There are lots of folk out there who are talented and have great things to say. But with big search engines supposedly penalizing sites with dupe content, will the emphasis on writing articles for publication through article portals die away? I think we could end up with a serious problem as webmasters start to fear search engine penalties more than they value the information they are trying to portray or publicise. Obviously fewer websites will want to republish articles and writings if the threat of de-indexing and search engine traffic is at serious risk. Taken to extreme, the article market could become stale and the only stuff you will find will be so called one-off original works that are not repeated and backed up eleswhere. This could make opinion unnaturally rare and threaten free speech because information transmission will be inhibited and restricted to those who happen upon a smaller number of unique instances of any given morsel of information than would otherwise be the case. Whatever happened to the human adage of sharing knowledge and learning by repeating it? How will we continue to understand popular concepts if articles and writings can only be found on single individual sites? How could debate rage? Would quotes of original texts be seen as duplication too? Interesting problem if we all of a sudden must revert to monopolistic views and are scared to share and repeat our knowledge, thoughts and opinions because one or a few companies say so. I believe the concept of duplicate penalty / de-indexing is wrong and is an unfortunate side effect of search engine spam abuse, but, having said that, the search engines cannot be allowed to disrupt the fundamentals behind human education. As a species we need to see things often and repeatedly in order to learn concepts, certainties and complexities. We must, in order to judge what is popular, remain free to observe recurrent references and therefore have the opportunity to assess for ourselves individually what the majority might think on a given subject, based on our own observations of supported repetition. In a way, we vote, when we republish articles. We are expressing support for the writings and by showing others what we support, we grant the freedom of expression for objection and calculated debates that may take many forums and many forms. Of course search engines must try and deliver good results, but let's be clear about who and what controls the information that is out there. It shouldn't be any one, single company, institution or even government. Not in these fairly advanced times where public knowledge is accepted as better than public ignorance for the most part. If any of the search engines want to penalise, they should draw a line in the sand in terms of their own advertising awards, or better still, figure out a way to share their traffic fairly, so that true interest is reflected across publishers instead of just the favoured few. Search engines should not really be empowered to withold public accessibility to knowledge which the public itself sees fit to patronise, regardless of our vast number and the difficulties involved with writing algorithms capable of showing decent, up to date results. Without multiple copies of books, we could not all learn enough of anything in this world and who can really say that its up to any search engine to decide who gets to own the only copy of the original book, or how many copies there should be in publicly accessible mainstream circulation for people to find and read? I hope commonsense will prevail eventually allowing public knowledge and opinion to be viewed and broadcasted with due respect by the corporations entrusted with the social, global functionality of technological information delivery services. Ronnie Feel free to copy this and send it wherever you want. With or without my sig!
This is not a bad thing; this is a very good thing. It could help reduce the profitability of committing copyright infringement. Almost every week I have to send out cease and desist notices to websites along with DMCA notice of copyright infringement to their hosting providers to get articles people stole from my website taken off their websites. Duplicate content hurts writers because it reduces the value of the original article. This means that publishers like myself who try to pay a fair rate to writers because someone else stole the article from me and is creating a competing copy of an article I paid a significant sum for thus reducing my ability to buy more articles. Even the United States founding fathers realized the importance of intellectual property rights thus they created patent laws and copyright laws. Why should someone be able to steal an article from my website (an article that I commissioned to be written and paid a handsome sum for) and be able to reuse it on their site? They did not pay for the article to be created, I did and the article would not exist at all if I hadn't commissioned the article. Google's penalizing duplicate content is helping to protect the original creators of works thus allowing them to earn a return on their investment, which in turn allows them to commission more articles. People who simply steal articles from other people's websites are not helping to support the writers who are trying to earn a living by writing the great content you are so worried about protecting. There would be nothing for debate to rage on if those who pay writers to write content can not be assured of recouping their investment because others steal their articles. Those who steal and republish other people's works are not producing anything of unique value that adds to the collective knowledge of the Internet. Under copyright law, quoting a small part of an article on another website (e.g. a few sentences) is considered allowable under fair use doctrine. Copying large sections of someone else's work is considered copyright infringement and is not allowable. There is nothing stopping the sharing of ideas or spreading of knowledge as long as people do it in their own words. It is not, however, acceptable in the eyes of search engines nor society at large to republish the works of others without their explicit permission. If you truly want to "vote" for or show support for writings then you should link to the original source such that those who paid for the works have a greater ability to recoup their investment in the writings and thus are able to produce more writings that you may find valuable. The way search engines work is about as fair as automated processes could be designed to be. Why should duplicate copies of stolen works be shown favoritism or listed in search engine results when search engines could simply show the results for the original copy of the works? What added value do unauthorized copies that violate copyright laws bring? A discussion of the original works can still take place with a link to the original and a brief description of the original. This still allows for debate and discussion of the merits of the writings. Not just anyone can create copies of a specific book (unless it has fallen into the public domain). Only the copyright owner of a specific book can produce copies of the book. The same goes with writings published on the internet. Only the copyright owner of the writings in question can legally publish/republish a writing unless the copyright owner gives someone else explicit permission to republish the writing. Common sense has prevailed; unfortunately some people just don't understand or appreciate the importance of copyrights, which have been an important part of our free speech rights since the beginning. Without copyrights, writers would have no way to protect their efforts or earn a fair living from their writings. If writers can not earn a living from writing, they would be forced to cease their writing in order to earn a living doing something else. So the copyright laws and duplicate content penalties you are railing against are what is protecting the spread of ideas you claim to want to protect.
