well if you want to launch that kind of an attack first.
Just let me know if there is anything In can do and I’ll gladly assist!
It would be better if they only included a summary (not more than one paragraph) and a link to the blog entry.
Actually, I think that would be a very good idea for a metablog.
The answer is right there in the name, if you say it fast enough — in-fo-queue… in-fu-queue… in-fuck-you
From their About page:
“InfoQ’s most important team member is you!”
See, they’re open about it
“We welcome our readers to contribute news, articles, get involved in the discussion threads, and more.”
You just found out how *much* more.
Seriously, the copyright thing is a slap in the face, and they wouldn’t dare do this with someone like O’Reilly, but Joe Q. Blogger? Fair game for those without anything to contribute themselves
~Matt
You guys are all about open-source and free information, and then when it comes to your own copyrights you’re all indignant.
Hi Mike, I’m the Chief Editor and co-founder of InfoQ.com and I am the guy who sets the editorial policy and vision and trains our 30+ community-editors on writing style, so I guess I’m accountable here but I’d like in fairness to explain our intent and style and that I don’t think anything wrong (neither morally nor legally) was done here.
InfoQ’s intent is to provide the software development community with a place to track change and innovation. We don’t do digg-style aggregation, we actually have 30+ people like you with full time development jobs who participate in their free time to write news of interest to their peers. Unlike even some partially-edited aggregation that just give a paragraph and a link, we seek to make our news more summarative and add a wider context so that our news items present a complete picture and add value to the reader. For example, linking to comments across blogsphere on current events, quoting perspectives across various forums and sources, ultimately saving the reader time and serving the community which is our intent.
Your post was innovative - it was a very worthy idea to spread that you can get started with SQL lite in 3 minutes so by the merit of your idea we thought it was an innovative idea worth spreading, so we picked up the story and hopefully a lot of people came to your site. We made no effort to hide your blog, it even says the tutorial was useful and repeatedly mentions the tutorial before most of the direct quotations.
Your article (not including code samples) was almost 1200 words long. Our article quoted (not stole) about 131 words of that, plus a small code sample - it was just a few choice parts to impart some key points, with the expectation that interested readers will go to your tutorial to see the full length piece now that they know it is there.
Besides your blog we also quoted another source plus added original editorial summary on the state of SQL Lite at the end and interspersed.
Therefore, your blog was properly linked to and credited, and properly quoted. I don’t see any copyright violation, and I think that in-good-faith the article is promoting your tutorial not stealing from it.
Ultimately our objective is to provide value by giving a very concise summary and adding in more context from across sources. Some times we may fail at that and there have been a few posts I’ve noticed that were not focused too much on a single source without being short enough to be a value add (such as the Scott Hanselman item you mentioned) - this is a live and learn excercise and as you can imagine - with 30+ developers and architects learning to be editors there are some challenges with getting everyone on the same page in terms of style so some times mistakes happen before they can be caught and our vision explained. Your blog post certainly helps to point out the need to clarify this stylistic issue and I assure you that we will discuss it at length internally.
I’d be happy to discuss this on the phone with you please feel free to email me.
InfoQ is a by the community for the community site and we invest a LOT into our content, check out our hundreds of hours of online conference video, interviews, free books for download, etc. Myself and a couple of others started the company on a shoe string in a labour of love, before this I worked on TheServerSide which ended up being consumed by a big media company which wasn’t willing to invest in much in content and the site so I left and we started InfoQ. You wouldn’t believe how much we invest in content, and as far as I know there is no other independent community outlet putting stuff out on this scale (we are not MSDN or funded by any big vendor).
If we are not doing a good job serving the community then I definitely want to know so we can adjust our style. Thanks!!!
Sue! They blatantly picked from your creative pocket Without proper credit. If this was in print you would be inflamed. New medium or not- They did you wrong!
You’ll never feel vindicated unless you pull the trigger and take care of business.
Have a nice day…
Hi Mike,
I first wanted to apologize if my news item on InfoQ offended you, it was not meant to do so.
