Why Share Original Content When You Can Steal It

0 CommentsTuesday • June 28, 2011 • by Imei

Based on what I saw on the Internet yesterday, I thought to myself, “Why share original content when you can steal it?” Obviously, I’m not a thief. I try to generate original content, or if I’m commenting on content that is not my own, it’s usually for the purpose of adding my own spin to the topic. To not do so is to simply create more noise. While researching stories about the Skype/ Silver Lake breaking story about the vested stock options of fired Skype executives, I noticed that two popular blogs, Wired and TechCrunch, had articles that were lifted word for word and placed into other blogs that had nothing but lifted content. If you are new to blogs, printing excerpts with attributions and links, doing reviews of other blog content and product with editorials, and citing the author and location of the original blog post are kosher activities. Lifting the entire content of a blog and placing it on another blog with advertisement (with the hopes of getting hits and revenue) is not. If you are a new blogger, here’s some reasons why you should create and share original content, even if you can steal it.

Share Original Content If You Don’t Want To Be a Thief
Whether done with the use of bots and a special program to search the web, scraping content is a form of plagiarism called content scraping. A fine discussion in the comment stream is happening one of the best blogs on the topic, For Bloggers By Bloggers. But what it comes down to is this: if you take content from someone else’s site without attribution, you are a thief. From an excerpt from the comment stream of the blogpost “Good Thief Bad Thief”, blogger Judy Dunn shares this about her experience with her blog, CatsEyeWriter:

But, don’t know if [commenter] knew that, according to intellectual property attorneys, as soon as you write something including a blog post, it’s copyrighted, whether you register it or not. I have a copyright symbol on my blog, but it’s probably not necessary (except that it might deter some people when they see it).

[By the way, the For Blogger By Bloggers site is cooler than cool, and I've been reading it with regularity for about four months now. Judy Dunn clarified that the content scraping was done on her blog, CatsEyeWriter, but as suspected, she was targeted for scraping because of the high number of unique hits she was receiving.]

Did you know your original content is copyrighted? It’s yours. For artists of all kinds, there are few actions that have that sweet sense of deep satisfaction than seeing your work in print. Sharing it should mean that it met some level of your approval, and that you would stand by your work if anyone came to question it. Stealing it (content scraping or grabbing excerpts without attribution) doesn’t quite give you that satisfaction. Not only is it something you can’t brag about, it is something you have to hide.

Original Content Helps You Rank High
I keep saying to people, “I’m the somebody of the nobodys.” Honestly, I’m not trying to disparage myself when I repeat this story to people. I don’t have a huge number of subscribers, but I do notice when my analytics jump because I wrote something interesting. And while I’m not sitting around raking in the dough off of advertisement [I place the site's ads on one page, so if you want to shop, it's because you choose to], I know how this works: more traffic and higher page ranking on Google means more potential for business and brand recognition. Popular bloggers are those who create original content and write it in such a way that search engines can categorize that information for accurate consumption.

Content scraping hurts.

A few months ago, another blog that I occasionally contributed to as a guest blogger alerted its blogging community to a stronger position on editing and producing original content. I applaud that choice, especially after sampling some of its blogging content over the past year. A prolific blog can rise in the ranks by sheer volume of material, but Google search crawlers can detect when novice bloggers are lifting material from other sites. Blogs can and do get banned for these kinds of violations, and in some cases, a fine can be assessed. I’m not saying these bloggers did that, but there was clarification that content scraping would not be tolerated.

BTW, thinking you can outsmart the system by simply copying excerpts with attributions and NOT creating original content is neither wise nor interesting. Readers can smell a fake, and despite the all the droll things we see on Youtube that go viral, readers can tell when your stuff is interesting and when it’s not. When I research a topic online, I skip over all the sites that look like regurgitations and content scrapers. I bet you do too. Or if you haven’t noticed, you will start to notice from now on.

[BTW, I do want to take a moment to say, "Thank you!" for reading my blog. Readership has been growing, and business is good.]

Original Content Inspires Creativity
Thinking and writing creative and original content keeps you in the creative stream. Songwriter and singer Pierce Pettiss shared with me his insight about creativity: it is a waterfall that never dries up. It’s eternal.

That’s a little secret, you know: once you’re in the waterfall, it just keeps coming, and you stay wet. If you step out of the creative act and start taking shortcuts, you lose your edge. I notice this when I take vacations from my creative work. It takes a bit to get back into the swing of things, unless I keep a toe in the creative process at all times, such as reading a good book, or viewing thought-provoking film. If I haven’t choreographed a new piece for a month, the next piece can sometimes have a few more unnecessary starts and stops before I hit my groove. The same can be applied to writing or any kind of content production.

If you steal other people’s ideas, you might get away with it. Artist Justin Hillgrove reminded me that most artists steal ideas (borrow might be a nicer way to say it) along their pathway of development, so much so that it is assumed an artist isn’t completely original. In that sense, all of us are little thieves of our own mind’s curation. But if you don’t focus on creating something in your own style and essential core, you’ll never understand what it is to stand in the waterfall of creativity that never ends.

I’ve had ideas, gigs, and business opportunities stolen from me over the years. I’ve even had work that is attributed to me to be rebranded with that attribution removed from its proper mention. While that makes me gnash my teeth lightly (no need to send myself to the dentist over it), there is a part of me that also says, “No biggee. There’s more of my original content coming.” Because I understand what it takes to be creative, I don’t worry that the ideas will stop coming. In fact, the other persons who steal ideas show themselves to lack the very flow of creativity that I find so tangible and abundant.

My sympathy goes out to Judy Dunn for the troubles she is going through to regain control of 2.5 years of content after content scrapers somehow managed to wrangle her posts and domain. She has taken the time to outline important steps you can take to guard your own content, and I encourage others to take action to protect their work.

[Editor's note: Judy wrote the reply, below, to my comment on her blogpost. Thanks again to Judy for sharing her experience so that we can all benefit].

Wow, Imei. Nice post you wrote. I think the more we get the word out about this, the more educated we’ll all be. This actually happened with my own blog (CatsEyeWriter), but, yes, it was because of the traffic I had built up.

Typepad’s response was a little irritating. They said:

“When you choose to close your Typepad account, you free up your domain to be used by new account holders…”

As if it was somehow my fault. And they didn’t tell me until after the fact that I could have kept that domain with a free account, so no one else could snap it up. Boy, that would have been helpful information, like 3 months ago.

Thanks again for helping to get the word out, Imei.