What’s worse than deliberate copyright theft? BLATANT copyright theft.
The about page of Gamecentro explains what they do, and why they do it. According to itself, Gamecentro is a “non-commercial blog dedicated to providing the best video game news on the internet through freely available RSS feeds [emphasis theirs].” Then, they push off the problem of completely copying your articles by noting:
I added your RSS feed to the backend of my system. If you are worried about “revealing” too much of an article through your feed then you need to configure your feed to only display a short snippet of the full article. Please remember that having your feed on my blog will increase traffic to your blog – and we all share knowledge and become wiser.
The blatant and intentional disregard for copyright becomes clearer with their copyright notice in the footer:
The copyrights to all posts are held by their respective authors; all posts are reprinted from freely available syndicated feeds in accordance with a Fair Use Policy found in US Copyright Laws.
There’s too much going on here to pass up.
First, the copyright holder doesn’t have to publish excerpt feeds to prevent others from reproducing the work on their sites. Your feed is for your readers, not for content thieves. And, making a full feed as opposed to an excerpted one doesn’t give some kind of tacit approval of illegal copying.
Second, the commerciality of Gamecentro doesn’t affect the potential loss of revenue due to duplication, and thus the violation of the copyright of the copyright holder. I am making money from this content–without uniqueness, I’ll make less money. Since copyrights exist to protect commercial interests, and duplicate content results in less revenue, the copyright is clearly being violated.
Third, Gamecentro is not in accordance with Fair Use doctrine. While they do provide attribution, they are also copying the whole article and surrounding code. I would also argue that the following attempts at advertising make it a commercial site, as well as the “Ads by Google” ribbon:
Since they have a resolution email address, I will drop them a note before I send a DMCA notice to their host.
Update:
The host has removed my feed. However, I still have a problem with the entire site, which is just a slightly more sophisticated garden variety spam site.
Update 2:
He seems quite upset up this; I’m not sure why. His blog would be 100% awesome if he published excerpts instead of full feeds. You can read his article, which dug up some old posts I made to play with traffic patterns, and one case where I improperly quoted an article, which I’ve fixed now. I replied, in part,
I think the blog you have running on autopilot here is very well designed, professional looking, and probably very profitable. I also wish you the best of luck with it! However, I think that you should consider using excerpted feeds instead of full reposting both to stay on the right side of the law, and to avoid making copyright holders unhappy.
Update 3:
I was curious to find out how many blogs might be used as sources, so I wrote a short java app to pull them up: Bluegoop Video Games Blog, Consolas, Game Matters, Games Galore, GamersGame . com Gaming Blog, GamesIndustry . biz, Xbox 360 Blog, Way I Play, Water Cooler Games, Video Games Review, The Console Conspiracy, RetroGaming， Grumpy Gamer, Buzz Level, Sore Thumbs Gaming, NintendoGossip, Gamasutra News, Play Gadgets, and Google News. Interesting.
| This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 1:25 pm and is tagged with video game news, intentional disregard, content results, fair use doctrine, tacit approval, share knowledge, commercial interests, snippet, copyright laws, uniqueness, thieves, copyright notice, excerpt, backend, footer, attempts, copyrights, blog, traffic, making money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
I seriously think you are being a little harsh on that site. Saying that their site shouldn’t exist is really amusing to me because i could say the same of yours, or of his, or him of mine. So, really, nobodies site really needs to exist because everyone can really get their content from digg/reddit style sites.
Its really childish and immature to ‘request’ someone take your rss feed off the site. If you dont want other people to use your feed, then dont have one. How does that sound?
Hello! My friends and I really amused by your work Bred Simpson
This is a very good site. It assists me find lots of information on one site. Usually when I am surfing I can find nothing of the kind I want, but this site, gives me lots of ideas on whatever I need to know about him.
On the matter of the alledged plagiarism by me. I did put quotes and the proper url-source on my blog when CP wrote his stuff on “hacking Skype”. Charlie Paglee is just a bit overprotective I guess. Especially stating now : “Call to all Bloggers!” Well I find such reactions childish.
Maybe one should focus on the reasons why this blog on hacking Skype was launched in the first place. Put that next to the fact that my quotes where initially not big enough for CP,well and it looks like the bank-robber saying to the person that parks wrongly on their get-away car spot to move along and find another spot…
By the way. I corrected my “errors” immediately after Charlie thought that the quotes where not big enough. The quotes where there from the beginning, but he did not like the font. So basically we talked about it and wrapped it up. He agreed with the corrections and apologized for his exagerated reaction. But that was just a smoke-screen it seems… Afterwards he came back to his statement and needed to open the case, by starting a public jan-stole-my-content-wich-hunt on me. And then the call me a devious guy…
I find these allegations an injust attack on my personal integrity and reputation. Actually I tried to ignore this whole story due to the minor importance but it seems to me that this is still going on. I hope it will stop.
Call to all Bloggers!
A Blog which I have spent a substantial amount of time writing (http://www.voipwiki.com/blog/?p=16) was recently plagiarized by a Belgian Blogger Jan Geirnaert living in Malaysia. Then the guy started writing about conversations which we had which were “off the record”, then he incorrectly identified a Chinese company as the company which I had written about.
You can read more about the entire fiasco here:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/movabletype/blogger-plagiarism-and-sweet-revenge.asp
I would greatly appreciate it if Bloggers out there can comment on what this guy has done. His original theft of my article was blatant and yet he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. Perhaps some comments, one way or the other, can help settle this unfortunate situation. Thanks.
You can comment on his actions here:
http://webtown.typepad.com/webtown/2006/07/more_skype_clon.html#comments
[...] Then I discovered he had written an article about my web site and how I had stolen content and that game Centro was nothing more than a splog. [...]
[...] Elliott Back recently discovered that some of his content was being scraped by a game blog. First, the copyright holder doesn’t have to publish excerpt feeds to prevent others from reproducing the work on their sites. Your feed is for your readers, not for content thieves. And, making a full feed as opposed to an excerpted one doesn’t give some kind of tacit approval of illegal copying. [...]