As Floyd pointed out, we are trying to provide a service to people that may not get a chance to see your great content. As one of many writers, and full-time developer, we are trying to summarize good writing and gives readers a single place to find it.
I never try to attempt to make content my own but add value by adding bits of information to it. As you can see from any of my news items I credit the author and anything that is not my words it gets blockquoted always.
I do not plagiarize but summarize and get the word out about information that can help other developers.
I probably should have chosen a different title, but the words were great and I felt fit exactly what a reader would get out of the information.
You have my email, if you would like to chat I would be more than happy to do so.
Again, I apologize if my work at InfoQ has offended you, it was not meant to.
Regards,
Rob Bazinet
@WilleeYum - can you please list exactly what kind of ‘proper credit’ was missing?
The source was named and linked to. Any elements that were from Mike’s blog were properly blockquoted to make obvious that they were not our own words.
What more could we have done Willee?
RE: http://www.mikeduncan.com/tech-post-ripoff/#comment-227
Floyd’s email is:
floyd@infoq.com
I’m not a lawyer but looking at both posts, I think InfoQ is doing it legally…
However, I agree, InfoQ ends up copy-pasting content from various sources (citations!) and writes one line filler text around them (”grab the dll”). Around 60% the article is citations!
They’re making a buck off your hard work, but I don’t think there is much you can do.
Well, as Guillaume mentioned, InfoQ do summarize my blog posts from time-to-time. They don’t seem to add any new material, but they do run down some of the better comments and discuss other relevant posts in a “blogversation.”
What do I make of it? Well, more than one person has suggested I need an editor. Well, InfoQ are providing that service for free! As long as they spell my name corectly and link to my weblog, I think they are providing a service for my readers.
But that’s just me! AFAIK, nobody has dropped my blog from their feed reader to start reading my work on InfoQ, so it’s a net positive for me and for anyone who prefers the “executive summary” before wading into my self-indulgence.
But again, as you can tell from this comment, I never use one word when two will do. So you may not feel the same way.
As Floyd points out, their summary is indeed a summary of your article. Perhaps it borrows heavily from the original, though definitely less in-depth.
Either way, you outrank them in SERPs.
@Floyd and @Rob,
Maybe it would help if you made the “inspiration” behind InfoQ posts more obvious — give a big rap to the author(s) or the post(s) that you are summarising.
The citation for the article Mike wrote is “An article from a developer, Mike Duncan, gives a tutorial to setup SQLite on .NET in 3 minutes” (text copyright InfoQ :-P), about 5 paragraphs down and a sub-heading into the article.
To me, it would clear things up immensely if:
- the article started with the citation
- the link/reference is prominent to encourage people to visit (after reading the useful InfoQ summary ;-))
- You make it clear that you are summarising the article
- You also make clear what information you are adding to the base article to make it worth the reader’s time.
This will also work if you are presenting information from several posts, as readers can learn from the summary and know the sources to pursue if they want more in depth knowledge (which is more useful to readers than just recycling a single post).
I’m guessing you’d like a site where bloggers are proud to be quoted and that developers love to read. We’d like that too thanks
Regards,
Some bloke who is bitter none of his posts have been ripped off on InfoQ
a.k.a. Dave
SQLite is a cool tech, I just saw this post from digg and although I’m sure your not having a good time I’m not too concerned by it. It was a brief article, and there’s many sqlite references; as your article noted it’s not that difficult.
The other site, if they can’t write how to use SQLite on their own, they’ll disappear on their own. The blatant copying shows a desperation for trying to create content. The development world isn’t moving so slow that people are out of ideas on what to write about… they apparently don’t have any good input.
Meanwhile, if you’re producing quality, new and fresh content, you’ll retain your readers.
If the article was something else, or if this had direct commercial implications beyond advertising perhaps I’d be more concerned.
After reading Floyd’s response I went over and took another look (the first time I dismissed it as a link-farm for google rank since the first few articles were all content from elsewhere) and I now see the value they’re trying to provide but I believe what’s making people sore is that in most places the articles are represented as having been written for infoq when, in reality, they were written for someone else’s blog.
