Content Farms Are Not Evil, Just Upstarts

If you've heard the term "content farms," then you've heard people rail against websites widely considered to be content farms: Demand Media's eHow, About.com, WiseGeek, BrightHub, Suite101, HubPages, InfoBarrel, even Wikipedia...and hundreds more.  As content farms, these websites either get their content from crowdsourcing (that is, they get their content from everyday people as opposed to those employed on a contract or permanent basis) or from contract writers with not necessarily journalistic qualifications.

Google has recently declared war of sorts on content farms.  It's not clear at all to me whether their definition of content farms is the same as yours or mine, or even whether Google considers properties like Demand Media to be farms.

But regular folks do use the term "content farm" for the websites above.  They complain that:

1. They are not "authority" websites.
2. They are spam.
3. They have copied, spun or scraped content.   
4. They produce volumes of content just to make money.  
5. They don't offer value to the user.

I'm here to disagree, or rather to defend content farms, and in a big way.  Yes, I write for some of those websites.  I'm also a user of some of those websites.  And I see a different perspective. 

• Do these websites exist to make money?  Yes.  So do newspapers.  So do massage therapists.  So do call centers.  So do doctors.  So do the big banks.  So do food producers.  So does any profit based business. They all produce a product or a service, sometimes out of love for that product or service,  sometimes not, but at least out of the desire to make money.  Content farms are doing nothing that the businesses they are competing against are not also doing.  Is it moral?  That's for you to decide.   But the question at hand is, is their product or service useful?  I'd say that we can spare the big banks, but not so much the content farms.  We need those, for reasons I'll explain soon.
• Are content farms spam, existing only to be "monetized" by Google AdSense?  I don't know, and furthermore, only Google does, and they haven't been saying much about it.  
• Do content farms have copied, spun, or scraped content?  From my perspective, I see far more content copied, spun and scraped from content farms than by them.  But I'll admit this is anecdotal evidence and that yes, some content creators do copy or spin content on some of these content farms, despite each sites' attempts at quality controls.  (Incidentally, the websites on which I've published do not want recycled or rewritten content, which is considered plagiarism).  However, the problem of intellectual property violation is by no means limited to content farms.  Rather, content farms are a front-stage but relatively small part of a much bigger show.  The huge problem assaulting the web is the inevitable challenge posed by digital technology to existing intellectual property laws designed in an infrastructure of print and controlled media.   What does that mumbo-jumbo mean?  Basically, that it was hard to copy things before, and now it's easy, and the old intellectual property laws were designed to protect property that was already well-protected by physical constraints.  For example, in the world of magazines, people used to read only the few magazines sold in the physical bookstores or by subscription or in the library, and you had to physically copy them, transport them, covertly resell them, etc.  Now to copy and publish material, all you have to do is search for one of the billions of bits of published material freely available, copy, paste, post, and earn...it takes less than twenty minutes and chances are you won't even get caught.  The laws and the technology have to catch up with what people can now do in their new environment without stifling necessary free expansion.  This is hard, and not a problem caused by content farms, but by the Internet itself.
• I'll deal with #1 and #5 together, since they're related.  Does the content in question have authority?  Value?  Yes, a goodly portion of it does.  Content farms are not always sourced by authorities in the traditional sense, but that does not mean the content does not offer value for the users as good as, and even better than (since many are more concisely and clearly written), that of so-called authority sites (so-called because our criteria for calling a website an authority are controversial).  They're valuable because these "farms" utilize the skills of the unproven but talented (read: youth), the authority of the freelance little guy rather than that of the hired drudge (what's the difference, again?), the garage expert rather than the certified and accredited expert.  But wait, now...they utilize the certified and accredited experts, too, because the opportunities for jobs in the traditional job market are fading.  Sure, those experts could have their own websites, but content farms make publishing easy for the non-techie.  In fact, that's what the "content farms" that aren't editorially controlled are, like HubPages: they're massively popular self-publishing platforms.  Even Suite101, though editorially controlled, doesn't dictate titles or topics.  Those that use established professional editors like About.com and Demand Media actually seek experts to write for them, and get them, too, because the experts are out of traditional work.  So yes, the expertise IS there on these websites; and where it's not, we have homegrown expertise, creativity, and talent coming from out of the woodwork, just as it did at another time of a critical economic shift - the Golden Age in the early 20th century.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I tend to proselytize about the "new economic model" of the Internet.  Though I'm not really a preachy person, I'll probably keep doing so on this subject until I'm done.  Think of the World Wide Web as a big, new territory opening up from what was a shrinking, overpopulated, and highly competitive territory.  Online, there's lots of space and resources and people are moving here for economic and social reasons: it's cheaper, faster, more equitable, and more bountiful than the economy built on the technology of the train, car, telephone, airplane, and TV.  
Content farms provide something akin to a ramshackle mall structure in this new land: they provide a framework for people to enter the land and get down to business.  Writers publish not just the stereotypical "made for AdSense" or "MFA" pages, but marketing pages for struggling businesses (the much-maligned affiliate model), creative works, and the "how to" tricks of human enterprise that allow people engaged in all trades, from cooking to boat building, to set down their knowledge when there is no apprenticeship model or family inheritance model any longer for transmitting this knowledge.  Content farms offer publishing platforms for what will soon be a new Golden Age of creativity and information, the first truly bright spot in progress since the World War II era.
The people publishing on content farms now are not mostly scammers or spammers.  They're disreputable, but only as the pioneers of the past were: they're the immigrants, the newcomers, the non-established, non-certified  new blood, and in a dying economy, what we need is this new blood.  
Yes, there's a lot of dreck produced on content farms.  I don't like that, but I consider it not much different from the dreck produced and sanctioned by corporations calling themselves newspapers.  (Why do we need the Associated Press again?  AP was invented alongside the telegraph, so that regional papers could get non-regional news.  Well, the Internet takes care of that now; with a click of the mouse, I can read about the earthquake in the newspaper of the city in which it's happening.  So shouldn't newspapers let go of all recycled content?)

