inluminent

For those not following this issue: I called Scoble’s quoteblog theft. He responded here. Comments followed on his site and mine, and a few other places.

For me, this discussion about full-post quoting on a weblog/aggregator isn’t really about copyright and legality, though I can easily see how the argument can get pushed that way. For me, the argument against full-post quoteblogs is more about ‘the right thing’ to do, just because it’s the right thing to do.

While I never called Robert Scoble’s experimental quoteblog illegal (see Josh Legard’s weblog), I did call it theft. I guess that I inferred it’s illegal, but I should point out that I’m not a lawyer, nor am I personally interested in figuring out what is ‘fair use’ or what is legal with respect to copyright laws. There are plenty of people out there smarter than I am on that subject. I just think that full-post quoteblogs are a bad thing to do, if they’re publicly accessible or spidered by search engines. So, to clarify my position:

I’m against publicly accessible aggregators that post full quotes of the original source material.

That’s what I’m against. Period.

Why?

Russell Beattie does a fantastic job of pointing out the Google connection to quoteblogs that I failed to mention in my first post on this topic. Googlejuice is shared by links. Readers on the web are shared by links. Posting a full-quote of a source, even with attribution and a link, is not sharing… it’s stealing and then trying to smooth it over with a link. Robert saw this point too, and I’m glad Russ pointed it out.

Some of Scoble’s readers agree, some don’t.

Russ also points out another offender: stargeek.com. (I just sent them an email asking them to pull my content off their site too Russ.)

I too get a good amount of posts stolen by stargeek (A lot of people do). Case in point. Stargeek is a commercial website (or at least it has advertising on it, thus it is more commercial than a personal site like Scoble’s Quoteblog). I think it’s utterly wrong for a quasi-commercial venture to repurpose content that they aren’t paying for. It would never fly if stargeek republished magazine articles or other content that someone else had to make a living off of.

Topix is an aggregator, but they don’t re-publish full articles. News.google.com is an aggregator, but they don’t re-publish full articles. Yahoo has a news aggregator service, and they pay for the content they re-publish.

Another reason that I’m against quoteblogs, is because I generally update my weblog posts shortly after I post them to make them clearer, or perhaps to add more links or fix spelling errors after the first time I post them (It’ll probably happen to this post). For example, Scoble has an older version of the post (not by more than an hour or so), than the one I want publicly available. Not much of the actual content is different, but I did fix some spelling mistakes (practice vs. proctice in the first sentence) and add a link or two, and change a few words just for readabilty and clarity’s sake. Should Robery pull the original version down and put up the corrected/current/accurate version?

Sadly, my accusations make Robert want to stop doing his quoteblog, most likely due to legal concerns, which wasn’t my intent. My intent was to get him to change the way he was doing it… to get him to think about posting excerpts instead of full posts on his publicly accessible aggregator…

And, the coolest thing about this whole discussion?

Robert can (soon) continue to point out really cool things to read in a manner that works with his particular workflow, by using an updated version of Kunal’s excellent OutlookMT plugin, so that I can continue to read “the best of Scoble” as one of his commenters called it.

My suggestion to everyone: Follow Scoble’s lead… he’s leading you down the right path…

(Robert, you’ve got my permission to re-post this entire post if you see fit)

And lastly, thanks to Jonathan Greene for bringing this discussion up.

Related: BlogHerald: What do you do when other bloggers steal from you?