When theft isn't theft

Sadly, theft on the Internet isn't as uncommon as you'd hope. Lots of people look for ways to generate content without putting in much effort themselves. See Farrah Ashline.

Sometimes though, sometimes theft isn't theft at all. It's a misunderstanding of modern technology and the way content can be spread around all over the damned place.

Take Deborah Ng as an example. Yesterday she posted about plagiarism, that someone was nastily stealing her content and using it for their own nefarious means. Curious, I clicked the link she provided and discovered it led to the friends list of clmoriarity on Livejournal.

"Surely she couldn't mean that," I thought.

But oh yes she did. And oh is she wrong about it. What happened was Caitlin Moriarity added the RSS feed from Deborah Ng's blog to her friends list on Livejournal. Lots of folks do it. There's a Dilbert feed, an Astronomy picture of the day feed and even a QI Quote feed.

The idea is you check your friends list on Livejournal and also see the content of your favorite sites. It's a clever little thing to keep people using LJ instead of shunning it for other feed aggregators. For users it's fairly convenient and for webmasters can spread out bandwidth costs. People reading your content and clicking your links but not interfering with your hosting bill? Give me some more of that!

The best resolution to this would probably be a public apology. Caitlin is coming out of this relatively unscathed for those of us in the know and with the time to explain. How often does it happen that your 15 minutes of Internet fame comes from being mistaken for a thief, instead of actually being one.