Sarah Bird, the person responsible for keeping SEOmoz out of trouble, offered some excellent advice on how to enforce your copyright online. In her blog entry she stated, "Don't get sad. Get letter-writing mad!" She offers four ways to enforce your copyright.
- Contact the website owner
- Send a Take-Down Notice to the Online Service Provider ("OSP")
- Send a Take-Down Notice to the Company that Registers the URL
- Send a Take-Down Notice to the Search Engines
Each item details how to research and contact a website that's infringing upon your content. She includes several best practices throughout the entry, including this one:
If you get a response from the website owner and she is resisting removing the content, it may be worth considering whether you can turn the infringer into an affiliate. Since it's your content that's driving ad sales, you may convince the infringer to give you a share of the ad revenue.
Ahh, clever. Hit them where it hurts. Google even encourages this in regards to AdSense. After you send a notice of alleged infringement using their procedure, they encourage you to notify them so they can take the appropriate action.
Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 wrote an entry this week about the scourge of blog comment spam and how it can become an annoyance for unintended victims. Such is the case for Howard Owens. Whenever Howard leaves a comment on a blog that uses Akismet, his comments almost always get flagged as spam, but the problem is that they aren't spam. Scott believes the culprit is hacking (or cracking as it should appropriately be called).
It's likely because Howard's blog was hacked by spammers. Not once, but twice. So when Howard enters his blog URL in the comment form, it triggers the spam filter.
Without Akismet, it would be almost impossible to manage comments on a WordPress blog. On the Sitening Blog (which runs WordPress), the percentage of comments submitted that aren't spam is less than 4%. So, as much as I feel for Howard's commenting pain, I'm willing to allow him to slip into my Akismet spam list and click the Delete all button without reviewing the list, and without remorse.
Ultimately though, the point of Scott's entry was to highlight and increasing trend on the Web — "how spam threatens to squeeze out real content." Unlike email spam, which has its own agenda, comment spam seeks to artificially build up traffic and search engine performance through automated — albeit somewhat archaic — means of publishing keywords and links. Also, blogs in particular, are like a vast gold-mine for spammers. For every high quality blog that is carefully attended to, my assumption is that there's a hundred more that are unprotected ones that are being filled up with spam comments. If email spam is any indication of the future of blog spam, then we're in for long, bumpy ride.
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