http://www.xplana.com/newsletter/newsletter.php
I stumbled across this newsletter from the folks at Xplana through my referrer logs (apparently they are also a CMS company in addition to producing the Xplana blog). If you go through the section titled ‘Useful Research’ you’ll find many posts you have already read before, from many edtech blogs you read. Some of them are just repostings of the original post without anything added; while their link points back to the original post, they are otherwise unattributed.
I seem to think there was a screaming hissy fit about this about a year ago in the ed tech blog space, which I have no desire to revive. But I’m wondering if someone can tell me if by providing the RSS feed to my site I should somehow simply accept this usage of my words? Personally, I think this isn’t o.k. – if you want to redisplay my feed somewhere else, great, but do so by at the very least also displaying the site’s title and a link, even if all I post are just my little annotations to others’ resources. Otherwise, feel free to re-post any links I’ve pointed to – I can’t stop you – but describe them with your own words.
But I am interested in hearing what others think, as I am certain this is not the only place where people’s posts are simply reposted wholescale but without much other attribution. Should I just accept that by offering syndication of the site, that it’s contents will show up elsewhere? – SWL
Scott, this looks like a prima facie violation of your atttribution-share-alike CC license. But unlike some terms, I don’t see an explicit definition of “attribution” in the legalese.
At the very least it looks like Xplana is being careless….
I think that it’s not right to just display that which is not yours, without attribution and/or a link back. I notice that Xplana asks for attribution on its CC license.
As for your CC license, maybe you should post this question on the Creative Commons blog and see what kind of a response you get.
BTW, I can’t find “Useful Research” on their site.