That's a very nice perspective Elearn. I guess the search engines don't think about it that way and especially Google is trying to thwart MFA sites. I am stuck with an article site that I bought here and have invested about $400.00 in. It is still not even indexed. I type the URL into Google and I get nothing. This is very disappointing. I have even commissioned original articles and put them at the front of the site. I guess I would have to put the site on a new domain and try again. The damage is done.
For those under the false impression that copying articles from another site to their own is protected by fair use doctrine, please take note. The copying an entire article or substantial portion of an article from one website to another is not protected under the fair use doctrine. This is because such copying of articles will have an adverse market effect on the copyright owners by creating competing copies of said works that usurp potential markets. Also the verbatim posting of other people's works is more than is necessary to further the critical purpose of discussion and/or debate (brief summaries of articles with hyperlinks to the original articles serves the same purpose as copying entire articles). See case law LOS ANGELES TIMES v. FREE REPUBLIC: http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/cjoyce/copyright/release10/LosAngT.html http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch07/LATimes.html For more information in regards to fair use doctrine under copyright laws, please see: http://chillingeffects.org/fairuse/faq.cgi#QID492 http://chillingeffects.org/fairuse/faq.cgi#QID540
I completely agree with KLB on this one. What you're saying really is that it's OK to de-value writers. It's already bad enough as it is, with so many of them practically expected to work for free, and still give up copyrights. I charge a lot of money for most articles I write for clients. They're paying for my expertise and solid articles. I can write a piece in 30 minutes, collect $250 and the clients have yet to complain. The fact is that they couldn't do it themselves w/o just recycling the same information already available, because they didn't have the background to know what they're talking about. My freelance work is a large portion of the living I make in addition to my business. If those articles are then stolen, clients will stop paying decent wages to hire real professionals who actually know what they're talking about, and the Web will be nothing more than littered with garbage articles written by every inexperienced copywriter and kid out there who wants to say they published something, so they do it for peanuts. The quality of the information available will keep decreasing until there's more garbage than useful knowledge in the first place. Writers are professionals in the same way designers and internet marketers and SEO pros are. They deserve to be paid for their expertise in the same way. You can't justify stealing someone's income potential and intellectual property rights just because you seem to think all information should be free. Then lets make all designs freely available for use and sharing. And all code. And all music. And all videos. If that were the case, how long do you honestly think professionals would keep creating anything of value? Jenn
Great replies. I agree in that it is essential to protect writers from having their work stolen. The point I was making however, concerns the publication of articles written for the purposes of having them republished in order to create popularity, back-links, traffic etc. There are many writers including occasionally myself, who hope and want to see our articles everywhere with Bio and links intact. There are established mechanisms and article sites that actively facilitate and distribute articles by permission of the Author. The problem of stolen content is indeed a massive issue that needs as much if not more attention. Many of us have strong views on the subject, especially the activities of certain 'search-engines' that seem to believe all printed works should be duplicated and shown on the internet with little ads perhaps appearing nearby! In that scenario, I find it difficult to see where the benefits to the original author and publishing house can possibly be realised. People, corporations, will always find a way to steal writings just as they do any other art. However, punishing all publicists who want their works reproduced and distributed, just because some people steal, is surely not the answer.
It content theft really is a major issue and the thing is it isn't just intentional content scrapers that are doing it. Most of the copyright violations of content on my site come from trade groups and associations. They think that because their objective is noble, what they are doing is okay. People have absolutely no understanding of copyrights or fair use. Literally of the last five or six cease and desist/DMCA take down notices I have had to issue four were to association trade groups or legitimate non-profit organizations that should have known better. Literally I end up spending several hours a week simply addressing the issue of other sites that have stolen articles from my site and are using them without permission. The duplicate content penalty is critical to keep these infringing pages buried beneath my pages in the SERPs and reducing the damage these copyright infringements do to my operations. From a search engine's perspective their duty is not to the website or the author, but to the user conducting a search. Showing multiple copies of the same article to the user is of no value to the user especially if those multiple copies result in other pages related to their search being buried. I personally don't look at the duplicate content penalty as punishing the publisher as much as providing more diverse results to the user conducting the search. The rest of the issue is just a side effect that helps protect sites like mine that try to produce unique content and works against writers like yourself who are trying to gain maximum exposure.
Google had to do what google had to do. But I submit hundreds of articles to article directories and Im still getting quite a bit of traffic from these sources. I've seen a downturn in traffic from a few years ago, but its still a lot of free traffic for me.