TechTribe excelling at content piracy

TechTribe is one of the first professional networking sites to be launched in India. Last year, they secured funding from Canaan Partners, amongst other VC’s.

I’d hardly visited their site ever. Till yesterday, that is. Yesterday, it came to my attention that they are engaging in shoddy act of content piracy - not just content from StartupDunia but lot of other blogs as well.

Here’s how it works - registered users can sign up to blog feeds as part of their profile/dashboard. And instead of showing a small summary of the blog feed, TechTribe displays the entire story in such a spurious manner that it seems as if the TechTribe user has published the story.

See the screenshot below for an example. One of my recent blog posts shows up as if its “published by” some Ranvir Batra.

You might think I’m making a big deal of it, but let me tell you that I debated quite a bit if I should write this post. I got some moderate traffic from the site and so if they yank my posts I’d stand to lose. At the risk of losing this added traffic, I’m writing about this unethical behavior. Why ?

Because I think what TechTribe is doing is morally and ethically repugnant.

It takes a lot of time and energy to write these blog posts. By republishing entire blog posts, they increase their own page-views, stickiness and get to offer ‘free’ content to their users. While I dont know about other bloggers, I find this distasteful. Not once have I been notified in any manner that my blog posts are being republished on their site in their entirety. Of course, they cant control what blog feeds their users sign up for. But hey, here’s a start - why not publish only a small excerpt as opposed to the entire post ? They should have done due diligence that entire blog posts (which are copyrighted by the way) are being re-published on their site.

This is not ‘fair usage’ as per copyright law. If this continues, I’m seriously thinking about looking at various legal options for suing their asses.

Update: See Sarah’s awesome post on ReadWriteWeb about this very topic. It discusses whether an external web service has the right to appropriate a blogger’s RSS feeds and build their own brand around the blog content. Exactly what the suckers at TechTribe are doing.

If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds

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This entry was written by pranav and posted on April 15, 2008 at 3:37 pm and filed under India Social Networking, India portals. Post a comment

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16 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

i understand your concern…..but what about google reader that shows the complete blog content for all the blogs that I have subscribed too. I only visit the actual blog sites when I want to add a comment just like this one. I think if they linking back to you and showing the actual source as startupdunia.com, that should be okay. another way to control this would be to have your RSS feed only contain some part of the post…but would be quite irritating for users who are already reading your posts from blog readers. overall i feel you are gaining more mind share this way though not direct users….mind share i feel is a big plus…just my 2 cents….keep up the great work dude!

1. snehal on April 15th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
snehal,

Google reader is not an end-user / destination site. Google reader is just a web based feed reader - more of a utility app.

and I’m not conflicted about mindshare-direct users. Several sites syndicate content from my blog on and off. I have no problems in having my blog posts republished with permission or notification. But if you do it in some shady manner - to increase your own stickiness - you bet I’m gonna be pissed.

2. pranav on April 15th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I checked the site and what they are doing is content theft in the name of community. They are nothing but a spam blog network. You should send them a DMCA notice to take down your content. Shame on these guys, profiting from some one else’s content is just a bad business model. By the way who funded them for this content theft idea.

3. Ram on April 15th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
There are a lot of blog feeds syndicated including QOT, Trak.in, Codinghorror, Zen habits and more. Don’t know whether these people know or not

4. Ram on April 15th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Plagiarism was always a serious issue. It is becoming much more rampant nowadays.

We often have incidents where other content providers steal our home page content from Chillibreeze.com. Belive it or not, some have even tried to swipe our About Us page content with a few small tweaks:) We write to them and they take it off- just like that!

Check out this blog post by Kamla Bhat- http://kamlabhattshow.com/blog/2008/04/09/msn-s-response-to-plagiarized-content/

That was a small para, but some websites seem to think they can make a living out of stealing content from other websites. And the worst part is they might even get away with it!

The need of the hour is an effective plagiarism detection tool/software that is totally foolproof! Coming to think of it, isn’t that a great idea for a startup!

5. Nishi/Chillibreeze on April 15th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Great Expose! I also invite you to read this post of mine

6. Debashish on April 15th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
hmm, so google reader is not content theft today, but if they start putting ads on their interface tomorrow, they will become one? Looks like the image above does have credit to startup dunia as original source.

PS: rss feed interface allows you to control how much (or how little) of the post goes into the feed, and if the user needs to click there to come back read the full post - may be you want to use that…

7. Vishwas on April 16th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Hi pranav!.. i noticed that article of yours on techtribe… it seemed to me as if you guys have a tie-up !! bcoz they had your full article(s) along with the comments too!

by the way what do you think they should have done to give the due credit back to startupdunia in the right measure??

8. Raghu on April 16th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Why not snip your RSS feed ? Rather than publishing the entire article with comments on RSS feed, publish only a snapshot that will drive more traffic to your website and stop people is using your article in its entirety.

9. Ayan on April 16th, 2008 at 6:06 am
@vishwas - google reader doesnt splash full feeds on their home page. if techtribe wants to be a RSS reader, they can keep these feeds hidden from the general community on the site.

And dont be mistaken, giving credit back to StartupDunia does not give them the right to publish entire posts.