Just look at the biggest part of the main page: New & Notable Written for InfoQ by the Community. I see one of Reg’s recent articles quoted. Putting it in that header makes it seem that Reg was writing about that for InfoQ even though when you think about it you see that’s it’s really Sadek summarizing the discussion between Reg and Daniel on that page.
I have no delusions that my own blog will ever have even a fraction of the readers Reg or Jeff Atwood have so if I do ever put out my 15 mins (well, in the blogosphere it’s more like 15 secs) of fame article I wouldn’t be happy if all the diggs and reddits and whatnot all went to infoq’s summary.
I see that InfoQ is trying to be something of a Spark Notes for the community but it’s how they represent themselves that’s off-putting to me. If the header on the main page instead read: Recent Interesting Discussion in the Community and articles that are summaries of other people’s work started with an admission that it’s a summary instead of presenting itself as an original article that Reg agrees with then people probably wouldn’t be mad (or at least as mad) about having their content summarized and re-posted elsewhere.
EDIT (kind of): Firefox dissapeared again on me (firefox is ridiculously unstable on ubuntu, even changing to firefox3 didn’t help) and when reloading I saw David’s comment. I agree 100% with everything David said.
Sounds like they created a derivative work without permission, which is a copyright violation. Sounds like the Reader’s Digest business model without the pesky licensing fees.
Hey… I’m sure this has already been done / said in the comments (who has time to read comments?) but you should consider just making your text un-highlight-able.
At least those fuckers at InfoQ will then be stripped of the convenient copy and paste function.
They’ll have to type it all out manually and, perhaps, in the process: a) feel guilty about their blatant ghank-move and, in turn, repent. b) actually learn what you are saying, which generally contributes to expanded awareness and knowledge throughout the world (my inner tech evangelist speaking).
Fairly certain the photos you used aren’t yours by copyright.
Eh, what do you expect from a guy (Floyd) who asked me, “Mongrel? Why does Ruby need a web server?!” His amount of clue could probably only buy the candlestick and that’s it. The actual fake tiny one that comes with the game.
This gives me a great idea for a new web site: disinfoq.com. See, I like this idea now that Floyd’s opened the door to straight-up ripping people off and giving them tiny little bits of credit for their originality. I think maybe we should just automate it.
Here’s what I’m thinking: spider infoq.com and collect all the text, then use a few simple algorithms to “quote” the original text (the infoq version of the original, not the real original) and rework the ordering. The goal is to modify it enough to slap your own name on their content.
That could even be a cool challenge to mess with copyright: Use infoq.com as the corpus for automated copyright dodging. Man, I can see all of India and 1/2 of China giving me money for that idea. Could revitalize off-shore writing.
I feel your pain. I have had my tutorials ripped off so many times that I have given up caring about it. It is really frustrating to see your site come up lower in the search results than someone who stole your article word for word.
I even had a chapter of a book that had stolen my article almost word for word published. Would have been nice to get credit for that.
To me the worst offender is TheCodeProject. They have a very large collection of good tutorials and code, but considering I’ve see 4 of my tutorials published out there by other authors claiming they wrote it, I have to imaging most of the content there has been ripped off from somewhere else.
It sounds like they did credit you. As for the copyright notation….that is standard boilerplate, which in the internet age, means absolutely nothing.
You didn’t write the great american novel. it was a single blog entry. You got some a small traffic increase and a few notices. That is about all you can hope for from a blog entry
You should not worry about, many of the blogs I’m subscribed to is because I read an article pointing to them in another blog. If I like the article I will visit the original blog for more.
Credit is given to you in the article, maybe it should be put at the begining of the article or in a more visible place, that would be my only complain.
Cheer up! You know what they say, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Wow, stealing on the internet. I would never have guessed that would have happened.
If you’re really concerned about internet piracy and your blog content being stolen, you could always proactively do something about it rather than whining.
