Any blogger with 10 posts or more and at least 2 months with a live blog knows spammers are everywhere. Creeping around the internet, looking to pray upon the technologically innocent.
Busy bloggers also seem to be great targets for spammers with large pageranks, lots of comments, and too much to do in to little time. Busy bloggers are easy targets. It’s like mugging a guy talking on his cellphone, walking down the sidewalk, and trying to read the newspaper all at once. They just are easy pickings for the morally complacent, selfish spammers.
Don’t worry, although this is a topic I am emotionally attached to, this will not be a rant 
. Instead I would like to talk about the rights of the blogger and the purpose for intellectual property rights in the first place. Everyone needs to know why we put those funny little © symbols in our footers and how you may be intentionally or unintentionally breaking copyright laws.
Property Rights
Whether the law interests you or not, you have property rights, so pay attention. A property right is a relationship more than anything else. That might sound weird so let me explain.
You own a laptop or computer in which you use to blog. It is yours and you paid for it or received it as a gift. Your property right over the laptop is a relationship. If you looked at everyone in the world, you would have a respective right over your laptop in comparison to everyone else. When it comes to why we give property rights it is very simple, to protect the labor or effort that you put into something. Labor can also be replaced with money, which at one point required labor to get and therefore is often replaceable. When you buy land you get the property rights from the previous owners because you put labor/money into receiving it. Most laws in both America and throughout the world deal with property in this manner, based upon the philosopher John Locke.
Intellectual Property Rights
Blogging has property rights, but these rights are intellectual. They are not over some physical thing, like a laptop, but rather over expressions. The most important intellectual property right for bloggers is the all important COPYRIGHT.
This is why we put the © on the bottom of our blogs and state that all the content is copyrighted by our blog and place the date when the material was first created. A copyright is not a right to protect an idea though. It is the right to protect the way the idea is expressed. With a blog, that means in writing or literarily.
A blog’s copyright is saying you have the property right, or the superior relationship, to benefit from your writing and work under the law. Your writing or videos cannot be reproduced in their exact expression (plagiarism) without your consent. You took the idea and turned it into words, and for your efforts you have the right to benefit from your labor. That is the purpose of the copyright, to encourage you to create new expressions (writing, video, podcasts, etc.) and then profit from them.
SPAMMERS
Not only are spammers manipulating the process of blogging, but they are breaking the law. Whenever anyone tries to misrepresent a product or piece of property (your blog) as their own they are breaking the law.
Just today a spammer tried to get dozens of trackbacks from Blogussion towards a blog post that they ripped off of our blog! They literally copy and pasted our post (which took me 3 hours or more to write) and then put it on their blog. They then had the gall to try and get me to link to it!
Not only was I irritated, but I realized they were breaking a fundamental right. I may not have the resources to sue this person (which under the law I have the rights to do), but I definitely will not help them try to make revenue from my work!
The message about copyrights that I want everyone to understand is their purpose is to protect and encourage everyone to create and produce wonderful things. When spammers steal the product without putting any effort into it other then copy and pasting, they hinder your creativity. If everyone did it, I would never write another post again. What would be the point of creating original thought.
Conclusion
Know your rights and make sure to protect them. Also, check everyone that tries to get links from you through pings and trackbacks. Actually look at them before you click approve. See if the article really does reference you or your post. You might find that it is not even their post to begin with.
Also, as bloggers we need to protect each other by avoiding the ugly process of ripping others content. We also should avoid blogs that do this as well. The more we look out for each other, the more we are protected in our creativity and efforts.
What do you think about Spammers? How do you deal with Spammers? What is a great way we can stop this process from happening?
The Discussion
Leave a Comment Read Again?Hey Seth,
I definitely agree with you on how annoying spammers could be but there’s really not much that we could do them (we could sue them, but that’s too troublesome…). So, your suggestion on checking the track backs and pings before approving them is the easiest action that anyone could take. You could also use Akismet plugin to help you with spammers, but I guess everyone already knew that.
