FeedBurner COULD Help Fight Content Scrapers IF They Wanted To
If you remember, the other day I wrote about how “Did You Rob Bill Gates Blog is a Thief” was stealing content from this blog’s RSS Feeds. It still is. Not only from me, but from many others as well.
I did a couple of things to try to alleviate the problem of content theft.
Here is a few of the things I have done.
- I commented on their blog asking and then telling them to stop using my content without my permission.
- I contacted AdSense (Google) stating that they (that blog) were infringing on my copyrighted material to no avail.
- I searched for and Blocked their IP address so they couldn’t access the blog directly.
- I even added a line “IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON “DID YOU ROB BILL GATES”, IT IS STOLEN CONTENT! PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY ADS, IT WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE THIS THIEF!’ to the Copyright in the footer of the RSS Feed, which showed on their blog.
All with no discernible result.
However, there COULD be another way to solve the problem of SPLOGS Scraping Feeds, at least on FeedBurner.
As you can see from the above, they have this report in Feed Statistics called “Uncommon Uses“.
So, they already have an idea of people, bots and IP’s that are doing things that are a bit out of the norm. They even give you the option of telling FeedBurner that you know can trust the URL that they have tagged.
However, they only let you tell FB that you know the URL but they do Nothing with it. They don’t give you the option of Blocking it.
Since they can already track who or what is subscribed to your RSS, it makes sense that they have the ability to Block That Subscriber.
I think they should give us the option of Blocking Scrapers, especially since they can already identify them.
What do you think? Should FeedBurner give users the option of Blocking Scrapers in the Uncommon Uses portion of the reports?
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That is interesting Joe. I think that it could be a good idea - I would like to know the negatives (if any).
Input by Brooke | July 29, 2008 @ 7:47 pm
Hey Brooke,
Thanks, FB has the way, but I don’t think they have the will to help control scrapers.
Personally, I think they got too busy being bought by Google.
Input by Joe | July 29, 2008 @ 8:26 pm