First things first, you need to send a take down notice to the offending site (don’t worry about actually getting a lawyer, you’re not going to take them to court for this), if they comply you ‘win’. If they don’t comply do a whois and start a dispute with their host, state that they are hosting stolen content and find other examples other than your own.
In my opinion, that’s a massive waste of time. In regards to the search traffic, you’re not going to be seeing a 50/50 split, you’ll likely see about 90 and they might see 10 if they are lucky. Because they are linking back to you about the same topic (presumably with decent anchor text) you’re consider the authority on this subject. When somebody searches for something and there is two of the exact same titles and content, they will click the first one probably around 90-95% of the time.
In all honesty, you should toughen up. This is going to happen and if your blog gets any traction it’s going to happen a lot.
You might also want to fix your feed so that it always includes a link back to the post and your homepage. Otherwise when somebody starts using your blog for own of their autoblogs you won’t see any backlinks.
Personally I love when people start ripping my content, they increase my backlinks/readership/people interested in my topic and my stuff gets read.
I’m sorry, I don’t buy InfoQ’s excuses at all. They should get some kind of explicit permission and blessing from the actual author of the post before they do their little summation magic on it. They sound like MC Hammer saying ‘Can’t Touch This’ was doing some kind of big service to Rick James. Write your own s***, bi%%hes!
I really don’t think what the InfoQ people did is that bad in this context. These days it seems that intellectual property laws tend to inhibit rather than increase innovation and I tend to think we’d be better off in many cases if you could more freely share content with less regulation.
However, I think the appropriate ettiquette should be that InfoQ should have notified you of the article they were planning to run that included such extensive direct quoting. You could have told them in that case that you were upset with the duplicate title etc. and everyone would have been happier in the end.
Don’t sweat it. Like you said it is a form of flattery, they see you as a knowledge base. Yes you will lose some clicks but you will also gain some. Don’t worry, your content is good, others have to steal. Just keep writing good useful information and your work will be repaid. If people aren’t stealing your blog content, then maybe it is not worth it. Yours obviously is, be content with that. And yes infoq is wrong in doing this but you also got upped rankings from it. It would be nice if they attributed it but you should also put a cc license on it or something.
Moral of the story is, if you are interesting and have good content is WILL be stolen.
Steal my AI — pleaze!
[...] I was reading up on DotNetKicks when I came across the most interesting headline I have ever seen on the site, “How YOUR tech blog posts are RIPPED OFF while you sleep!“ [...]
Hey Mike,
So I promised a blog post in response to yours? I wrote it, “Four Options to Consider When Your Content is Plagiarized”
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/?p=350
This is the best thing I’ve read off of DotNetKicks in a long time; I hope you get the credit you deserve!
InfoQ linked to mikeduncan.com’s home page, not to the actal blog post. That’s a big problem, IMO, because it means that readers of the article on InfoQ won’t be able to follow the link to the original post. Sure, it still gives Mike some traffic, but it’s a real faux pas not to link to the actual article that is being quoted.
I hope that it was just a mistake; I am surprised that the people from InfoQ are still maintaining that they did nothing wrong, when this is a pretty obvious error.
I’m the Lead Editor for InfoQ’s Agile community queue. I do understand the copyright and visibility concerns voiced here.
Generally, when I write this kind of news about a blog, I consider that I’m directing readers to the author who’d otherwise miss a good item. Yes, the original author should be made clearly visible, and of course “Fair Use”** is a standard publishing guideline, though it seems almost impossible to find a quantitative definition for it.
To echo Floyd: we’re working hard to add value to the community by drawing attention to good content on the web. The feedback we get is that people rely on us not only to point out interesting stuff, but to make useful connections and to provide some neutral analysis and exclusive quotes from industry experts. Certainly, for Agile, this seems to be filling an empty niche.
I hope the value of using full-time practitioner at InfoQ balances out the occasional lapse while we all learn to be professional writers too
And I hope that, in the mean time, we provide you with some interesting pointers to stuff you can use.
