I’m really interested in the whole content theft/ ownership issue. I agree that the DMVA (whatever initials) does not work – except for the content thieves or people rich enough to have a lawyer. It does nothing to help the average person publishing online.
I am shutting down my account on HubPages because it keeps getting content scraped and HubPages doesn’t really give a rat’s butt. I can protect it on my own domains but… I was actually making money via HubPages.
I’ve heard people talk about letting their content go as promotion and encouraging it to be stolen/ passed around. This does not work so well in the age of Google’s war on duplicate content. Though, for images it is not the same issue as Googlebot only checks text content that way.
Also, for some reason I feel more frustrated when my art is stolen than my photographs. The art takes longer to create, thus I have more invested in it. So I really do not want to encourage it to be taken as promotion. I am setting up an egreetings site for my ASCII art but each image has my initials with it. (The standard for the artist signing their art). People steal ASCII art a lot. I don’t count it as stolen when it is distributed with my initials intact. However, I have had art taken and the initials removed. People have claimed my art as their own creation and people have sold my art for money without paying me a cent or asking permission.
The way things are, there is very little you can do to protect your art, photos or text online. Sending out a note asking for it to be removed is laughable. Very few people bold enough to steal in the first place will care that the artist caught them and sent a stern/ official email.
—
I wrote this in reply to a post made on Google Groups for the content curators at Scoop.it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.