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Down the Rabbit Hole: on viral texts and linking to sources (scottbot.net)
60 points by samclemens on July 16, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


And thus, stuff like: perma.cc

Though it strikes me that with such an extended chain, it'd be better to essentially have ping-backs for each item that referenced or used the data.

At least with stuff like this there aren't privacy concerns, and it's not a low-level web commodity like a picture. EXIF & IPTC data can show authorship, but can also store location data, and whatever crap you (or your software) decides to stuff into metadata. It pisses me off that tumblr strips metadata, but all-told, it's the best course of action anytime people use your platform to post erm.. selfies.


As someone with a large amount of content that is both casually shared or blatantly ripped off, there doesn't really seem like a great way to fight this sort of behavior. Calling out sites which steal content publicly would likely end up in them gaining additional visitors and views.

Has anyone here found good ways of battling sites that "repost" content without attribution?


Denial of service :)

More serious you are fighting a losing battle here. If even the big media companies with full time employees can’t stop this it is basically impossible.

Google might be able to do something about this if they banned sites that continually re-posted content without attribution, but even here you would have issues - you would not want to get into the situation where because of the time google crawled your site you were accused of stealing from the reposter.


the tweets at the end hint that the way Facebook attributes reposts (or even better, tumblr, which keeps the full path) should solve it.

I'd say it mighty even be useful for silly articles like the one he started with, but for anything more serious, with several sources, those solutions to crediting a single source are but a joke. a lame joke no less.




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