.-= Andi | Web Marketer Depot´s last blog ..Is Your Blog A “Me Too” Blog? Diagnose It Now! =-.
Akismet is a fanastic way to protect yourself and stop spammers. I think writing an email or comment is a great way to get the content removed as well. I have emailed many bloggers with my content and they generally remove the content.
Just try to be professional and explain why it is harmful to them, and their business and they usually remove it quickly.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Hey Seth,
Great post indeed. I use Askimet which really does help, and I also find the IP’s of the spammers and block them from the blog as well. Doing that helps.
And good point saying other bloggers need to look out for each-others, that is definitely true, helping out one another, will benefit our blogging life’s.
.-= Bilal´s last blog ..Interview with Jean, founder of Wprecipes.com =-.
IP’s are a great way to stop spammers from having access to your blog. Hopefully you are not blocking other customers or readers, but sometimes spammers need to be stopped.
I think helping each other is the only way to shut them down for good. If they don’t profit from it, they wont do it.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Thats the sad state of blogging. I have had my content ripped off as well and I just let them do it instead of wasting my time yelling at them..
.-= Melvin´s last blog ..Look, We’re Not Idiots Here =-.
You do not have to yell, or waste a lot of time. The key is that you try your best to prevent them from profiting.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Thanks to anti-spam comment developer, and if you’re a new blogger , you should moderate your comment by yourself. It’s easy to do because the comments is just a few.
.-= Reza Winandar´s last blog ..5 Tips to Increase the Number of Subscribers for Beginner =-.
It is funny in a lot of forums you see this exact tactic (and many others) being discussed. It is very sad that people just can not get the clue that it is much better to build a business then just spam spam and spam. Great post!
.-= Internet Income Formula With Evan Gould´s last blog ..Five Way To Write Blog Posts Without Writing =-.
Right! It really is too bad that an industry of products and processes are created to fight spammers! Maybe its the spam fighters that are encouraging the industry!
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
The search engines seem to be getting a lot better at knowing which copy is the original and which one is ripped off. It especially helps if your blog is pinging them whenever you post new content. As long as your blog has some pagerank and backlinks, you should be able to outrank most of the scrapers because they can’t invest a proportionate amount of time into promoting their lifted pages.
Someone reversed this on me, though. Instead of copying my work, they put a completely plagiarized comment into my blog. It didn’t have any links so I approved it, and then my page completely fell out of the front page of search and lost most of its traffic!
.-= John´s last blog ..Reported Dreamhost Coupon Problem – Can’t Change Promo Codes at Signup =-.
Wow… spam commenting sucks! I do think that generally spam sites are found by google, but hopefully they become even more sensitive to this issue.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
I’m not sure about whether if there is someone copying my content, but I have got a lot of spam comments that just make me feel bad, well spammer just sucks, I mean can they really make any money out of it?
.-= The Bad Blogger´s last blog ..The Bad Blogger Sunday Sexy Surprises # 4 =-.
Spammers aren’t in it to have a voice on your blog, they just want to spread their links around, in the hopes someone’ll click on them.
They could be annoying, I have decided on a more active anti-spam technique, I just try to block the spam comments when they’re being posted.
.-= Online shop hosting´s last blog ..F.A.Q =-.
Active spam protection is important. You are right though, they do not care about you or your blog. Just promoting themselves.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Can’t they just understand what they are doing is just not going anywhere… I mean are they human, do they not know about what they are doing?
.-= The Bad Blogger´s last blog ..Don’t Rip Me Off, You Idiot ! =-.
I’ve heard of these blogs which scrape content from blogs. That’s pretty annoying especially if you have a new blog thus not yet being crawled by search engine bots more often. If the scraped content was crawled first, then the search engines might think that that was the original.
I think one way to prevent this is to show only an excerpt of your posts in your rss feeds or whatever you call it. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that these blogs scrape content through feeds. Not sure though.
