Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

Simon says once. But again?

See this. Then this.

I’m not sure what the second one is. Did “admin” rip off Simon Collister’s original post by posting it again? Was it for commercial reasons? Does it violate Simon’s Creative Commons 2.5 license?

The site of the reposting, Lalalia, is a “Virtual City”, described as An open system project, based on volunteers, to build a “virtual real democracy” based on the permanent votes of the “Lalaians” (the citizens of the virtual city Lalaia).

Is Simon part of that? If so, I guess it’s cool, being cross-posted. if not…

I don’t know. Can’t tell. Doesn’t smell right to me. But then, my nose is old and my blogging teeth are long.

Whatever. Seems strange to me. Is it?

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Doc Searls

9 responses to “Simon says once. But again?”

  1. Simon Collister Avatar
    Simon Collister

    Hi Doc. Thanks for flagging this as I’m not a Lalaian! I’d better go and check the T&Cs of my CC license…. would welcome any expert advice 😉

    Reply
  2. Michael W. May (Joffi) Avatar
    Michael W. May (Joffi)

    The obvious CC infraction is no CC license copy is distributed on the copy site. They have a section concerning CC, but no CC link on the page of the post.

    Reply
  3. Doc Searls Avatar
    Doc Searls

    Good to hear from you, Simon. Thanks for clearing that up. That must be a spam blog, or splog. I noticed after this post that my RSS reader noted one or two more of the same thing, but with different URLs.

    As for guidance on the license issue, here’s what I wrote about it several years ago, when I switched licenses on my old blog.

    Woops, that was when I still had a public domain dedication. I switched later to CC 2.5 but can’t find it now.

    Maybe later.

    Reply
  4. Adam Fields Avatar
    Adam Fields

    There seem to be an increasing number of spam blogs that just copy posts whole cloth out of the rss feeds of other blogs, sometimes with link attribution and sometimes not.

    If you search technorati for my blog, for example, a number of them come up.

    I’m really not sure what to do about that. I’d considered blocking them at the IP address level, but I couldn’t figure out what IP address they were coming from and I’d assume that means they’re not hitting my feed directly or not from that machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a service out there harvesting posts explicitly for this purpose.

    Reply
  5. Doc Searls Avatar
    Doc Searls

    Adam,

    There are automata that have been doing this kind of thing for some time. The big payoff, of course, is in gaming Google’s AdSense. Lot more money in that, I suspect, than in spam. But creepy either way.

    Reply
  6. Simonsays

    I’ve been cloned!…

    Or rather this blog has. Doc Searls spotted this post over at the spammy-looking site, Lalaia – the virtual city, and blogged it. It doesn’t take a close read to spot it’s word-for-word the same post. If you look further…

    Reply
  7. dburr Avatar
    dburr

    I also agree with adam

    Reply
  8. Ben James Avatar
    Ben James

    I’ve recently had entire posts of mine not exactly stolen, but quoted in their entirety and trackback pinged.

    I suspect there are spiders searching Technorati for posts on subjects which are big search engine traffic pullers; I wrote an article mentioning the iPhone earlier today and already have had two trackbacks from blogs crammed with iPhone ads.

    Thankfully I moderate the trackbacks and so avoid unwittingly helping the spammers with reciprocal links.

    Reply
  9. Alan Kellogg Avatar
    Alan Kellogg

    I get them too, I just delete the trackback.

    (This blatant spam comment brought to you by the tiger bunny, the number 6, and brown water spacecraft across the universe.

    Reply

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