The wonderful thing about the Internet and all of the so-called “new media” we’re enjoying as a result of it is that it’s easier than ever to make your living as a writer—there’s plenty of places willing to pay for quality work, and if you’re ambitious and savvy enough, you can even create your own site(s) to generate revenue.

The terrible thing about the Internet and all of the so-called “new media” we’re enjoying as a result of it is that either there’s more theft of others’ work than there used to be or people just lack a basic understanding of what constitutes improper or illegal use of words belonging to someone else. Maybe a combination of those two things, actually.

And what this means for a lot of writers who work online is that we have to be vigilant about possible content theft. What it means for me is that I feel angry about having to spend time on stopping people from stealing my work, and it makes me very grumpy.

First, let’s talk about some handy definitions of terms when it comes to writing.

* Plagiarism is when someone tries to pass off your work as their own. It is usually a wholesale appropriation of your words with no indication that you’re the original author. If you take the content of this post and publish it on your blog with your name on it, that’s plagiarism.

* Copyright infringement is violation of the author’s copyright, meaning that some or all of the covered work is being attributed to the original source, but reproduced in a manner prohibited by law. If you take the content of this post and publish it in its entirety on your blog—even with my name on it—it’s a copyright infringement.

* Fair Use is a subset of copyright law that defines how others may legally use and refer to copyrighted works. So, for example, if you reproduce a paragraph from this post on your blog, correctly attributed to me, and linking back to this post, that would fall under Fair Use. Copyright law isn’t intended to prevent the sharing of information, but to protect the author from having her work claimed by another. Fair Use allows the spread of information as long as the source is correctly cited and the excerpted information gives the reader a way to go to the original work for more information.

Okay. Now, knowing those terms, let’s talk about scraping. Scraping is when a person or (more commonly) some sort of bot takes content from a site and reproduces it on another site. The content is nearly always stolen via RSS feed—the thing that allows you to read blogs in some sort of aggregate reader like Bloglines or Google Reader—and there are a number of ways authors can try to protect their feeds to prevent this. There are plug-ins that will append copyright notices to the bottom of every post. There are scripts that will detect when the content has been ported to a different site and will add some sort of warning like “If you are not reading this on myblog.com, this content has been stolen.” And of course there’s always the option of truncating your feed (allowing only a small piece of it to show up in a reader), but a lot of people feel that if they have to click through to read the entire post, it’s too annoying and won’t bother.

For the record, I truncate the feed on my personal sites. I know it’s annoying, and I’m sorry for folks who find it aggravating. But I was being scraped so regularly I couldn’t stand it; to me, it’s the only reasonable solution at this time.

Scraping can and does take the form of either plagiarism or copyright violation; I’ve been scraped both ways, although having a link back to my blog when my entire piece of writing has been taken is cold comfort, frankly. And to answer the question of “Why do people scrape?”, well, generally the splogs (scraped blogs) that result are littered with ads and the content-stealers are hopeful they’ll make some money. If your stolen content shows up on a splog with ads, contact the ad provider. There are strict rules about copyright adherence with every ad provider, and although it may take some time, they will respond to complaints.

Being scraped by a bot is obnoxious and annoying and takes time to deal with and isn’t any fun. Obviously. But to me, the much more aggravating situation is when a regular human with an actual site of his own takes the time to pilfer your content for his own use.

I want to believe that people are just dumb, rather than malicious. And most of the time, I really do believe that to be the case—lots of people don’t understand what constitutes Fair Use, or figure that if they like something and put it on their blog it’s okay if they don’t have many readers. (Hint: Still not okay!)

Yesterday someone took a post of mine from Want Not and reproduced the entire thing, adding at the bottom “thanks to Wantnot.net.” It wasn’t even a hyperlink. (If it was, it still would’ve been a violation of Fair Use, but it would’ve at least looked like the stealer meant well.) I’ve emailed the person in question and am awaiting a response. I tried to politely explain that she is welcome to excerpt my content and then link back to the original post, but her current usage is a clear violation of my copyright. I haven’t heard back but I choose to believe she will realize her error, apologize, and fix it.

But it’s time out of my already busy day, and aggravation, and if she ignores me or says no, then we have a problem.

Isn’t being an online author fun?