Deborah Hartmann
Independent Agile Coach and Trainer
** “Fair Use” is a concept that limits attributed use of copyrighted materials. In the US,I’ve heard, it’s notoriously hard to enforce, but it still is applied in the publishing industry as an ethical guideline. Some suggest the limit is 100 words, others say 10% of the original source. Here is one definition:
From: http://www.uspto.gov/go/kids/kidantipiracy02.htm
“Fair Use
Limited circumstances under which it may be allowable to reference or sample works without seeking an express release from a copyright holder. The circumstances under which fair use may apply include criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Four tests are involved: purpose and character of use, nature of copyrighted work, amount and substantiality of portion used, effect of use on potential market for copyrighted work.”
Thieves!
I don’t think fair use would be a valid defense in this case if actually litigated. All the salient points in the article were copied, negating basically the entire value of the original. InfoQ appears to show ads on its site (the expo ad in the bottom left) as well as selling books on development, negating any claims of pure non-commercial use (which is not a total defense anyway). Basically, InfoQ just recapped his article without the flavor text. I can’t imagine any court being ok with that.
Mike would never sue you guys so the point is moot, but I just don’t buy that this is ‘fair’ use.
Simple solution, post an article, watch offending web site for a link to your article, then change your article to be something extremely offensive, laugh!
You won’t belive what this guy is doing:
Look at my post:
http://www.michaelckennedy.net/blog/PermaLink,guid,55a9b21e-ae85-4c24-a0b6-63dff4a6b491.aspx
Look at his post:
http://www.spotgnome.com/2008/02/10/NET35BringsMajorUndocumentedChangesToThreadPool.aspx
The jerk just stripped my info off, including my picture, and posted it to his blog. Seems to be doing tha tto tons of other people as well.
IT IS AMAZING HOW MUCH TIME AND ENERGY PEOPLE ARE SPENDING HERE!!!!
trying to ridicule a site which is working in the interest of community.
InfoQ is the site that I hit the first thing in the morning to get the latest in the tech world. It is amazing to see the clarity with which the news is reported and it is in an easily digestible format. If i need more information i can always go to the main blog. I think they do a fair job of bringing your blog into limelight so that people can read about you and your thoughts. What is the concern here ??????
@Michael Kennedy : That is jacked dude it is war when they start hotlinking imagery. Let them jack it but when they start leaching bandwidth that is messed. I use photobucket for my tracking blogs for this reason, I dont’ mind if it is scraped then and encouraged as I am meaning to drive traffic but still it is annoying. I would put a handler to only show your images from within your domain.
Goatse is always a good choice to discourage hotlinking.
Unfortunately, you probably just sent infoQ a ton of traffic with this article. I’ll try to resist the urge to go see what they’re about…
People ripping off somebody’s work and selling it as their own should be waterboarded every day for a year before being brutally butchered.
I have no problem with people referencing work and mentioning sources, that’s how the pro’s do it. But ripping off somebody’s work and then having the gall to put a copyright notice under it deserves nothing less than sneering contempt.
Either someone publishes original work or they base a post on the REFERENCED work of others. Passing off someone else’s work as their own only merits the passionate violence of torturers.
[I don't usually go overboard to hurt people, I don't need it, but to see one's words being abused by people whose technical competence limits itself to using the copy/paste technique to me is the most grievous insult imaginable]
- Waterboard for one year [hey, it's 'not torture' anyway]
- brutal butchering
In that order.
@Jack you are such a lamb! May I borrow your imaginative services for a while??
The more I read about InfoQ and their protestations here in the comments the more I believe that their intentions are not legitimate. If they were truly interested in helping the original authors and adhering to the spirit of a “fair use” doctrine there would be more credit, more of their own original content, and less quotation. Thanks MikeDuncan for the information. Goodbye InfoQ.
