Is there any way to either prevent, or limit, the copying/pirating of stories from a Drupal site?
We've been finding our copyrighted stories plastered all over the Net, many of which are the entire article with not even a courtesy back-link.
We've plowed through Google and Drupal.org looking for solutions to stop or at least limit the theft of stories in Drupal, with unimpressive results. We've noticed that sites like the Washington Times has attempted to limit copying by nagging you to death with "Read more at (http adress) when you highlight text beyond a predetermined limit. And the New York Times puts up a question mark when you highlight text.
Please tell us we're not alone in not wanting our stories populating other sites, especially when we have not given our consent.
Comments
Just curious here, but is
Just curious here, but is your RSS feed configured to post the title and the entire story, or just the teaser? In my experience, when your work is being reproduced all over, it's generally from RSS feeds. Most people don't copy and paste, they just aggregate.
Making sure you are set to only show the title and teaser may be a big help to you. If it turns out it's a copy and paste job, there's not anything technologically speaking that will stop that.
You're not alone in wanting
You're not alone in wanting to prevent this, but unfortunately you're also not alone in being told that there is not (and likely never will be) a reliable technological solution to the problem. Anyone determined enough will get around your protection fairly easily, by turning off JavaScript, spoofing user agents, etc...
For sites hosted in the US, you can send a DMCA takedown request. ISPs tend to react very quickly to them.
Thanks for the info
Yours is a more constructive reply; thanks.
We're not looking to kill a thief; just break his leg.
RSS feed posts teaser plus title only
The site's RSS news feeds are title + teaser only.
From what you're saying, technology has not yet advanced to the point to where it can address this issue, and that lawsuits with offending parties are the sole solution. It also infers that there is not a single web site in the world that is immune from copying/pirating, the Internet is a free-for-all pirate zone, programmers have given up trying to protect their site's content and that invoking solutions such as the prevention of hotlinking is a pointless waste of time.
That's pretty accurate
That's pretty accurate actually. For every method people have created to protect your text, there's at least 50 ways around it.
Anything you write is
Anything you write is copyright protected in most countries. There are firms specialized in finding copyright infringments on internet, sending bills to the offender and make sure they pay. And make sure they get their share ;-)
Protection methods
It seems this would be a good time for the newspaper community to discuss ways they are protecting their sites from such things, and could serve as a source document for others looking for better protections than they currently employ.
I don't think sites should just lay down and let the Somali pirates take over their ship without at least a fight. Perhaps efforts might be puny in the overall scheme of things, but its certain there is more intelligence in a group than in single entities.
When we had to deal with this
When we had to deal with this problem, we determined we had only two routes: lock it up or share. We decided to go with share policies that we enforce strictly. We have had some folks willing to pay us to share our copy with them, with a link back and first-user access. We've had others that won't pay but are so very willing to link back. Once we became firm about our policy and aggressive in enforcing it, our problem became dealing with the inquiries on usage, the proof of usage submissions and the increased traffic that the links generated. People want this copy because they have a need. There will always be the rotten eggs but 90 percent of those we have dealt with are reasonable folks who react well to a win-win. Breaking news/exclusives...now that's another can of worms.
Worthy of pursuit
That certainly sounds like a reasonable solution, and we will seriously consider it.
If you leave a site wide open, as you have noted, you open yourself to being copied for consumption elsewhere. Indeed, one of the larger issues facing online newspapers is the knowledge that, when given a choice, readers go where the news is free. Thus, if FoxNews will charge for content access (which Murdoch says he wants to do), then readers will just go to CNN. Even the NY Times backs off at times; not insisting you register just to read an article. In sum, it seems as if the "big guns" haven't gotten their arms around their pay models yet, perhaps because their sales folks are adamant in their assumption that Internet profit is generated with the same methodology as print.
Still, content must be protected, and your sharing solution offers very attractive possibilities. News gathered by an online newspaper takes work by a number of people to get online, and its use by "Joe Schmuck's News Service(dot)com," which didn't gather or publish it, is a pay-to-use situation. Heck, we've even had people who have asked us to e-mail news articles to them. We tell them - paraphrasing here - "This ain't McDonald's."
I was pondering that issue of
I was pondering that issue of readers going where the news is free (something I admit I'm guilty of, also) when I was at a local TV stations web site. Of course, they are not accustomed to packaging news as hard copy and making it available by subscription. However, their site is copy heavy as well as video heavy. And there is no "pay-to-access" business model in place at this site, nor any other TV station site of which I am aware. They get a lot of eyeballs and they are monetizing the site via other methods. I've only talked with one fella there but he claimed to be doing fine monetarily from their site. We built a site here many, many, many years ago around the copy content, no banner ads, click thru from article to buy product mentioned within copy and we get percentage model. Stopped working on it long ago. To this very day, we get a very attractive wad of checks from commission payouts on that site. The copy writing has been paid for handsomely many times over. We also use the share/aggressive enforcement model there, too.
I'm only assuming that this
I'm only assuming that this topic refers to a newspaper, based on the group it was posted to. I recommend doing some investigation of Fair Use Copyright laws.
I'm no lawyer, so I can't pretend to council about copyright law, and of course this applied to the U.S. only from what I know of it, but it's worth mentioning that newspapers do not receive the same copyright protection that other printed mediums do.
