Work

A few days ago, i arrived home to find a copyright infringement letter waiting for me..

I said i wouldn’t talk about until it was all sorted out, so thankfully, it’s all been sorted out now

The case was all to do with mygadgetinfo.com‘s use of RSS feeds as content. When i bought the site, it was taking two full feeds from engadget and gizmodo and publishing them as content. ‘No big deal’ – i thought, as they were both given permanent links on the site and all posts were tagged with the authors names which linked back to their respective sites.

I knew, technically this was illegal, but it’s a really gray area on the net and i didn’t think many publishers cared where their content was published, so long as they got credit. Anyway, AOL on behalf of engadget, didn’t like the way i was doing this and basically said it could confuse people as to who owns the content. That’s fair enough, valid point. At the end of the day, they own the content, so they have the final say who uses it and how it’s used.

Now at the time of the letter, mygadgetinfo.com has over 38,000 pages indexed in google , it was virtually impossible for me to try and hand comb through that lot looking for engadget posts.. so i ended up doing a mass delete of all posts. However i did keep all the urls

Currently, i’ve added a gizmodo RSS feed, but it’s not a full feed so i’d be very surprised if they took action as it’s basically free backlinks for them on a PR4 sites. Anyway, i couldn’t argue with AOL’s case and deleted all posts ASAP. Today i got an email from them confirming that the site is good to go now.

So anyone who’s using full engadget RSS feeds as content, your days are numbered The one positive i can take out of this is that the site was becoming so big, and was so well SEO’d that eventually it started hitting frontpage on some google SERPS so i’m fairly sure that’s how they stumbled upon it in the first place Victim of my own success