That is a great idea, the only challenge is that feed readers like to read the full content on your site… a tough decision!
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Great post, just one thing, you write “those funny little @ symbols “, but the international copyright symbol looks similar to “(c)”, the one you use in your post is the “at”-email symbol. Might confuse some people, SY
You are so right! What a mistake… I am glad you all got what I meant though… thank you so much. Fixed!
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
You are welcome! SY
.-= Blogging´s last blog ..How stupid can a single spammer be? =-.
Ya i too agree with you spammers are evenly spread everywhere we should know our rights and we should keep them away.
Hey Seth. Did you contact their host?
Most host must stick the ethical rules of marketing unless to idiot has his own server in the bedroom or something. Worth a try though.
.-= David´s last blog ..Get a FREE ‘Follow Me on Twitter’ button =-.
I did not contact their host, that is great information. I did not know or think about that. Thank you.
Just to let everyone know… I was contacted by the scrapper and received an apology and a removal of the content from their site. I guess sometimes a brief explanation of the offense really does work.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Double Your Pageviews – Pros & Cons of Displaying Partial Posts =-.
Something very similar happened to me with the exception I was lucky enough to have the person edit the content to link back at my site. Good blog!
.-= KalibreOnline -Games, Life and Ent´s last blog ..Enraged Reviewer =-.
Copyright is implied whether you use the © symbol or not. But I guess it does make it clearer to anyone unsure of the terms.
I guess there are a few points to make here…
!
1. If your post includes references to your brand and links to your site etc then tbh I’m happy for it to be flung far and wide. It is funny to see people desperately try to get their brand out there yet get upset when spammers do the job for you! Google is good at spotting the original source, I’d only get upset if the copier is ranking above me – and then you can just report them to Google. I actually get a lot of traffic from scrapper sites, many of them leave links intact! This is a good thing!
2. OK so I agree they ultimately shouldnt be doing it, but is the time spent dealing with it really worth the ROI? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose if I’m honest I’d be a annoyed if someone did rip off an entire site of mine and passed it off as their own work. But if they were a lazy scrapper and left all the links in place that would be fine by me lol!
3. Some blogs have expressly allowed their content to be copied freely, the best known example is Xen habits. It will be interesting to see how that goes but I suspect it won’t dent the readership at all. It is interesting that we are all happy to use free software (eg WP) but, and I include myself, feel resistant to giving up our own IP. Although that said I have always been proud to give away my plugins and themes etc for free, charging for WP plugins just seems to go against the whole spirit of free open software but that’s another debate
.-= BLOGERCISE´s last blog ..How Much Money Do I Really Make Online? =-.
I can agree that the spread of content is not bad when the links and brand are intact and the scrapper at least attributes the contents creation by linking to you and stating that it is your work. I just do not like it when they misrepresent the work as their own. That is when it is stealing.
.-= Seth´s last blog ..Learning Social Media Marketing from… Chick-fil-a? =-.
Now that’s a very different and way cool Post !!
For me, Akismet rocks for now..
And yeah avoid leaving your email IDs on adult websites and places visible like twitter bg,
)
Also avoid using online messenger clients unless they are from their official website like Yahoo Web Messenger. (Helps keep spam emails
.-= Enk.´s last blog ..15 Premium Portfolio Wordpress Themes =-.
I’ve just installed the Cookies For Comments plugin on my blog and it’s dramatically cut down on those kinds of comments. Matt Cutts recommended this plugin at the recent Wordcamp seminar.
.-= Paul Hancox, copySnips´s last blog ..Why Writing Headlines For Search Engines Like Google Will Get You More Readers =-.
there are many spammers out there all over the internet. but there are also many spam buster that you can use like Akismet, i think suing the spammers are waste of time, because nowadays spammers are also have great knowledge. I think all you have to do is install Spam Buster to your blog
.-= oes tsetnoc´s last blog ..Increase Link Popularity By Blog Commenting =-.
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