DISQUS

Aaron,

I agree that things have again taken a turn at Blogspot and it appears that Google is once again largely tolerating spam on the service. They seem to go through a pattern where they attack and then retreat from spam on the service.

Considering that they likely run the service at a loss, I can't see them investing heavily to make it spam free. They just try to keep it out of their index and hope for the best.

Sadly, that seems to be their MO lately.

Thank you for the information!

Mike,

I agree that the CSS solution has serious flaws but, then again, so does any DRM technique. The solution you present, for example, won't wok on those who turn of referrals (which includes many of my privacy-buff friends) and will not work in all environments as many bloggers don't have access to their server config files.

That being said, I generally think technology solutions are a waste for many of the reasons you list, still, I discuss them for those who are interested. If you think that a technology-based approach is best, you need to decide what works for you in your situation with your needs.

You definitely present a good idea for some and I agree it is superior in many ways, but I think every method will have its limitations.

That's fair to say...

Bernie,

For the most part, I agree with what you had to say. One minor point before jumping in to the meat though is that PDF is now an ISO standard so you can create PDFs from any number of applications, including OpenOffice, without agreeing to anything from Adobe. The point is there, but PDF might not have been the best example.

I agree with you about the contract portion of the ruling. It seems to me that the judge was kind of working backwards on this one, having formed an opinion about what was right and then making the law match. It seems that the logic was a bit twisted in places in a bid to get the ruling that felt right to the judge.

With the copyright portion of the ruling, I have to say that I am a bit confused, I don't see how TII could invalidate any legal protections for a work put into it. Even though it was ruled a fair use, the fact is the student still has copyright in the work and all TII stores is a fingerprint, which after talking with the CEO of iParadigms at a conference, I can say is indeed different than the article itself.

Nothing TII does should negatively impact the student's rights to their work elsewhere, the question is whether TII is an infringement unto itself.

I'd be interested in your thoughts and clarification on that issue, admittedly, I haven't looked at the ruling for quite some time.

Rick: It is important to remember though, it is not just the author, but the reader, who is defrauded by plagiarism. Plagiarism is not just taking someone's words, it is a lie to the public. I put forth that while there is praise in being plagiarized, it is still worth fighting both for the poet and for audience...

Mayra: I would take a look at Divshare for embedding and Photrade for marketing and selling.

Hope that helps!

@Joan Reeves -
I just got done posting a comment to your article, very sorry about my tardiness, but I wanted to say again thank you for addressing this issue and for the mention of PT!

@Christina Warren -
This is a great idea! Thank you very much for sharing this. I don't think I'm going to stay with MT because my databases seem to be constantly in "burst" mode due to the volume of this site (even with Super Cache on in many cases) so a VPS will also be less expensive. However, I definitely could see how this script could be modified for any host, as you mentioned. I'm going to give it a closer look this weekend. Great work on this.

@Mark -
By now you've probably seen my article on Copy Alerts, I sent you an email about it after I posted it, if not you can find it here: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/07/01/bitsc...

Congrats on a very compelling product!

@Robert Orlich -
Glad to hear that it has been working for you, thank you for the update!

@David Bradley -
That is great news! Thanks for the update!

@Martin Jones -
Thanks for the help on that one. It's a throwback to my college days where I can take pages and pages of notes in a lecture and then, just a few days later, be completely hopeless in finding what I need. Just another reason why the idea of law school makes me uneasy.

I actually really enjoyed your talk on this topic. Hindsight being what it is, I thought that what you did was better than my original vision and certainly more practical to me. As someone who thinks heavily of plagiarism in conjunction with copyright issues, this was refreshing and gave me some new ideas to hash out with my attorney friends.

It was a pity that Mr. Littlewood couldn't make it, that debate would have been MUCH better with him. However, I've been hearing rumors about what exactly were some of his other arguments and it may be for the best that he wasn't, for his personal safety.

It was a great conference and I am glad to have met so many interesting people, yourself included. Looking forward to 2010!

@Christina Warren -
Somehow, I feel much better knowing that others have experienced this kind of epic fail before. Thank you very much for posting about your experience as well.

I'm on MT right now, using the GS, the same as you. I'm relatively happy with the performance but I know that, if I combine all of the sites I have responsibility for, including at least one shopping cart site, I may start to go over the GPU limits. VPS will actually be a cost saver for me.

I took a quick look at Slicehost and really liked what I saw. I'm going to do more looking up on them when I get back to the States (In England now, the reason your comments took so long to go up) and see if everyone fees as you do. However, the price is very fair and the TOS looks quite good.

Thank you for the suggestion!

