October 10th 2006

We don't want your scraped content

Posted by C.K. Sample, III

› tags: bottom feeders, scraped content, spam

Besides the inevitable spam and ad-heavy spammish blogs that hide their content under 500 pixels of advertisements, besides the duplicate stories that are rehashed versions of the same story or even the same exact AP story syndicated across numerous local publications that are submitted and resubmitted to Netscape, and besides all the blogs out there breaking the middle-man rule, submitting stories that they've nearly quoted entirely from another source as their own--besides all these things that try to drown and weigh down Netscape, my least favorite type of submission is scraped content.

We just banned http://resanium.com from Netscape because one of our content-partners, Autoblog, found that an entire post from Autoblog had been scraped, reposted to this site, and the reposted link had been submitted to Netscape.

I just wanted to drop a line here and let everyone know that we do not want content stolen from elsewhere posted to Netscape as if it were your own. Your site will be banned for such behavior. In fact, I'm tempted to start publicly blogging a shame list, detailing all the people who we do ban for this reason. The Internet community as a whole needs to start taking a stand against these types of bottom-feeding sites that are cluttering up our search results, our social news systems, and our Internet. Please let us know if there is anything you think we could be doing to better combat this problem.

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Comments

(Page 1)

11:07AMAjay DSouza

Thank you very much for taking such a decision like this. Atleast it will prevent stupid splogs from taking our content, posting as their own and then repeaping the benefits of visitors through ads.

11:59AMDumy

This is a very good idea..the one with the public shame list :D

1:05PMpaul van assen

Netscape has poor service when I tried to cancel they are charging me 89.oo disconnect fee. Why they have disconnect fees when they don't want you to leave because of poor service

7:09AMSean McManus

Blogspam is a massive problem for the creators of blogs. Often scraped blogs are easy to spot at a glance, but there is a risk that they will improve sophistication and become harder to distinguish from the definite article. If two blogs post the same content, how can you tell who copied who?

It's great to see Netscape taking action on this. The key is to provide simple tools that make it easy for legitimate content owners to report scraped content - DMCA takedown notices involve a disproportionate amount of work and can't be pursued for every scraped post.

There does also need to be some safety net to protect genuine content owners from spurious accusations.

6:17AMTony

you obviously haven't noticed the huge amount of spam blogging thats
going on in Netscapes adult Sex section.

11:17AMnektotigra

Seems that I got my blog (in the signature) banned, too. That's pretty embarrassing since I never (and I mean _never_) copy-pasted a single bit from other bloggers and I always put a proper link to the source of the original news.