The portal http://www,softwarefree,org/ aggregates many blog feeds related to free software without regard to license.
The About Page for my blog links to my Blog License page which states that “The contents of my blogs (unless otherwise noted) are licensed under a non-commercial share-alike license. This means (among other things) that you may not put my content on a web page that contains Google AdWords or any other similar advertising“.
Fortunately I had just read a great post on ProBlogger.net about dealing with such problems [2].
This time I decided to report the site to Google Adsense. I’ve been sending out a few DMCA take-down messages recently and it doesn’t seem to do much good (some sites keep doing it). So I’ll try getting their Google account cancelled.
I encourage everone who blogs on Planet Debian and the other planets that they use as sources of such unauthorised copying to do the same.
I assume you tried *asking* first?
Anon: I’ve got tired of the cat and mouse game where I send in a DMCA take-down only to have my next post copied somewhere else.
Let’s see how dealing with Google works. If it gets a good result I’ll keep doing it.
Hello.
I can’t find any copyright notice in your feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/etbe. IMHO it doesn’t seem right to expect people to read all the items – including one named “About” that has expired and doesn’t appear in the feed anymore. Why don’t you use the atom tag or the old rss one?
Maybe what you are thinking is people shouldn’t copy your content without the author explicit authorisation. That would make sense.
Nirgal: The “About” entry is a page not a post, it doesn’t expire. I will use an Atom or RSS tag when I work out how to do so, do you have any suggestions or a URL to reference? I’m using WordPress…
If someone was not going to copy content without explicit authorisation (which is the legal requirement anyway) then they would either have to ask for permission or find a page on the site granting permission for their desired use. For the latter the “About” page would be the first place that they would look.
As a general rule apart from Fair Use / Fair Dealing laws you must always get permission to use content and lacking such permission you can’t use it. It’s quite obvious that the softwarefree,org people are not doing so.
[…] this useful information from Russell for future reference. I’ve just installed the RSS Footer plugin as recommended by the post […]
I see this as a very narrow minded approach. Why not just be happy for the extra attention for free software and your content. Also I doubt very much if the exposure of some google ads proof that the site has a commercial purpose as meant in the creative commons license. It looks more like they try to cut down there costs.
I suppose they would take it down if you just asked. Sure it’s not your job to hunt down such people and ask each one but if it’s only now and then I would think that’s the non-confrontational way of doing it.
If you want to add a notice to your Feed at the top, you might want to try this plugin for WordPress: Feed Entry Header. You can put in a simple “This is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA” as a link if you so wish that will only appear in the feed. I’m not involved with the plugin in any way, my friend was facing just this problem and he told me how he fixed it. Good luck!
Out of curiosity, are you persuing these cases as an exercise, or are you concerned about your material being aggregated?
[…] to think about a basic license system for blogs – and if it’s really necessary. I came across coker’s blog (another open source blogger) and began to understand that other people are having this issue too. […]
its sources are used by other aggregators, but I have not seen any criticism on them.
:( :( :(
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/21/softwarefreeorg-violates-blog-content-licenses/