You’re a Traffic Thief If …

I enjoyed Jo Diaz’s piece yesterday: Copyright infringement still ticks me off, especially when requests for removal are ignored.

In fact, I had been thinking about writing a piece on this myself, inspired by one of the links in her post: Business Insider, over-aggregation, and the mad grab for traffic.

The issue here is theft: The theft of the credit for the original author’s work and the theft of traffic to the original poster’s site.

Obviously, links can bring credit and traffic when done right.

Doing it right means three major things:

1. Give the original author credit up front.
2. Don’t re-print so many words that the reader has no reason to click over to the original site.
3. Do your own work!

Just because facts are not copyrightable doesn’t mean it’s ethical to re-write someone else’s story without giving them credit and a link. That may be legal, but it’s a cheat and a sleazy DB maneuver.

Traffic thieves are stealing pieces of someone else’s LIFE. That’sbecause the original author devoted part of their finite time on Earth to create something, time that cannot be recovered.

So, think about that when you post. You’re a traffic thief if …