You don't have to be George Clooney to know that it's embarrassing when someone takes statements you made and uses them out of context, or without credit to you, or for purposes you never intended.
In traditional media worlds, there are fairly clear and strict guidelines for usage of copyrighted material, attributions, referencing others' works, and so on.
But bloggers, like digital music traders and video streamers, are staking out new territory. What constitutes "fair use" of someone else's blog content? Is linking to their blog or Web site enough? What if you don't credit them?
What if you find out someone is stealing your blog entries, republishing them, and making money off it to boot?
That's what happened to "Velvet," author of the "Velvet In Dupont" blog, which chronicles her often hilarious and sarcastic observations of the Washington, D.C. dating scene.
Velvet was alerted by another blogger that "AllWomensTalk.Com," a Web site ostensibly devoted to womens' interests and issues, was reprinting their work. Moreover, it was doing so without any credit to the original authors, often simply pasting whole entries from other blogs on its site unattributed.
Unlike Velvet (who asked that her real name not be used), AllWomensTalk.Com included paid ads from Google, which would enable the site owners to make money from the "clicks" on the site. More visits means higher rates for advertising, which means bigger bucks.
Amy Sherman, of "Cooking With Amy," found out her work was being pilfered from tracking links to it via the Technorati search engine.
Speaking to ConsumerAffairs.com, Amy noted that her site has a clear copyright notice stating that her work can't be "published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission."
"I think that says it all," she said.
Rustling On The Blogosphere
Velvet, Amy, and other angry bloggers filled AllWomensTalk.Com's comment pages with demands to have their content removed. They contacted Google to let them know about the unsolicited reuse of their content, and the Google ads were quickly removed.
But things got weirder from there. The site creator, someone claiming to be a woman named "Olga," waded into the fray, claiming that using other bloggers' work was no different than referencing it in a Google search.
"Olga" has a partner in Vyacheslav Kaushan, to whom the AllWomensTalk.Com site is registered. Kaushan claimed that his site's content was protected under a license from Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that specializes in offering licenses for distribution of content according to various levels of use.
Creative Commons' general counsel, Mia Garlick, disagreed. She weighed in on behalf of the bloggers, saying Kaushan's actions were an abuse of the license, and though it protected his own original content, it was also meant to protect others from plagiarism.
Kaushan soon deleted the stolen blog entries, as well as pages of comments lambasting him for stealing the work. But the site continues to link to others' work, seeming to imply endorsement.
Kaushan began showing up on other blogs, claiming that American copyright law didn't apply to him, as he was a citizen of the Ukraine. He even published the real name and address of one female blogger -- a very scary prospect in a world of easily obtainable information.
Kaushan's site is hosted by Arizona-based GoDaddy.Com, one of the largest domain registrars and site hosts on the Web.
According to GoDaddy's public relations specialist, Dan Siegel, "GoDaddy.com supports the protection of intellectual property, and we comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Complaints about content on sites whose domain names are registered through Go Daddy should be sent to copyrightclaims@godaddy.com."
As of this writing, AllWomensTalk.Com is still up and running, and still linking to other writers' work. In fact, a recent post contains a link to a blog complaining about Kaushan's alleged actions.
Fair Use
Even though the blogosphere's signature is freewheeling expression of opinion, bloggers still have rules of etiquette they respect, such as crediting materials they link to or from and "tipping the hat" to people they quote.
When those rules are broken, it damages the atmosphere of free information that makes blogging so attractive.
"Needless to say, [blog plagiarism] is rampant," Sherman said. "Because it is early days, there aren't clear guidelines for how to treat content on the Internet or even a code of ethics. But there needs to be."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) designed a "guide to bloggers' rights," including instructions on using others' copyrighted content in accordance with the Copyright Act, the DMCA, and the "fair use" doctrine. By definition, "fair use...for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
However, the law favors "transformative" uses of works, such as parodying or quoting, as opposed to copying whole cloth. By the "transformative" standard, simply copying other peoples' blogs without comment would not hold up in a legal challenge.
The Creative Commons license framework won its own legal challenge when former MTV video jockey Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid for publishing photos of his daughter without his permission. The magazine had found Curry's photos published with Flickr, the popular online photo host, and claimed they were in the public domain.
But Curry successfully argued that the photos were under a specific license from Creative Commons for personal, not commercial, use.
The "Wild West" frontier of Web content can be very attractive to self-publishers, budding citizen journalists, and anyone that has a fast Internet connection, a lot of time on their hands, and an opinion to share.
But writers, bloggers, and other content creators are determined to maintain control of the work they do, and to protect it from what they consider inappropriate or uncredited use.
Blogger "Larissa" sees a clear difference between creators sharing work and stealing it to claim as their own.
"It's one thing to say, 'Hey, so and so's blog inspired me to write about this' and include a link to said blog," she said. "The blogging world is all about communication and open dialogue, after all. However, AllWomensTalk took it too far when they started their site, using our entire posts and passing them off as their own. That's blatant copyright infringement."