This just happened to you? It happened to me last July/August. I wrote about it at http://tekkie.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/this-guy-sucks/. Some guy in Germany (best I could tell) set up a “blog site” with plenty of Google ads on it, and copied 9 of my posts, along with a few from some other folks. Most of mine achieved a fairly high rank on reddit, so I assumed the guy thought he’d grab some of my traffic for his own personal gain. I don’t have ads on my site, but I was angry about the plagiarism. The guy didn’t even put my name on the copies! Nevertheless, people were finding my blog, because my articles contained links to other posts I’d written (they weren’t smart enough to reroute those, fortunately).
I found out about it the same way you did. I was getting incoming links from the plagiarizing site.
I came to find out this was common. It was called creating a “honeypot”, trying to get a high search ranking on Google on certain topics to funnel traffic to a “honeypot” site in hopes that some visitors would click on some Google ad links and the site owner would pick up some residual income off of authors like me. It turns out Google is kinda complicit about this, because they make money off of clicks as well.
After that I started signing my posts explicitly in the body, along with a link to my blog. I wasn’t satisfied with the way the blog service automatically put my name on posts, because an astute programmer could just get my posts on a feed and filter out the “author” field, which is just what this brat did.
I made attempts to complain to Google and to GoDaddy.com, where the offending site’s domain name was registered. I don’t know if they succeeded. I became increasingly busy enough that I didn’t have time to deal with it much. I hated trying to deal with Google. They didn’t make it easy for me to contact them about this. Fortunately I had some help from another blogger whose work was copied by this guy.
Eventually the offending site went offline, which was good enough for me. I don’t know what caused it. Perhaps some other blog authors were more successful than me at getting someone powerful to pay attention to it. So far I haven’t seen it happen again.
Me and my cracker jack team of hackers will initiate a broad cast storm in 2 minutes and bring InfoQ to it’s knees (just kidding, but how lame man). Spread the word, InfoQ is for losers …
InfoQ stole my identity… but now I’m safe with Lifelock!
@ALL
Thanks everyone for the comments, both good and bad. This is all refreshing - since we launched nearly 2 years ago we’ve received strong and overwhelmingly positive feedback, so it’s good to get shaken up from time to time, it keeps you nimble!
I’m just sincerely sorry that it came at the cost of causing any one anger (sorry Mike). I do see this situation making us revisit our editorial guidelines based on a lot of good ideas came out in this thread.
Also we have some currently existing guidelines that were not followed on this specific post, such as the mistake that we linked to the blog itself but not the specific blog entry (that almost never happens but we slipped on this one). That was already corrected and we’ll also make sure that internally all editors get on the same page about our policies.
@David
Great ideas for modifying our style to make external sources more prominent. I do think that all news items shoudl have an essay-style intro paragraph that introduces the key ideas and sources, right upfront for all to see. We have done this from time to time but it wasn’t written in stone so I’ll make sure that becomes a policy. I do think that we ARE making it clear when we are summarizing articles, but I do see how in this particular article, since the link/quotes from Mike’s blog started 1/3rd down it wasn’t clear upfront.
@Guillaume Theoret
Good point about “New & Notable Written for InfoQ by the Community”. WE will change this. That text was written 2 years ago and its time to update it to better reflect reality. I also think that following David’s suggestion about a clear intro linking to any key sources upfront (instead of inthe body) will make it clear what posts summarize and which don’t as you suggested.
@Bob Foster
I’m no lawyer but I don’t see any evidence that this particular post is a derivative work. It seems to more closely match Fair Use for the purpose of news reporting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use. There may however be some posts that are debatable if they quote too much from a single source, but and I will do a detailed analysis of our past posts and update our editorial policies accordingly.
@Brian Cook
Brian we do not present our selves as scraper site because we are not. Each news article is hand-written by a real human being whom as I mentioned has a full time job doing development and does this part time.
A large proportion of our news are purely original, featuring original q&a with the sources of various stories, etc. Most of our posts do quote from a number of sources together to capture a meme in one clear coherent article. As far as I know no other site/group is taking the time and effort to present an easy to follow source for change and innovation for readers like yourself. We are lucky to have been able to find a business model which more or less lets us provide this service and work with 30+ in the field editors to make it happen.
