A growing trend on forums, aquarium club websites, and even the mothership that is MASNA is the unfortunate act of scrapping. Scraping is when you copy and paste an article, or republish an RSS feed that you don’t own, on to another website. For writers who provide content like myself, it’s quite annoying. Imagine if [...]
A growing trend on forums, aquarium club websites, and even the mothership that is MASNA is the unfortunate act of scrapping. Scraping is when you copy and paste an article, or republish an RSS feed that you don’t own, on to another website. For writers who provide content like myself, it’s quite annoying.
Imagine if you were a painter, you took the time to create this painting and at the first showing someone took a high resolution photograph and distributed / sold copies to galleries and across the internet without giving you credit or any monetary consideration. While I don’t consider my ramblings on aquaria on par with Picasso, the feeling is the same. Scraping sucks.
The original. Social media pro tip: Don’t steal stuff that’s not yours.
Not only is your work being stolen, but it hurts traffic coming from search engines. Yes, some search engines will penalize websites for duplicate content as it is seen as spam. Meaning GBD may be given a lower search engine result or omitted completely.
For our long time RSS readers you know that we switched to truncated RSS feeds in 2009 to prevent this behavior. While truncated feeds can be annoying, the amount of scraping and spamming on the site’s launch was absurd. It wasn’t until the always on point Felix Salmon continued to shine light on the positives of full RSS feeds that I caved in and switched to full feed in 2010. [For those unfamiliar with RSS, see here]
Since then the scrapping has been interesting. The main offenders are no longer spam-indexing website looking to display well on search enginges (such as this one), but it’s coming from our own kind–Reefers!
Arguably the most prominent scraper of GBD articles is the Marine Aquarium Society of North America. That organization that I support by attending and covering MACNA every year. MASNA never asked permission to use my articles, nor did they with the other writers and bloggers that I’ve talked with.
UPDATE 6/21: MASNA President Steven Allen has addressed the issue, responding to the comment below and correcting the full reproduction aggregation. As GBD, myself and our contributors do support MASNA and believe in their mission we’re pleased with this resolution and Steven’s swift action.
Yes, MASNA is a non-profit, however, that does not fully waive them of copyright violations, nor does it trump common decency; like sending a polite e-mail asking to use our content. As of pixel time MASNA has republished 135 articles from GBD without permission. Ironically their RSS scraping program will also publish this very article on their website.
MASNA’s first stated goal is to “Educate our members with online and published material, the MACNA conference, and other sanctioned events”. It is extremely unfortunate that such a respected organization has set this example of “education”.
MASNA is not the only offender. Smaller forums like ReefChat have done the same.
Why is this an issue? Etiquitte and search engine issues aside, economically it hurts the sustainability of websites like Glassbox Design who create original content. These sites that scrape, or steal content, gain traffic from the republished works, which in turn creates an asset to sell advertising space. On the flip side, it takes traffic away from GBD and potential revenue with it. Blogging about aquariums is not a moneymaker, however, without our sponsors advertising and supporting the site, this very article would not be possible.
Lastly, and most importantly, scraping creates fragmented dialogues which can create misinformation. Readers of websites that scrape are generally not aware that the material is being taken and republished. As was the case with our Vortech Giveaway from April when readers of MASNA published comments thinking they were entered in the GBD contest. [Let me reiterate that MASNA is not the only offender, but they are the most visible in the aquarium industry.]
Should a reader have questions, these website scrapers do not [and should not] answer for the original author. The best feature of blogs is to facilitate this dialogue and interaction. While scrappers may think they are consolidating information, all they are doing is muddying the interwebz and creating asymmetric information.
Forums and websites can take note from the likes of Matt Rogers at 3reef, who asked to published our newest links on their site. In exchange we gladly offered 3reef a banner on GBD. On a similar note, our friends at the Washington Area Marine Aquarium Society (WAMAS) update their homepage with links to our most recent articles here on GBD, rather than illegally reproducing our work.
On the internet, every click is a vote. Click wisely.
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