Registering blog posts: Individual? Collective? What?

[lucia]

We are talking in circles here. It doesn't matter the specifics monetizing or not.  Take off your engineering hat, if you are being "wronged", do something besides looking for a legal remedy.

Well... putting on my engineering hat, I already have looked for something besides a legal remedy. I:

• Organized my pages so that when the 'copy' is loaded, visitors are shown a message and forwarded to my blog. You can see the message if you visit the link I've provided several times:
  http://newsblur.com/reader/page/1100897
  
  After it loads, wait 10 seconds and see what happens.
  
  
• Organized my .htaccess file so that visitors who load the 'story' version are shown only my post discussing newsblur.com's business practices. They are not shown the version newsblur tries to frame.
• blogged about this issue at my own blog. Twice.
• raised the discussion on stackexchange so that I can learn other more effective engineering responses. (I want to fine tune what I am doing with javascript and .htaccess so that I can deal with newsblur in a more fine grained way. There are some infelicities in my scripting so far.)

You have the opportunity here to list the specific website and party that is commiting these "wrong" but you don't name them.  Name them so they start getting into the search engines.  You should be naming them everywhere and tying them to your story.

I have named them. I've named them at my blog. I've named them here. It's newsblur.com. Not only here but at my blog. FWIW: If I google "newsblur frames" the first search result returned for me is here at eli. Google does track preferences so I don't know if the result will be the same for you. Click below and let me know.

https://www.google.com/search?q=newsblur+frames&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I have some reasons for not specifically naming at stackexchange. It has to do with their policies. They want questions asked generically especially if you are new. I am new. Their rules restrict my first questions. So, I am limiting that question to getting information to deal with the framing.

What "should" be and "ought" to be is a futile argument.  I deal with what can be done and what works. Maybe you want to go spearhead some legislative effort. If so, you are pretty much on your own.

I agree. Moreover, because I want to know the full range of what can be done, I ask questions to learn how I can add to my range of responses rather than be limited by only doing the ones I already know how to do. I realize you might not be aware of all the things I've done.  But don't jump to the conclusion that my not asking how to redirect traffic to my blog here means I haven't done that.  What it means is I  know how to do that and most people here don't.  So.... I already did it!

OTOH, some people here are more familiar with DMCA and copyright suits. So, this is a good place to ask about what's required to buttress any legal response I might elect to pursue.  My asking this question here doesn't mean it's my "only" response nor even my "main" one.  It means it's the one I'm not sure how to best implement.

[Matthew Chan]

I definitely like the message I saw flash up.  That was really great.  Any way you can leave that message up longer?  That was a lot to read.

I have to admit, that was quite creative and "devious".  I approve!  :-)

Keep the pressure up on NewsBlur.  If you want payback, you will have to run a sustained Newsblur campaign.  I know it can be a time suck but sometimes it is the only way to get them to pay attention and get satisfaction.  You seem to have a good programming background. You might be able to devise a way to replicate content on this copying issue. Over time, you might get the negative results you want for these folks.

On your blog, I believe you should "celebritize" yourself, your name, and works.  That gives your content even more "meat" and distinction.

In many ways your discussion of this situation is actually pretty cutting-edge. It isn't for the tame.

You may have started out your blog with climate discussions but you my  have just opened up a whole new line of discussions on a new issue.  My question is: are you willing to be a larger, more visible, and more outspoken advocate?  It could be this entirely new subsection of your blog!

[lucia]

Matthew--
I set up a 2nd domain name to discuss more IT ish things. That's going to build slowly.

I've been working out a better way to implement the message/forward etc. response.  I figured something out today, and tomorrow I can turn that into a plugin. That way others will be able to use it easily. (This plugin will be much easier than my attempt to secure a blog against bad crawlers and image bots. That's quite thorny.  I almost hate to tell people.... But I am absolutely sure that image bots are attempting to crawl my site by appearing with a huge range of IPs and presenting 'no referrer' 'no user agent'.)

Anyway, back to the script to prevent my stuff from being copied and framed: There are advantages to writing the plugin, making it available and then explaining what it would be used for rather than  to change the central topic of a climate blog to one about copyright.  Generally speaking if people can prevent something they don't like by installing a plugin and clicking "activate" they will do it. And given the range of things people blog about, this plugin might be mentioned at a variety of "blog about blogging blogs" ones the plugin exists.  The fact of it's existence --- if it works properly-- will inhibit the behavior it tends to thwart. And people won't need to worry about hiring lawyers and so on. 

(But some will still want to know how to prepare for a suit in certain instances. So... answer to my question about what's best in that regard would still be useful to me.  But more and more, now that I've figured out a way to deal with certain .. shall we call them "features" of Javascript, I'm definitely leaning toward 95% coding solutions. )

[Matthew Chan]

I am not a coder so it isn't part of my arsenal unless I hire someone. But since you are a coder and I got a taste of the concept, I definitely approve simply by virtue that it is something you can proactively implement without having to ask someone's opinion.

I say "rock on" and code your little heart out and teach this SOB a lesson and embarrass the crap out of them.

[Greg Troy (KeepFighting)]

 lucia,

I was thinking about you and your blog situation the other day and had not seen an update as to what was happening. Have you been able to stop the copying of your blog? I found this thread very interesting and would be curious to know its current status if you would share it with us. Thanks!

[lucia]

Yes. I have. 

I figured out how to use javascript to break frames both in the direct copying and in the framed bit.  Also.... I sort of got a dig in that I think was effective.   Matt might have been proud of me-- but I don't want to discuss details.