@SDC
SDC, you’re saying that we should seek permission before even quoting small parts from various sources. Again, there is a big difference between fair use and copyright. From the wiki-pedia:
“Fair use … allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders”…”the fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”
If it were not for fair use there would be no such things as newspapers because the logistical nightmare of having to ask someone permission even for a simple quotation would make it impossible to quickly and effectively report on the news.
In InfoQ’s case, I believe that it is fair use for the purpose of news reporting and teaching.
@Sam Klass, Zed,
I’m sorry about your low opinion of me personally and the site. I never claimed to be Ruby expert or any sort of leader. One of the editorial principles we live by at InfoQ is that we are NOT leaders, we are facilitators. On InfoQ we facilitate the flow of innovative ideas and information to a wider audience. We do this by drawing attention to people, blogs, and other sources that have something important to say. We also invest tens of thousands of dollars filming entire conferences and making the videos online for free, we have free books for download where the authors get 70% royalties. For the last 2 years we’ve been the only site publishing daily news, and rich weekly content for the Agile, SOA, and Architect communities.
We also were one of the first ‘mainstream?’ sites to put Ruby at the same level of billing with Java and .NET and InfoQ’s Ruby coverage is has brought Ruby into the daily attention of a lot of other ‘enterprisey’ readers who otherwise would not be reading about ruby at all. I think therefore that our contributions to the Ruby community have furthered Ruby adoption.
I hope you can judge us by our over all contributions to the community, and not by this one specific instance or your perception of how technical I am. I never claimed to be an expert - I just facilitate other experts so that we can produce this valuable service.
@Vinay Kumar
Vinay you are right - this post mistakedly did NOT link to the actual blog source, just to the blogger. This is mistake and I’ve already fixed the article. I will make sure this pointis made clear to all of our editorial team.
@Ryan Smith
Are you referring to InfoQ.com as the source that ’stole’ your tutorials or other web sites? I’ve searched InfoQ and haven’t found any news or content written about any of your work. I’d appreciate some clarity so that people don’t blame InfoQ.
I also feel your pain in general about people copying entire works, right now InfoQ China’s content is getting stolen like mad all over other Chinese IT sites, since we are one of the few producers of original content there. They aren’t quoting our stuff and driving traffic our way, they are just copying the whole article without any links or attribtution; now THAT is copyright infringement and not fair use. There is a big difference.
@Mike
Please see my initial post higher in this thread, we did not in any way attempt to make this our own. We linked and cited the source properly. We only quoted about 130 words out of a 1200 word blog.
However I can see that not following some of the suggestions in this thread (like a clear intro paragraph) might be confusing as to the source, until they got 1/3rd into it where we clearly cited Mike’s tutorial and began to quote from it.
Have you tried sending a DMCA take down request with InfoQ?
Wow, talk about brusied egos. If the content was being passed off as InfoQ’s, that’s one thing but the author is quoted and mentioned. The work is not being passed off as their own. Maybe you should put a “Don’t quote me without my permission” tag on your posts. I guess it’s like the old saying “The fighting is so fierce becuase the stakes are so small.”
Free software and data, but blogs are sacred?! Double standard?
Yeah kick it!
Wait until everyone must have a real id to post…maybe then it will solve the problem.
[...] avantajele si dezavantajele publicarii pe net. Se intampla si la case mai mari, nu trebuie sa [...]
[...] few days ago I was alerted to a post on Mike Duncan’s blog titled - How YOUR tech blog posts are RIPPED OFF while you sleep!. Yikes!! This post was talking about my news item on InfoQ. I won’t [...]
Kind of like how you ripped off all those pictures that you don’t own the rights to?
In the US its simple. Start your article with a clear copyright warning that no (partial) reprint is allowed on any media(etc) or aggregated and name explicity some names like thecodeproject.com and InfoQ.com as an example. Link also to a complete copyright page.
Any good lawyer (like jacky) will make you money when they rip you.
@FunnyThat
No see it’s OK to copy *other* people’s work, they just can copy yours.
