Blogs and copyrighted content

MarketingSherpa’s publisher, Anne Holland, wrote an article on bloggers cutting and pasting the entire text of her publication’s content in their blogs. Apparently it’s an emerging trend and I’m experiencing it too (even if fortunately on smaller scale).

As Anne points out, at first you’re happy to see people like what you write, but then you get disappointed (and angry) since you receive no credit, no link back, no mention. As I already wrote in the past, I believe blogging is all about sharing, so giving credit to the source it’s part of the game. No matter if the source of what you copy, comment, refer to or just link is an international newspaper, a trade publication or your cousin’s blog, you have to provide a (working!) link back, a reference to the site you get inspiration from.
This being said, I also have to add that there’s a sort of “circle of trust” among the most of the bloggers writing about marketing and advertising who always link back the blog they’ve found a news on. It’s a question of fairness. Some of us blog for business, but most of us blog just for fun, to share ideas and opinions, so competition, at least to me, should not be an issue.
To tell the truth, I agree with Ann when she says the problem of stolen content might just be connected to Google AdSense: