853's post 'Sorry RSS readers...' was pumped straight into myvillages.com
Today I picked up on the above post from 853 blog’s manager Darryl, apologising to his readers for altering his RSS feed and blaming ‘thieving myvillage idiots’:
…unfortunately I?ve had to bring this into place because of abuse of the RSS feed by the MyVillage network of sites, whose rubbish Greenwich site has been pulling in content from 853 to help it attract readers and advertisers under the banner of ?local news?.
William Perrin commented that material (including photographs) had been reused by myvillage from his website http://www.kingscrossenvironment.com without his consent. A vague bell rang in my head about a myvillage Birmingham, so I searched and lo and behold, there was content (again including photographs) taken from the RSS feed of Digbeth is Good. A quick scan showed me content from Birmingham it’s Not Shit and Created in Birmingham was on there too.
I tweeted my annoyance and quite an interesting discussion ensued, which is in this Storify. Some creators of the content myvillage uses (like me) were quite annoyed and others such as Michael Grimes felt it might be a fair use of the RSS feeds we’d published.
Whatever the rights and the wrongs of the argument, myvillage’s creator Roifield Brown’s approach has meant that whilst building what aspires to be a profit-making website he’s angered a lot of the creators of the content he relies upon to populate it – not a good start for a business. As Stuart Harrison commented there is a better way:
I emailed Roifield Brown today asking him to remove the Digbeth is Good feed from myvillage, this is the response I received:
Hi Nicky, sorry for the upset that using the first 200 characters from you blog has caused. We have now deleted the feed from publishing on MyVillage. Your blog is an extremely good one and one that I personally read from time to time being a Brummie.
When we started using extracts from blogs last year we emailed the blog owners to ask if this was alright by them. In some cases we did not get a response and we used their blogs. In hindsight this was a mistake, which we will completely correct in the first two weeks of Jan by completing an audit of all rss feeds used. We will ask again if the 200 word characters limit is acceptable before the link back to the article source, if there is a negative answer or no answer we will not use that blog.
Sorry again Nicky.
Rest assured your blog content will not be appearing on any of our sites from here on.
“When we started using extracts from blogs last year we emailed the blog owners to ask if this was alright by them”
Not me, and there are two of “my” sites on there at least.
I never received any such email, neither did William Perrin.
It’s a thorny issue, had I have been asked I might have said yes?I think all content originators should be open to reuse if possible, and should endeavour to make clear the terms of that.
My problem here is that on
kingsheathen.co.uk
welovemoseley.co.uk
northbrum.tumblr.com
which have been pumped in I and others very often use CC licensed non-commercial images from flickr which I would be inadvertently posting to a commercial site. myvillage’s use would prevent my own.
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I just had this response:
“It appears Jon that when this was done emails were only sent out to the first blogs that we used in London, by the time we came to do a lot of other areas the researcher “ran out of steam” and I did not check. Again sorry for the inconvenience”
It’s a big problem – Andy Mabbett’s sent myvillage an invoice for republishing a photo of his I posted on digbeth.org, whilst DiG isn’t commercial myvillage is.
The response that they didn’t contact anyone outside London because the researcher “ran out of steam” beggars belief!
Ah, seems there’s an update on 853blog:
http://853blog.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/myvillage-content-theft-site-owner-says-sorry/
>It?s a big problem ? Andy Mabbett?s sent myvillage an invoice for republishing a photo of his I posted on digbeth.org, whilst DiG isn?t commercial myvillage is.
I’d really like to hear what happens about that.
Hi Matt
Roifield Brown’s reply to Andy’s invoice was:
“Andy, sorry for linking to your pictures in the article extract that was published on Myvillage. We did not store your images on our server as you can see my looking at teh image source. We have however deleted the article summary from the site. When we started using extracts from blogs last year we emailed the blog owners to ask if this was alright by them. In some cases we did not get a response and we used their blogs. In hindsight this was a mistake, which we will completely correct in the first two weeks of Jan by completing an audit of all rss feeds used. We also now realise that we should exclude html code that links to photos from this process. We will ask again if the 200 word characters limit is acceptable before the link back to the article source, if there is a negative answer or no answer we will not use that blog. Sorry again Andy.”
Andy replied saying ‘Where you sourced the images is immaterial. The invoice is due for payment.’ and as far as I know has not yet received a response.
William Perrin asked Roifield Brown to make a donation to a chosen charity, but didn’t receive a particularly satisfactory response (http://is.gd/j978I) – looks like William intends to take him to the small claims court next year.
Nicky