The anonymous toad ripping off poker bloggers’ content for it’s banner-farm poked it’s head out of the cesspool of “internet marketing” long enough to hip me to the whys and wherefores of this new form of thievery. I spent a few minutes dismantling this schmuck, but first, a word from the US Copyright Office, courtesy of pal The Everlasting Phelps (who I’m pretty sure is a JD):

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Everything that is not explicitly placed in the public domain is copyrighted. Not just things that have the little “c” at the bottom, or have a copyright line on them. EVERYTHING.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask the U.S. Fing Copyright Office:

When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created.

Oh, and this, for all the folks getting ripped off by script kiddies hijacking your work:

And, since you are running ads, you are liable for damages. IIRC, the damages can be trebled, meaning that TFG [ed: affected bloggers] can get triple everything you have ever been paid for those ads. Before you take out expenses; he gets triple the gross.

Who did you say your lawyer was? Some guys might want to talk to him about damages.

Now, on to my stunning display of petty intellectual one-upmanship:

The original comment from hose-head can be found here.

No I’m doing nothing wrong.
Yes, you are.

And I know it.
All the reasoning power of an 8 year-old.

If Iggy hadn’t made threats, used obscenities the first time he contacted me then this would have been a very different story.
You shouldn’t be using the internet if you’re so easily offended.

And yes I was contacted by one site whose feed I was using and I did remove their feed. No problem at all and I didn’t get “huffy”. Iggy and Maude’s feed were never used on that site so they had no legal right to tell me to take it down or they’d continue on with their threat.
That’s called the community effect. Also, the network effect. Perhaps you’ve read about it on your ‘webmaster’ bulletin boards. People have invested time, money, and sweat building a networked community. Free riders are not welcome. They should get flamed, and flamed hard, in my not-so-very-damn-humble opinion. And they have every legal right to tell you to remove the pirated content.

Previous posts are available, just not from the wordpress blog. And I had been moving all my blogs over to wordpress and poker was next in line.
OK, sure, whatever. Just a minor administerial oversight. Happens to the best.

No you didn’t realize what syndic8 is for. It’s to find rss feeds. All feeds were found there. I didn’t go rummaging around poker blogs decided whose to use. I’ve never seen any of your sites until Iggy decided to make a few threats.
So you admit to just willy-nilly scraping feeds and re-displaying them under another domain name without attribution. It’s even more galling to know you did it without even bothering to read the people you’re stealing from.

Jumping to conclusions aren’t you?
Well, it’s a blog…I get to do that.

I don’t know any poker bloggers.
I’m not sure, if you really are trying to be an aggregator, that I would come right out and say that. Oops, too late.

I have no idea who the first blogger you are referring to or what their problem is. I pointed out weblogsinc.com because they have blogs on differnent topics and link them together. I do too. So do many others. That’s all. If you want to be crabby they’re making money off cancer with their blog.
Help me out here. Are you saying you’re the next Jason Calcanis? Or Nick Denton, perhaps? Each one of their corporate blogs that I’ve ever read have an easily identifiable moderator who adds original content, whether it’s commentary, or teh funny. Each one has their own domain name, too. So, no — the Calcanis/Denton model is not what you are, no matter how many times you stamp your feet and say it.

Angry emails due to site’s feed being used? No. Only one site contacted me and professionally asked for it to be removed. It was removed as that’s no problem at all. If a feed owner wants it removed then I’ll remove it!
Well, I was speculating. I’m glad to hear that you offer the option of being removed. How many have you contacted about using their feeds, again? Or did you just snag the ones that looked like they might have some content you could pirate for your banner farm?

But the other bloggers bitching never had their feeds used. They have actually threatened me by phone and email. The police were very interested in the threats and taped the phone messages. So yes it’s getting more than 30 seconds of attention from them.
Proof, please. Go ahead — name names, post emails, put the mp3s on the web, scan your police report.

Now are you condoning their actions which may turn out to be criminal?
“May”? Are they or aren’t they? Of course, I don’t condone criminal activity. Look at me — I’m all worked up over what is at most a severe ethical breach of internet & blogger etiquette. Why would I condone anything criminal?

You have to understand that rss feeds are being promoted as a huge thing in the internet world. For the last many months every internet marketer has been using rss feeds on their sites as it’s being promoted as free frequently updated content.
Ah, here we go. #1, don’t presume to tell me what is huge in the “internet world”, kiddo. I don’t care how many months you’ve been reading webmaster fora. I was a webmaster when there was still some meaning to the word ‘webmaster.’ #2, I really don’t care how many other bottom feeders are out there stealing content from the original producers. Just because some script kiddy wrote it up does not make it ethically right.

It’s up to the internet marketer to find feeds and syndic8 is a great place to find feeds.
So banner farmer = internet marketer? You must be joking me. I bet you even printed some of those Avery business cards with the little perforations on them.

There’s no time to find blog sites on your own.
Lord, why would you ever want to find the blogs on your own? That’s too much like work. Except, of course, for ALL THE PEOPLE WHO ALREADY FOUND THEM ON THEIR OWN! What an idiot.

Then you check the site to make sure there’s no disclaimer preventing you from using the feed. If not, use it.
Steal it…it’s there, it’s in the commons, available for anybody! Look at all this free grass I can graze my cattle on! I can’t believe you can sit there and lecture me about capitalism. On second thought, yes I can believe it. You’re an idiot!

That’s the premise of rsstoblog.com software. There’s several other software programs out there doing the same thing. It’s a way to have a site about a topic that is frequently updated without you having to update it.
Just too damn much work to update it yourself, is it? Or is it hard for your little pinhead to think up something original, or fresh, or interesting? “Hey, here’s some software — I’ll just plug this in and get rich, Rich, RICH!” You’re a free rider.

And that’s just all there is to it. I leave links on the feeds so if anyone actually reads the blog they can go back to the original poster.
Heh — if anyone actually reads the blog. Feeling useless and pointless, maybe, a little? You should, because you are. Mighty big of you, though, to actually leave a link back to the author. You’re practically a saint, aren’t you? Go pat yourself on the back in front of the mirror. Have a cookie, too, if they’re not locked up.

But there is an option in the software to turn off all links, so it does look like you wrote it. What are you going to do? People find a need and fill it.
There is no need for a thief. I like how you delude yourself into thinking there is a need that you can fill, like a real business person. Real business people build something, like all the people you’re stealing from. They provide something. You, on the other hand, are providing nothing and have built nothing. You’re using free software to burgle other people and slapping it onto a poorly-designed web page. Big whoop. Cut-n-paster is more like it.

Lookie here, punk. Take your stupid little banner farm, intarweb marketing, screen-scraping, content-stealing piece of junk, turn it sideways, and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Dickless wonders like you have always been around…you last about a month. Then you have the vapors when someone calls you on it. You call the coppers (doubtful), you call the lawyers (doubtful), you have a big PMS-worthy tizzy, and then you vanish. Seen it a million times, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

I really should be ignoring you, like all my little web buddies say to do, but I happen to have some free time on my hands, so I’m not. This is an ethical issue, and no matter how many posts you read on the internets BBS about so-called webmasters using other peoples’ work, it will never be right. After all, I don’t think you’d appreciate me taking code from the Sequent source files, and using them to make a little extra dough on the side? You know, if I read about it on a web page somewhere, and I say it’s OK, and they all say it’s OK, and I copy-and-paste into something else that’s free, and then tried to sell it some idiot Googler? I mean, it’s on the innerweb and all.

Now, crawl back down into your septic tank, unless you’ve thought up a few more rationales you want to run by me.