Weblog Tools Collection: When Your Blog Gets Splogged, It’s More Than GPL.. Right?
Yesterday, I wrote about a problem Matt had about the GPL license with the Thesis Theme. Though I am not biased and seriously do not want to get into an argument about it, let me put forth an argument that I think is really worth thinking about.
Many of you reading this blog and probably who don’t read this too might have a blog, where you write rich and unique content and probably also have copyrights on the content. It could be licensed copyrights or some sort of Creative Commons. Nevertheless, you might also have a terms of use which dictates how others can use your content.
Now, this world is full of sploggers and there is no way you can stop that. But when it comes to your own blog you will tend to take some action against people who copy your content. This action could be politely asking them to stop copying your content, threatening them to stop using your content and last but not the least taking legal action against them by filing a DMCA complaint or using other means through the court of justice.
Now, when it comes to our own problems, our own content, we would contemplate to do everything in our means to stop people from using what is rightfully ours. But when someone violates a license or any license, in this case the GPL license of the software we use, we turn a blind eye or say it is not really what it says?
Let me make one thing clear here. I am not a GPL fan, I personally prefer to use the Apache 2.0 license. However, I also prefer to respect licenses I use and not violate them.
Update: I also wanted to add some API related stuff which people are arguing against. Your blog has a RSS feed, which is essentially a way to access content from your blog without actually using any of your blog’s resources (almost 
), and those RSS feeds eventually end up being used by the so called sploggers. However, at that point of time we don’t really want to think how they accessed our content and want them to adhere to our TOS and other licensing usage. Right? Right? Right?
I am seriously not against anyone, this is a real-life situation I wanted to put everyone into before making decisions about what is actually right or wrong. After this, the choice is yours.
Original post by Keith Dsouza
