Monday, March 30, 2009

Indieanimatornetwork, is this complimentary, or just theft?


I came across this site while browsing referall pages. I'm a little torn about posting the link, because I 'm not sure I want to send them traffic. There's lots of stuff to se and read, and a lot of it very informative. For my taste, it's too busy and, like AWN, tries to do too much.
But.
As I scrolled down to find where they had, presumably, posted a link to some content I featured, I cam across the "Canadian Animation Resources Feed".
This confused me. I assumed that I'd see a snippet of something from the blog. A piece of an article with a link. I've seen that kind of thing before and really enjoy it. It feels great to find that something I wrote was significant enough to someone else to sample it. But as I continued to scroll down, it got a little weirder for me. The ego stroke was replaced with a sinking feeling. This wasn't a quote, this was my whole blog, reproduced here and comprising about a quarter of the content on this page.
How do I feel about this?
I really don't know.
I work pretty hard to put this site together. I do my best to update the job boards, provide links, and generate original content. Some of what I do is just referal, so I don't want to over-react. But this feels like more than that.
I haven't gone through everything on the page yet, but I did notice the jobs section is taken entirely from Ani-Jobs.com. There seem to be original posts on there, so it's not like the admin is just "borrowing" from other sites. But I'm uncomfortable with the extent to which I've been co-opted. Maybe if I'd been contacted, if there'd been a request, I'd be ok with it. But now I'm not so sure.
I'd love some input on this one guys.

7 comments:

  1. I've heard of this happening before. Maybe you could send them a polite email asking to replace the stuff they stole from your site with a link. If that doesn't work, start a campaign to get readers of your site to bombard them with spam or something until they give in. Just a thought.

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  2. So, in your opinion, this is a theft? Like I said, if they'd contacted me up front, I would have happily done some link sharing and maybe even agreed to be a column on their site, but to simply discover it has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

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  3. I agree with Rob. There is absolutely no reason for them to cut and paste your whole post. Being artist, they should know better. You got my support.

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  4. You got my support too! ... The website should at least indicate it's sources or the author of the articles!

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  5. They do indicate that the feed is from Canadian Animation Resources. That's not an issue. My beef is that they've got my whole blog on their main page. My content comprises about a quarter to a third of the content they're presenting. Go check it out.

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  6. They've also got FPS as a feed on there too. There's lots of content, but most of it borrowed.

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  7. Hi Mike,

    I don't think it's anything other than tacky and a wee bit disrespectful. The fact is you're potentially getting your page and it's content seen by more eyeballs... which is a good thing. Keep up the good work!

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