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/article-30100.html
That's just one example and write up, I recommend if you are a U.S. based newspaper, you do more reading on it. I'm not saying we don't get copyright protection, I'm saying it's different depending on how they use it, and how much.
Associated press anti-piracy efforts
On the contrary, newspapers are every bit as protected by copyright laws in the United States as any other medium.
The Associated Press is making content piracy a priority, and is working with a company that uses software to locate instances of content piracy in a plan that may lead to creation of a service that monitors, sends takedown notices, and in some cases may negotiate payments. It's a much bigger issue for the AP than it is for local newspapers, for whom it's more of an annoyance.
I'll be the first to admit I
I'll be the first to admit I have no clue how the law works. I'm a server monkey, and I barely understand the lawyers when they say "Hi".
I read an article a few months ago about Fair Use, and that's all I really know about it. I think it was in Editor & Publisher Magazine if memory serves, but I could be way off on that too.
The article's contention was that newspapers had less protection from copyright because of Fair Use laws, and how those laws have been applied to news reporting. I can't pretend to know how that works, which is why I recommended reading up on it. It seemed to me they were saying that the vast majority, and in some cases all of the article, could be reproduced legally.
They also mentioned the AP was taking it as a top priority, just like you said.
My point really is that DMCA may protect newspapers, but the reality is, in the long run we're not going to stop it in it's tracks. We may be able to deter it, we may find ways to make it more difficult, but in the end, we won't be able to put it to a halt.
As someone else pointed out, sending a DMCA halt request to the ISP is one way to handle it, but that's being reactive rather than proactive, because proactive measures just don't cut the mustard.
DMCA?? Piracy?
Well, its funny to see the two derogatory words Piracy and DMCA here at an Open Source forum? Best is go for CC Licensing. I oppose abuse of content created by me, by using it in a manner I do not allow. But, instead of going for restrictive technologies like DRM, which we opposed, we must work towards productive measures as someone said above. Hope you will find a solution -- but locks are not for thieves :-(. This ugly mentality of stealing from others will have to stop. Can we set up a place where we can flag the stolen story. Copy-Paste-Hunt kinda stuff... this will not only make them realise they are being monitored but also attack their reputation among readers, thus they might stop this! Just a thought!
Swapnil
Open source doesn't mean
Open source doesn't mean we're anti-copyright nutters. Drupal would be public domain licensed if that were the case. GPLed open source projects like Drupal rely on copyright law to ensure the freedoms their licenses provide. If someone took Drupal and started distributing an executable version of it without also providing the source code, the Drupal project would likely consider it piracy/copyright violation and issue DMCA takedown requests.
CC licensing wouldn't change anything. If someone violates your CC license, you have the same recourse - go after them for copyright violation, most likely first with a DMCA notice.
There are copy/paste hunting sites that track plagarised content, but most of the people doing this sort of thing don't care. They usually don't have much of a reputation to protect - most of the cases I've seen are spam blogs that target keywords to serve Google ads to.
copyscape as a service
"On the media" (http://www.onthemedia.org) had a story on this subject a few weeks back. I can't find the transcript on their site, but as i recall, the story summarized the technical efforts from major papers on finding their articles around the web. It might be of interest to hunt down and listen to.
There is also services called Copyscape and Anti-Leech. (http://www.copyscape.com). They do have APIs but Drupal modules have not yet been written that I can find. You can get a pretty good feel on the issue if you take a look at Copyscape's press page.
Fight it? or Take Advantage of it?
Fighting this problem seems like a potential waste of a lot of time, energy and money.
I'd ask myself one question. Am I losing readers over this?
If No, then I wouldn't worry about it.
If Yes, then I need to do something.
The question is then, what approach to take? relying on legal remedies is not a great choice in my opinion, it is just not all that effective or scalable in the digital age. Of course lawyers will advise you to take legal action (not surprising, that's how they make money - they are giving advise in their own self-interest). Of course, DRM vendors will advise you to use DRM to protect your material (not surprising, that's how they make money - they are giving advise in their own self-interest). Neither of these approaches work very well.
So I ask myself, rather than fighting these guys, what can I do to take advantage of them?
Since these leeches offer nothing of value other than the article, regular readers will figure it out soon enough and seek out the original source, especially if you are providing added value.
Those are a couple thoughts off the top of my head. There are no doubt issues I haven't talked about or considered. But I hope you get the general idea.
start reading TechDirt.com
Attributor data
From Editor & Publisher: "In one month, more than 75,000 unlicensed Web sites are re-using content from U.S. newspapers -- including 112,000 near-exact copies of articles, a research report released Tuesday claims."
Attributor is the company I was trying to remember the other day when my brain wasn't working.
We have a subscription only
We have a subscription only site, but due to it being in a specialised sport we know the likely places that it will crop up if content is whipped off the site. After several years of chasing these situations down the word is definitely out that you dont copy our content.
Our new Drupal site :-) which is nearing completion makes much of our news content open, with our high quality indepth stuff behind the paywall. The mantra we are putting forward here is link, dont copy.
Copyscape - jjmackow - is one good option we have looked at and will certainly pursue it if we find more copying trouble with the new site. Just having the button there on the page saying 'we're checking' is good, without being too authoritarian.