Domain Owl

The umbrella of the RSS feed has been shown to be useful in promoting websites yet many domainers are stunned to find a ton of stealing is going on. Content stealing via RSS feeds can be as easy and cutting and pasting and also support a lot of spam identification of your ethical website’s domain for an email campaign. Hijacked url usage for spam campaigning is an ongoing problem. Hijacking RSS feeds have become a stealing offense.

Ever checked your hosting account inbox to find 21 pages f spam mail replies and responses? Using another domainer’s url can get a lot of people in trouble but only if the owner of the domain in violation knows what to do. And there are marketing and spam companies operating in a black hat mode who will never be accountable for one millionth of the spam they send.

When a webmaster for a black hat sites hijacks another webmaster’s original s  content and putting it on their own site, they are committing online piracy. Even the inferred rights on any material at another website should be observed. The confusion over the pingback phenomenon has been noticed here and elsewhere.

When the TOS of domain protected or branded website state that the material is not to be reproduced without express permission, domainers pretty much mean exactly that. Newsreaders don’t let other newsreaders steal content. The webmaster has to set up the site to draw masked feeds without proper origin acknowledgement.

RSS feeds can be siphoned from third party websites who also fail to show proper credit. That does not mean the material did not originate at its own publishing website, however. Material published at a website is answerable to laws of slander and libel, and the republisher of this material does not carry that burden. Web journalism is intentionally clouded by many online site operators at this intersection between freelance writing and “warez”.

Webmasters can find their rogue content flying its flag on sites they never heard of. Googling the material or using Copyscape is the way to discover this hijacked content. Sending takedown letters is unpaid labor that takes time. Possible reparations might be to instruct SEO software to ignore sites and domain which employ this practice, but black hat operators know how to mask hidden or invisible content to browsers anyway.

Site publishers then take a chance that their custom authored original content will ever surface on websites or networks of websites in other languages (yet derive the SEO value thereto.) When phantom websites mine RSS feeds for keyword dense material to be siphoned via the feed, they know what they are doing. It is for the future of website development that webmasters must act together to prevent this practice from continuing.

Unless something legal and broadly observed is done to pressure violators of content and copyright TOS and make them respect source material and originating content producers, webmasters and contributors face the indirect allowance of theft by their very act of web publishing. And the ongoing effort to improve traffic and garner SEO value will be dissolved until such a benchmark is reached.

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Got original content? If not, you could get sued. So goes the conventional wisdom now developing as the frontier of Internet media, law and standard operating practices grows another branch. Those RSS feeds may not be “free” after all. For rogue operators online, the “cut and paste” method of website development may be a thing of the past. The hounds of copyright legality are upon content thieves.

Taking a bead from a domain industry leader, I reference (and cite under pain of death) Elliott Silver’s comprehensive blog post today concerning content theft. The relevant article in Wired revealed the significance of getting published in conventional print run and digital media under a syndicated banner even in this day and age. The cost of these media operations assumes use of the material under its own auspices.

The company Righthaven actively pursues legal cases against websites that puncture the value of the native content by posting it on their websites and deriving SEO value and reader interest. The details of the copyright actions pursued by this company are something every website administrator needs to know about. This is in fact a sort of domain insurance, where activities like content writing and posting build value in a site.

It should go without saying that new website ventures should contain original content. but so many newb bloggers haven’t learned that concept. And many more domain speculators actively lift feeds and copy and paste entire sections of websites as a matter of course in the race to adsense and search engine revenue. The issuing of takedown notices is a time consuming and complex activity not all bloggers and webmasters understand how to do.

Who is doing the stealing? Bloggers and other webmasters, for the most part. Silver’s article sketches a swipe at the poor Web journalism practiced by many online text contributors, but the real picture is so much more broad than that. Many (but by no means all) domain speculators populate websites using models of virtual copy theft and content “relocation”.

For what can only be slivers of cents on the dollar, random webmasters draw from the RSS feeds of multiple sites and indiscriminately repost to fill up their site pages. This practice is uneasily as common as it is overlooked and underenforced for online copyright violation. More companies like Righthaven, online services that look to police online copyright violation are needed.

Infringement is an art form for many webmasters. They seek to diffuse and obfuscate the original post yet steal or repost most of it on their own sites, often without any link or pingback to the original site.But if internet practices lawsuits go forward, a new set of rules might soon be in place.  A new rubric of online content policing might spring forth.

Many webmaster who conscientiously invest in original content would like to see this happen. Hosting companies may get involved at some point. There is a rule of common sense that should be part of every hosting company terms of service. Content theft should be an act that terminates hosting company liability. Sites composed of over 50% stolen content could be taken down by disconnect notices.

And just think what the Google rankings would scramble to show then.

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