To get good content, we have to open ourselves up to all non-harmful content.  That's what content farms are good at doing.  Sure, it's a search engine's challenge to lead people to content that isn't harmful.  But that doesn't mean getting rid of those upstart content farms, despite the speculation running rampant all over the Web, including a recent discussion on Webmasterworld.com.   Hey, somebody come up with a real content management system that your grandmother could use, and then maybe we can get rid of content farms.
What do you think?Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Is Rewriting a Copyright Violation?

My  last post covered rewriting and plagiarism, but I wanted to do a quick post on copyright infringement as regards to rewriting articles, too.  Why?  I recently had to file a DMCA notice with Google AdSense regarding a copyright infringement of an article I wrote.  My article wasn't copied word for word, however - it was rewritten.

Is Rewriting the Same as Plagiarism? The Answer May Surprise You.

Many content writers wonder whether it's OK to rewrite articles by other people when they write for article sites like Suite101 or Demand Studios.  Is it allowed?  Is it plagiarism?  Is it worth it?

Me, Plagiarize? There Are Only So Many Ways to Say It and Other Myths

Having recently joined the honored multitude of plagiarized writers on the Web, I was intrigued when the subject of plagiarism cropped up again in my life, and so soon. It turns out eHow writers are up-in-arms because eHow has kicked up their plagiarism software a notch. A number of writers' articles are being removed for being copycats of each other.

Plagiarized! The Triumphant Story of One Writer's Recovery from Intellectual Property Theft, Kinda-Sorta

I'd been looking forward to this day ever since I wrote and published tons of eHow articles on the Web. But I didn't expect it to come so soon.

Mind you, I'm no raw chicken. I've been plagiarized before...as part of an en masse plagiarism extravaganza. Not till now, though, was I singled out. They could have linked to my article. They could have asked permission. But instead they snuck into my eHow page, saw my article, fell in love with it, snatched it and fled.

Using Creative Commons Photos on the Internet: Intellectual Property Rights in Transition

The questions pop up frequently on the eHow forums, HubPages forums and other writing and webmaster sites.

Is it OK to use any photo I find on the Internet? If I find a photo in the Google Image Search (TM), can I use it any way I want? On Flickr? If I find a Creative Commons photo, can I change it or post it on my Web page? How do I find out what kind of license a Creative Commons photo has? How do I know what license protects a photo I find on the Web?

The answers are rarely what you want to hear. You can't use just any photo you find on the Internet. You can't use just any image you find on the Google Image Search (TM), Flickr, Yahoo!, or any photo sharing site. You need permission to use them.  Permission may be granted by licenses stated explicitly on the photo sharing site.  Permission may have to be requested.  But even then, it's not that simple.

