I am working on a revised version of the article that is much more clear and concise. Hwoever, I’m going to wait to post it until after the attention has died down. I deserve much of the heat I’ve drawn for not being clear and don’t want to shirk responsibility.

Still, I wanted to make sure that misconceptions regarding the article are addressed. I don’t want to unfairly crucified as something I am not because I wasn’t clear.

As far as the term content theft goes, it’s important to note that this isn’t a legal blog. It deals with some legal issues, but isn’t written for lawyers.

In regards to fair use, I have no objection to fair use at all. I often don’t think that fair use goes far enough. However, some blogs, a very small percentage, go well beyond the bounds of what is considered fair use and repost large blogs of articles with very little original text, founding their entire blog on other people’s content, often for commercial gain.

That’s all. In truth, the article has an extremely narrow focus…

Though if you have a post called “The New Plagiarism” on a site called “PlagiarismToday” and the first graf says “…Dan Zarella from Puritan City call those who engage in it ‘the best plagiarists’. Others simply call them bloggers or, as Zarella also put it, ‘Human Aggregators’…” then you can’t really fault readers for thinking your angle is to at least insinuate that that plagiarism is part of the issue. But let’s put that aside.

There are problems with the vague term you use – “content theft.” It is not something defined legally (see the Dan Brown case in the UK) nor is it something widely used in academia (while the term plagiarism is).

Some consider “fair use” a form of “content theft” even though it is well established in the US sense. (It is less so in the Commonwealth’s concept of fair dealing.) So I wonder if that is the issue you have, with content block-quoted and attributed, but somehow the copyright owner being able to exercise more restrictions over the use of their content? Is it a fundamental objection to the whole idea of fair use (or fair dealing) that you are contending?

Also, contrary to what many may think, this isn’t a campaign against quoting. Far from it. If you notice, I use a Creative Commons License on my work, including that one.

It was targeted at a very, very small subset of bloggers, far less than one percent, that get almost all of their content in quote format and do it in ways that don’t encourage readers to visit original sources.

Many people have taken this issue personally even though they shouldn’t.

Thank you very much for your time.