Friday, May 29, 2009

Kindle – Encouraging Plagiarism?

I ran across a story about the new Kindle blog publishing features. It was called “How the Kindle Now Lets You Steal this Blog” It talks about how anyone can enter a feed for a blog, enter their information and start getting paid. In the example shown, someone entered the TechCruch blog with their information, but using TechCrunch content.

Yikes!

One of the great things about the Internet is that it makes everyone a publisher, but this also means that people can publish content that isn’t their own. I fight this battle regularly with SQLServerCentral as we find people using our content on their sites. Not just linking to us and running our headlines, but actually copying our content to their site. I probably have to send a notice every few months to someone to take down content.

As much as I like to see content shared, I like the aggregations that people put together (the whole purpose behind Database Weekly), and I see value there, I also see issues with ownership and rights that need to be resolved.

In my view, linking is OK, quoting < 1 paragraph IF you add a comment is OK, using 10-30 sec of audio/video IF you include a comment, is OK.

Copying someone else's content and republishing it for your own profit is not.

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