The rules for intellectual property of photos are much the same as the rules for intellectual property regarding text. You need to hunt down permissions. You must hunt down who owns the copyright and what, if any, rights the creator is offering. Often the rights offered don't allow commercial use and don't allow you to modify the work. Sometimes it's obvious; more often, it's not.

Although I'm not a lawyer, I am familiar with some of the basics of intellectual property law regarding using images online in the U.S.  The most common infraction I see on the Internet is people taking photos from a website - an e-commerce site, usually, but others, too - and putting the photos up on their blog or website along with a photo credit and maybe even a link, reasoning "It's okay as long as I credit them.  And besides, the photographer is glad of the exposure."

Neither is true.  You need either explicit permission from the owner of the photograph (and that owner may not actually be the e-commerce site itself) or you need to establish that the appropriate rights are associated with the photo and that you are doing everything you need to do to use the photo legally.  For example, if you use a photo on Flickr that has a Creative Commons License, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can use the photo.  You must understand the different types of Creative Commons licenses and then do your part to include the necessary credits, use the photo only according to the rights the owner of the photo grants, and so on.

The second most common infraction I see is people assuming it's okay to post on their own website, article page, or web page a photo or image they downloaded at a photo sharing site like Flickr or Wikimedia even when it doesn't offer rights for commercial use.  Not all use of images is commercial, true.  But these people think that putting the image onto an article page with ads isn't the same as using images for commercial use.  That's wrong.  It is commercial use to put up a photo on a hub at HubPages that has ads, for example, or on an article at Suite101, or on an article at eHow.

What is commercial use?  I'm not a lawyer and if I try to define it for you, I'd get into territory I have no business going.  But trust me - putting an image up on a page that will earn you money by advertising or affiliate links is commercial use.  Don't do it unless the rights granted you to use the photo include commercial use.  

All this can be terribly discouraging and confusing for website owners and online content writers who act in good faith to not go against the intellectual property rights of photographers.

I used to have an example here of one confusing search using the search Creative Commons function.  The confusion's since been fixed, it appears - yay!  But the whole thing remains a confusing mess and the only way to do the right thing is to study the rules.  Basically, if you want to use somebody else's work on the Internet to make money for yourself, you'll need to understand the licenses very well. That's part of your job.

Whenever you find a page like this fabulous one describing how to use Creative Commons Images from Flickr, you feel lucky - it explains at least some information about interpreting the licensing code for Flickr photos and Flickr images. But mostly, you have to piece together the info like the veriest usage license detective.

It gets even trickier when you talk about a site like eHow. EHow uses the content of hundreds of thousands of users on its site. It accepts text content, video, and images. In its terms of use, it lays down the law: you must own or legitimately lease or borrow the rights to all content that you post.

Now, consider this. Many eHow contributors take their own photos or create their own images. Others get permission to use photos on eHow. Many eHow members pay for the use of photos. But even when you pay, you may not always have the right to display the photo on eHow.

Why not? The terms of certain photo sharing sites state that the paying user can publish the photos, but not modify them, or in other cases transfer them to a third party that will distribute them. EHow states in their Terms of Use:

"You hereby grant eHow a worldwide, royalty-free, freely transferable, freely sublicensable (through unlimited levels of sublicense), non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, transmit, distribute, [my emphasis] publicly perform and display (including in each case by means of a digital audio transmission), and create derivative works of the Content, in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed."

EHow is reserving the right to use the content - for content, read text, video, and photos - almost any way they want. So in some cases, even using photos that you've paid to use by publishing them on eHow instead of your own site may be a bad idea.

What's more, if a photo features a person's image, then that person may have certain rights, such as model rights / personality rights, not to have that photo published. In the UK and other countries, there may be the potential issue of defamation if the photo is used in a way other than what is intended.  The person in the photograph may have released the right to publish the work bearing their image...or not. The rules are complex. Wikimedia Commons touches on these issues here in this article on using images from Wikimedia.

Seem like there are no simple answers? There aren't. Even lawyers don't agree on a number of intellectual property issues. The problem is that the Internet is changing the way we treat intellectual property. We're living in a period that later will be viewed as a time of radical transition.

Traditional trademark, patent, copyright, and other intellectual property issues are based on a world of tangible media, finite publication, slow development processes, and easy identifiers. The Internet is a world of virtual media, eternal publication, rapid development, and diffused identifiers. What this means for intellectual property is hard to tell. But I sure would like to be around in fifty years to see what it's like.

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