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Is RSS scraping plagiarism?
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This was an interesting article for me to write because when I started, I felt very definitively that it wasn't. After all, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, does it not? What else are RSS feeds for if not to syndicate that content? And if you want someone to syndicate it, ie. publish it simultaneously on their site, then how can they be plagiarizing?
But what I discovered was that there are a lot of less scrupulous Web editors who simply look for RSS with lots of content, put it on their site, and remove any attribution to the original authors. They then add advertising and attempt to get good search engine placement for what is, in effect, a copy of someone else's work. Some of the worst scrapers of the bunch do all that, but they compound it by changing the contents of the feed - they remove links, change words, and can ruin the point of the post or the reputation of the actual poster.
I will continue to use RSS feeds as a way of augmenting content on my sites, but I'm much more aware of how that content is used and I always make sure that it's obvious that the content is from a feed, not from my work or the work of the site's owner.
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Is RSS scraping plagiarism? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 09:00:58.
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