@Christina Warren -
Thank you very much for the praise and for the encouragement, it means a great deal. I can also understand the frustrations experienced by companies such as AOL when dealing with this issue. It is almost a game of Whack-A-Mole with two new sites popping up for every one taken down. Very frustrating.

What we need to do is start hitting the advertising and profit centers harder. That will be more effective than just reporting the sites. Since one account will have multiple sites and it is much harder to create a new advertiising account than find a new host. It is the easiest way to go.

Thank you very much for your comment and please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

@Websurfer -
Actually, I didn't do it to get more hits. I had three reasons for doing it.

1) Legal reasons. If you call someone a plagiarist and it works out that they aren't, you can be sued for defamation or bring other trouble to your doorstep. It's dangerous, especially when the terms and laws are very vague.

2) Drama. Though the Coldplay case in 2005 wasn't an example. Almost every time I covered a story it brought a lot of drama to the site. It wasn't worth it and it didn't help anyone. My goal has always been to help Webmasters and content creators, not be a shaming system.

3) Consulting. I make my living off of my consulting practice and these types of controversies don't really speak to the customers that pay my bills.

My goal here is to help people and I actually don't get much site traffic at all. I see that as fine. I get a full time living out of the site and I get to help a lot of good people. That is far more than what most bloggers can say...

I can't complain.

@Dr. Mike Wendell -
I'll have to remember that. I just have a good old-fashioned external HD for that right now. Probably should look at upgrading.

Regarding the plugin, it's WP-Comment Remix. You can find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-comment-...

I might move the comments over to Disqus though. Do you have any thoughts on that?

@Mikey -
Let me know how it works for you!

@Dr. Mike Wendell -
These things happen sadly. It was my first and only major blow up in over 12 years of hosting Web sites, but it was bound to happen. Hopefully I'll get another 12 before it happens again.

@David Bradley -
Let me know if it works!

@Joel Bloch -
Sorry you won't be able to attend but I will have a full recap on PT after I get back! Looking at the list, are there any sessions of particular interest to you? I might be able to attend it if there is.

@Anonymous -
While I can definitely understand being upset that we take a more humorous tone with these topics, it is important to note we did a much more thorough analysis on the new IP Czar position back when the PRO-IP act was introduced, this was more of an update to an ongoing story. I can't recall the episode right now.

Regarding the U2 manager comments, once again, this is not the first time he's spoken out on these issues and we covered it the last time as well. Once again, we looked at least a little bit harder into those comments the first time around.

That being said, we openly admit that the Copyright 2.0 Show is not a source for just hard news. We admit we take a more lighthearted tack with it and that is because the show is weekly and only an hour long, but also because copyright issues tend to be dry and dull. I would rather people enjoy their hour and learn something than fall asleep and learn nothing.

If you want, I can recommend some great "hard" news copyright podcasts that go well with the show. There are several great ones out there.

@Girl -
It was a nightmare but I learned a great deal from it and I am back up now. All in all, it has made me much stronger and a better Webmaster, in my opinion. However, I hope that I never have to showcase what I've learned...

@Dena Matthews -
I agree that there are some big corporate giants that might "win" but there are others that will lose including those in the mainstream media. The orphan works problem is a very real one and was caused by the ever-extending copyright term. The problem has to be solved or else the term "public domain" is effectively meaningless. I do not like this solution, I think it is the wrong answer to a very real problem, but a solution is going to have to be found and many are pushing for a sharp reduction in the term for copyright.

With organizations such as the American Society of Media Photographers supporting this bill, it seems like that it will pass and that, if it doesn't an even worse one could later.

While I don't agree with that logic either, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on how to resolve the orphan works issue. I'm open to new ideas on this topic and am genuinely interested to hear how you would propose it be resolved. Would you prefer a shortened copyright term to the current bill?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for your time.

@David Bradley -
You might be interested in my updated post on WorkFriendly from this year. It details the 404 error issue, what causes it and how to block them from your site.

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/04/08/workf...

Feel free to email me if you have continued problems or if I can help in any way!

@emma -
I am not going to comment on the recent scandal but I do want to point out for all that are visiting this entry for the first time that this is a post from 2005 about another article regarding ColdPlay. I've since shifted the focus of this site to help Webmasters deal with plagiarism of their own work and less on plagiarism scandals such as this. I may talk about it in a post tomorrow but it will only be briefly.

Thank you all for your understanding.

@jardel -
I like the idea of using htaccess but it would become a second job trying to keep up with where the readers were grabbing the feed. Some would be obvious, such as Google Reader, but every new news reader would have to be added.

In the end, I think your idea at the bottom is best, just add the copyright notice and make it as "yours" as possible. It's not perfect, but it's something...