Abused, fair use and user-friendly

Here's how our content proliferates beyond our pages, plus some legal need-to-know.

Scraping and swearing

Scraping is the black hat practice of aggregating content from a variety of sites into the scraper's site for the purposes of generating advertising revenue and search rankings.

The largely automated content management provided by WordPress, for example, coupled with its wide choice of preset syndication plugins or third party scripts, offers an ideal platform for non-technical types to set up and flesh out splogs and AdSense farms.

If you have something worthwhile to say, then your content is being targeted. Quite likely, in far-flung corners of the web, it has already been scraped and draped.

The problem with scrapers

The ramifications to the producer depend on how content is reused and your priorities and sensibilities. Many won't care, but others will be incensed by unauthorized or non-attributed use of their intellectual property, sometimes copied in...