@raghu - i’m not pissed because they didnt give credit but because (i) they are re-publishing full posts && (ii) no one ever bothered to notify me my full posts are being republished

@ayan - I know RSS feeds can be snipped. If you blog, you’ll realize that full posts turn out to be better for the audience than snips.

10. pranav on April 16th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I don’t think we can do much about blocking the content theft, but only thing we can do in a situation like this, where we know who is pulling our content, is to block the specific domain or IP address from which these guys are accessing the feeds.

Thats really bad on the part of TechTribe guys. It really looks like the TechTribe user has written that article. They need to show the source clearly and the digg like voting system should clearly say these are the articles added from feeds and not actually written by the users.

11. Chandra on April 16th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Pranav,

First and foremost, let me clearly state that techTribe’s intent is NOT to plagiarilze content so we or the members can claim it as their own work. The use of articles and feeds on techTribe is so members can share what they’ve written, or they’ve liked reading - so others can read it and benefit - but not take credit away from the author.

With feeds, we have tried to make sure the people reeding a feed can clearly see who the original author was. If we look at the screenshot you posted, there is the TOP HEADER, where right below the name of the the blog, it clearly says “Originally posted by Startup Dunia” - this is a link to the original blog. At the bottom of the post, it has the same - and says “View original post by pranav” - which is again a link.

Maybe we can think about whether we should entirely remove the name of the person who uploaded the feed (Ranbir Batra in this case) so there is no confusion whatsoever.

As for clipping the feed so it only takes a paragraph or two, we have many members who post their own feeds, and people who would like to have their entire feeds posted on techTribe. If we were to restrict ALL feeds to a certain character limit, we would not support them.

There are many partial feeds on techTribe as you would like, and they are controlled by the original blogger themselves. When defining the feed, they’ve chosen to restrict it to a preview format only.

Other suggestions are welcome - i can easily be reached at rohit at techtribe.

techTribe’s goal is to get articles such as the ones you’ve written to the community at large, and members do that by haring what they like reading. As you said yourself, this helps drive traffic to the blogger’s site as well. In a handful of cases, where there is the entire post being published due to a full RSS feed that the blogger would like removed, we’ve always done so immediately upon being notified of such issues - yours was removed yesterday as well.

12. Rohit (techTribe) on April 17th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Rohit,

thanks for stopping by and the clarification.

While it may not be TechTribe’s intention to plagiarize content, the way in which the feed content is presented is dubious at best.

For instance, see the first screenshot above and tell me whether you find anything wrong with the way its presented. If I am a 3rd person, to me, it gives the impression as if the Techtribe user (Ranvir batra in this case) has authored the article.

While I am aware of clipping my own feed, I feel I should be in control and able to make that call.

About not clipping all feeds on TechTribe to accommodate member blogs, I dont buy your argument.
I dont see why all user blogs cant be clipped (including member feeds). Going by your comment above, it would be help drive traffic to their own blog as well. Even 2-3 paragraphs from the original article should be enough to highlight the gist of the article to the community at large. Interested users can then always hop on to the member’s blog for further reading

While other bloggers may see benefit in getting the additional traffic, I dont. The way I see it - you guys benefit more at my expense.

After writing this post, I got emails from a couple of bloggers, who’d been in a similar scenario and had asked that their feeds be removed from TechTribe. If that is indeed the case, it should have set off some bells –that if several folks are complaining, probably this practice needs to be changed.

13. pranav on April 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I’ve been quietly following this thread for much of the day but I ahve to say that I am appalled at Techtribe’s response. To demand that bloggers truncate their feed when it is their responsibility to ensure that they are using other people’s content in an ethical and legal manner is an outright insult.

I know many services that make legitimate mistakes in this area, but none, not even Shyftr, have tried to put the blame no bloggers who just want to serve their readers.

In this regard, I would strongly encourage you to look at how sites such as Digg and Reddit handle these issues. They are sites that have managed to build great audiences using other people’s content but without actually duplicating the feed.

I am sorry for my harsh tone, but that is an irresponsible reply to some very serious and legitimate concerns about your service…

14. Jonathan Bailey on April 17th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Pranav, I see your point about the main splash page showing the name of the poster. I suggested in my response that we could look at changing that to make sure there’s no confusion.

We’ve received all of 2 requests from bloggers about their entire feeds published over the last 6 months, and we’ll always removed the feeds when brought to our attention.

Jonathan - we are not demanding that bloggers terminate their feed. My response was that we also have bloggers who would like their entire feed present. We are happy to take a look at how others do it - i know we aren’t the only site facing this challenge.

15. Rohit (techTribe) on April 18th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Hi Pranav,
Inspite of all the mistakes Rohit does not seem to feel that what they are doing is wrong. A rose is a rose is a rose by any name.
Who knows probably Techtribe is being kicked in tis asses by its VC to show some real traffic.
Giving credit back to StartupDunia does not give them the right to publish entire posts. It is appalling to find Rohit’s reply. Maybe Techtribe is on its way to deadpool!

16. Anon on April 18th, 2008 at 7:50 am

Startup Dunia