Content theft on the rise: What now Scoble?

Duncan Riley> Unfortunately Microsoft-uber blogger Robert Scoble’s jihad against partial RSS feeds continues at full stength. Last Friday in Scoble vs the average blogger I highlighted one area that I personally here, as a content creator, was struggling with, and that’s content theft. Now Robert was nice enough to link to that piece, even if I couldn’t spell my last name correctly, and I’ll give him credit for listening to both sides of the debate, although he didn’t directly respond.

For those who has missed my concerns of this point, it goes something like this: people are stealing content from blogs and a republishing it for profit, and its not just a few blogs, its thousands, if not millions of them.

Then this morning I’m reading my blogline subs and I read that even the big guys are still having problems, with Jason Calancanis highlighting a site that was stealing content directly from Autoblog. Fortunately the webmaster of the other site realised that Jason wasn’t the sort of person you should mess with and took the content down.

But wait, there’s more!

We know that comment spam is generated by scripts and programs that pump it out across the blogosphere automatically and with little effort. But how many people realise that content stealing through harnessing full RSS feeds is just as simple.

ION RSS highlights three sites that promise exactly this: Super Feed System, RSS Equalizer and RSS Content Builder. How about this for a choice quote from one site:

Never hire another writer again and always have fresh up to the minute news and articles from your industry on your web pages. Add one line of code to your website and your pages will update themselves forever.

That’s right folks, its not even hard to steal content, more and more people are doing it, and its only going to get worse. If you are being paid to write for someone else, like Robert Scoble is, then you don’t really need to worry. If you enjoy bringing in some pocket money, or even a bit more from your blog, enough to cover your hosting costs and occasionally buy some toys, or even more, then your revenue is potentially threatened by scum who are multiplying by the day using scripts and tools such as these.

The only solution that I can see: limited RSS feeds.

Scoble, tell me I’m wrong, and show me how to fight back. Tell the tens of thousands of readers of the Blog Herald, most of whom own and write blogs themselves what they should do? should we stand still whilst we get streamrolled by the rise of content theft, or should we take protective action. The way I see it, pulling back to a shorter feed is like wearing a condom if you’re having sex, it protects you from disease, and in this case the disease in content theft.