[...] Search Results to Content Creation http://www.mikeduncan.com/tech-post-ripoff/ [...]
Hey,
I’ve been a writer before, so I can relate to all the points you mentioned when brainstorming and getting your facts straight. However, my true calling is an artist, where I do the same thing only with a pencil and shapes. I believe what they have done to you would be in the art world the same thing as taking an image I’ve single-handedly created, changing the hues a little (such as changing blonde hair to brown, and a pink dress to blue) and then giving a quick blurb to me, thanking me for “reference.”
It’s plagiarism despite what they are trying to do to nullify it. It is fortunate that you have timestamped your post, and anyone who does visit you will see that yours came first, but that’s a very small percentage.
It’s wrong to take credit for something you didn’t do, either in whole or in part (and come on, let’s face it, that’s too little effort on their half to be considered “in part”). The main bugger is the copyright BS, which would be akin to an art thief erasing my signature and signing their own name in its place. Just an extra slap in the face. But, that’s just my two cents.
I do hope these ass holes get what’s coming to them, for it’s the belief in karma what keeps me goin’!
–Chesney
this is just sad.. i do leech some information from “old” blogs from my friends but i do ask permission and link them back for the original document for it…
tsk3..
That is just wrong, I mean if you are gonna use someone else’s work and probably at least 90% of what is out there is “someone” else’s work you should at the very least give them full credit for what they have done.
I know the feeling. I once posted on my blog about how Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song” is the same tune as the theme from the 60’s sitcom “Get Smart.” A few weeks later, two other bloggers posted about “just realizing” the same thing. My life has never been the same…
@Bill Carpenter
This is not the case here. We did not use 90%, roughly 10% of Mike’s work was quoted and attributed as per accepted journalistic practices.
The net probably has different sets of ‘ethics’, and in regards to those there were some small mistakes such as linking to Mike’s blog and not directly to the quoted-from-entry which have since been corrected and ackowledged in this thread.
However, we certainly did not copy and re-post Mike’s blog. That’s not what we do.
Hah, found this entry about 40 minutes after the first time of finding one of my blog entries copied on another site… crazy.
I can understand you are pissed Mike, but is not like if you wrote the Tao of Programming, you need to put the importance of your tutorial in context.
SQLite is after all an opensource program, with has been released as http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html , public domain. With that license someone can ripoff SQLite code and even sell it and the amount of work that would be “stole” that way doesnt have any comparison to the work that you did. Remember your supposed value of your tutorial is based on their work too which they elected to give for free in first place.
InfoQ give some credit to you even if it could have been done with more style. But for me with their answer on this thread it shows that they are concerned which is not bad at all, and that floyd takes interest.
Oh and btw I came here by another post of yours first and didnt know InfoQ, so good work pays even if its stolen.
Excuse my writing, Im not native english speaker.
I deliberately skipped all the responses to be as objective as possible. I admire unbiases responses wherever they may show up including my own =)
So here goes:
To my understanding, when you publish something on the Internet it is immediately *your* copyright. You have the rights to your work. It is undeniably yours. There is no debate about this. Just as the RIAA would campaign to prevent you from downloading / repurposing illegal music, why would you indeed deserve any less? I am not advocating the tyranny of how the RIAA *tries* to uphold their claims but am recognizing that if you are indeed the creator, then ripping you off is stealing. Please let me reiterate.. they are stealing and thus are criminals. This is a representative democracy (if you are in America =). You, just as much as any corporation with expensive lawyers, deserve justice.
Now what should you do about it? That’s the real question! If it were me, I would persue whatever has the best likelyhood of an positive outcome which would be beneficial to the creator … i.e. “you”, “the one to whom royalties are due”, etc.
Best Wishes and Good Luck!
P.S., If you aren’t too busy,
Email me if you prevail!
I’d love to hear!
great and amazing post you have.thanks a lot for this lesson.best wish for you Bos.
Seems to me there are probably several bloggers who share these concerns. Maybe many bloggers banding together could take steps to reduce this type of blatant abuse. It starts with one person standing up for all bloggers.
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