It normally takes a helluva lot to jolt me out of my “information wants to be shared” communal anarchist complacency (and, if communal anarchists haven’t achieved complacency, who can be said to have done so?) but this may just be enough.
TimeThief normally objects to blogs that republish the entire posts of other blogs, but I think in this case she’ll give me a bye.
Silly me, live and learn.
We’ll just work it out in a creamed corn wrestling smackdown live onstage at Limerick Junction for charity. In any case, here’s her post on the subject.
And here is an anti-Bitacle blog that’s got pretty comprehensive coverage of the issue, from pro and anti sides.
Essentially, Bitacle is a for-profit business that steals the contents of blogs from all around the world and publishes it on its own website, on which it sells advertising. In addition, it republishes this information under a “Creative Commons” license, which essentially gives the readerthe right to republish it at will under certain conditions, including the condition they not be making any money from it. Unlike Bitacle. Now, CC licenses are great things allrighty, but Bitacle doesn’t have your permission to relicense them in the first place, so absolutely none of the CC licenses they offer on material they publish are binding.
In other words, all rights belong to the bloggers and Bitacle is breaking the law. As well, its CC claim is encouraging other people to break the law, by pretending to them that it’s legal. It’s not.
If you’ve got a blog, check your RSS feed stats or your IPs and look for Bitacle. They can be IP banned; they may well change their IP (their ISP has been notified, as has Google, whose ads they are running) but until they do, it’s a good idea to starve them.
Pass the word around; since WordPress has put in some “measures” against them, they’ll be all over Blogger, Blogspot, etc.
raincoaster 