Licensing does not prevent theft

One of the comments to yesterday's posting about making content theft work in your favor didn't like my cavalier attitude to content theft. I certainly don't advocate such theft, and I've written before about using Google Alerts to find stolen content. As someone who makes his living primarily from writing (my definition of writing includes programming) you can be sure that the protection of intellectual property is a great concern of mine.

But let's be realistic. If you put stuff up on the Web for free and provide it in a form that's easily manipulated — those feeds — then you shouldn't be surprised to find someone using your content in ways you didn't intend. Licensing your content under a Creative Commons or similar license won't stop this from occurring. In fact, you lose rights when you release material that way, because you're allowing others to reproduce your material. Without that license, reproduction rights are strictly limited — remember that copyright protection is implicit.

I don't think that embedding digital signatures like Numly numbers helps prevent serious theft. Sure, it'll catch those who blindly copy the material without changing it, but that won't deter the serious thief. If they're altering your content to remove links and such you can bet they'll alter it enough to make those watermarking schemes useless. You can lock your doors all you want, but a determined thief will always find a way to break in.

I do agree with the commenter's final point about finding some middle ground in all of this. The biggest problem I have with policing content theft is that it takes time away from content creation and traffic generation. Put in some basic measures — again, Google Alerts is a great tool for this — but accept that some content theft is bound to occur.

P.S.: A lot of content doesn't get stolen, but it's not due to diligent policing and anti-theft measures. It's because the content's simply not good enough to steal!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

Comments