68Caliber.com, which I’m not going to link to, ever again, has a nice friendly article saying that they don’t allow anyone to reproduce their articles.
That’s understandable. No one wants someone taking your whole articles and reproducing them somewhere else claiming them as their own. That’s just not that cool.
But they don’t stop there. You now need permission to link to their articles. Yes, you have to put in an application just to link to their articles. How’s that for idiotic?
People go to your site by linking to it. If no one links to it, no one goes to it. If no one links to it, your SERP placement is going to fall.
They’re shooting themselves in the foot. Being over protective of your content doesn’t really help. I’m sure most people won’t even notice or care about your restrictions. That’s just the way it is. Put some sort of blocks in (you already don’t have a full content RSS feed) or offer something good and entertaining so people actually want to go to your site.
Plus, they’re actually being pretty hypocritical. If they don’t want people link to their article, they should add Disallow: / to their robots.txt so now search engine or whatever will index their site. They’re clearly linking to them. They should be stopped to.
But I’ve got a deal. If they’ll say that they’ll allow anyone, and not just this site, to link to them, like I’m pretty sure everyone can legally do, then I might start reading and linking to their stories again. If not, I can easily get content from hundreds of other sources.
You’re absolutely right…anyone can link to stories on 68Caliber.Com all day long. It’s how the RSS feed works and sites like this one work…I have absolutely no problem with it at all.
All the Copyright Notice is warning against is cutting and pasting entire stories over to another site and presenting it as their own. I was shocked at how widespread that problem was.
I understand you want to protect your whole article. That makes sense, but what about this line?
That paints a slightly different picture.
You could also say that using snippets are perfectly fine. Here’s a nice post about copyrights, and one about having content stolen
Mostly, I see sites using a headline and snippet and linking to your site, like pbheadlines.com, which has no relation to this site at all.
All I usually see are people in forums pasting the whole article, but those are usually 13 year olds that don’t care about the copyright law at all. Even if the first person just links to the article, someone down the line will reproduce the whole article, because people don’t like clicking through and going to some other site.
Personally, I’ll probably make this blog licensed under the Creative Commons to allow people to reproduce it as long as they cite the source. I understand people will probably copy and paste the whole article, so why not make it easier on me and them.
Also, where is your RSS feed? I know you have the syndicate thing, but that’s technically javascript, and you can’t add that to a feed reader like Google Reader.