I look at this as a reality that has to be adapted to rather than fought. It would be terribly inconsistent to preach that the MPAA and RIAA have it wrong, and then get in a rut over someone copying your article.
Now, to be fair, these guys are trying to make a profit off your articles (unlike the average joe downloading a movie on BT), but I doubt that many are succeeding too well. I have yet to see one of my own successful articles be supplanted by a clone in the Google search results, and sites like Reddit or HN are usually pretty good at rooting out blogspam. These guys are more like poor sods trying to sell a photocopy of your book for $0.10 on the street corner, than like organised pirates making tens of thousands off illegally copied DVDs. Even if one of them occasionally manages to get some real traffic, considering how hard it is to monetise even when it's on your own site, how hard do you think it is for them?
Getting angry about this seems, to me, on about the same level as getting angry at someone for paying attention during your speech and then going around giving that speech to others without crediting you. Yeah, so they're copying you. So what? The minute the content leaves your computer and enters the internet, it is publicly available and copiable, in the same way as the moment your speech leaves your lips, anyone with a good memory and delivery can copy it.
I'm not one for fighting fundamental reality with papier maché laws. I've summarised my feelings on the topic in my blog's repository, at:
All code is open to use for whatever purpose you have in mind (though I’d prefer if you used it for a good purpose!). You can copy the content and images too (though I’d really rather you didn’t copy the content, or if you do copy some of it, please include a link to my blog). If you want to use the danieltenner.com look/CSS/etc as a basis for your look, that’s fine too (though I’d appreciate it if you evolved it over time rather than keeping it looking exactly the same).
To me its quite different to the RIAA's copyright dilemnas. I find the misappropriation of authorship to be much more offensive than acquisition without license.
Bloggers don't want to be plagiarised because the plagiarism destroys the remuneration that they get from their work: reputation, feedback, etc. Pay for media doesn't want to have work copied because it deprives them of their form of remuneration: money.
They're both exercising control over an intellectual property so that they get something back from it. I see that there might be mild differences (for example, copying still provides some possibility of the owner getting something back, since the authorship link is retained), but fundamentally, it's the same right that is getting exercised.
The key difference here is that one group is going after those they consider guilty of unauthorized copying of media, while the other is simply trying to have their claim of authorship respected.
Torrent files of MP3s and TV shows don't, as a general rule, mis-represent the original creators of a work. Because of that, they can still drive real revenue for those artists -- people may initially acquire an album or episodes of a TV show illegally, then go on in the future to pay for new content from the same people.
Doing a copy-and-paste job on someone else's blog content, however, breaks the link (however tenuous) between author and reader, which means that the author is unlikely to ever see anything of value back from the interaction. Not only are they deprived of direct financial (AdSense) and social (search rankings, public visibility) benefits, they are robbed of one of the most valuable commodities available to a blogger: direct feedback from interested readers.
Now, to be fair, these guys are trying to make a profit off your articles (unlike the average joe downloading a movie on BT), but I doubt that many are succeeding too well. I have yet to see one of my own successful articles be supplanted by a clone in the Google search results, and sites like Reddit or HN are usually pretty good at rooting out blogspam. These guys are more like poor sods trying to sell a photocopy of your book for $0.10 on the street corner, than like organised pirates making tens of thousands off illegally copied DVDs. Even if one of them occasionally manages to get some real traffic, considering how hard it is to monetise even when it's on your own site, how hard do you think it is for them?
Getting angry about this seems, to me, on about the same level as getting angry at someone for paying attention during your speech and then going around giving that speech to others without crediting you. Yeah, so they're copying you. So what? The minute the content leaves your computer and enters the internet, it is publicly available and copiable, in the same way as the moment your speech leaves your lips, anyone with a good memory and delivery can copy it.
I'm not one for fighting fundamental reality with papier maché laws. I've summarised my feelings on the topic in my blog's repository, at:
http://github.com/swombat/danieltenner.com/tree/master
All code is open to use for whatever purpose you have in mind (though I’d prefer if you used it for a good purpose!). You can copy the content and images too (though I’d really rather you didn’t copy the content, or if you do copy some of it, please include a link to my blog). If you want to use the danieltenner.com look/CSS/etc as a basis for your look, that’s fine too (though I’d appreciate it if you evolved it over time rather than keeping it looking exactly the same).