First – under US law it’s legal to make PERSONAL copies of music as long as you don’t distribute them (that’s important) or use them for personal gain. This in many ways is the crux of the issue and has been since the introduction of the ability to make recordings off of the radio and the TV (with the VCR) back before the advent of the computer.

That really is at the heart of this issue and the arguments all have to deal with this reality – but unfortunately people’s personal ideologies and agendas are either ignoring the issue, are ignorant of the issue or simply don’t care.  At least those who oppose SOPA anyway.  It is illegal to distribute the intellectual property of other people – period.

I remember back in the day when Napster was the rage and people couldn’t understand why they were unable to share songs. When the music companies started protecting their legal rights to those songs they were vilified by those who thought that they had a personal right to share music.  I’m not sure where all this started but I suspect that people were so used to making tape copies of songs and TV shows… who was going to regulate it?  And people regularly share those with one another or made copies for each other and, for the most part, were doing it with the best of intentions but the fact of the matter it was ILLEGAL!

You can begin to make all sorts of arguments about what the impacts and fallout are of industries and websites and businesses that have arisen out of an unregulated Internet but no matter how you slice it – if you distribute a song illegally it’s… you guessed it… illegal!  So am I saying that if I make a video of my daughter dancing outside of my Jeep to a song that was playing on my radio and post it to Facebook that it’s illegal?  Are there nuances to what will be enforced and what will not? I don’t know – but rest assured that anyone distributing the intellectual property rights of someone else should expect to face scrutiny at some level eventually – it’s going to happen.

So what does it mean to ‘distribute’?  Well – we can use a lot of different words here but I’ll throw out a small lexicon for you to consider.  Post, RIP, share, upload… the more I think about this the less complex it gets. I used to lead worship for a small church in Houston, TX. We incorporated a ‘contemporary’ worship style in our service and used songs written recently. One of the things I had to do was secure permission to use these songs and display the words on our projection screen as well as pay fees to use the songs so that the artist could receive royalties.

Second – there is no second.  The first issue is the only issue – it’s ILLEGAL to distribute intellectual property of others!  Now you may want to side-step the issue to argue for your favorite social networking site (like Youtube or Facebook)… after all any serious execution of these laws would greatly impact a lot of content posted to these sites?  No more Call of Duty montages being displayed with the latest music played on top of it.  But here’s the funny thing – it’s already illegal.  What SOPA is going to do is force the owners of the method of distribution participate and be accountable for facilitating an illegal practice.  HEAVEN FORBID they find legal ways to make money and pay their employees.

The problem is that we still have the old radio and VCR mentality – no one paid attention to the fact that I was making copies then and sharing them at will.  Why now?  Well – the scope of distribution went from a handful of people back then to literally the potential that now you can share a song (illegally) with millions and not pay (which you have a moral obligation to do) for the privilege (not right) to do.

Okay – so what about censorship.  Isn’t that bad? Yes and no – in an open and free society your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.  The moment you cost me something is the moment that you no longer have the freedom to do what you want.  You can say I’m a jerk – but if you say that I cheated or stole from someone and I didn’t I can sue you.  If you take my car without my permission I can have you thrown in jail.  And if you take artwork I created and do not have permission to share it I can sue you as well and you could potentially face criminal charges.

The fear mongering I see going on about the chilling impact of SOPA on websites and the Internet itself is indeed sobering.  But it’s still fear mongering.  America, in the 1800s, went through a transition that is very similar to what we’re seeing with the Internet today.  In the 1800′s people were used to being able to live life with a level of freedom that we can’t really imagine in our comfortable American homes and communities.  Life on the frontier was hard and people had a certain latitude to live that, as more people moved into the west, began to resist efforts at the firm establishment of civilization.  And that’s what is happening on the Internet.  It has been a wild-west of unregulated behavior and over the course of the past 10 years we’ve seen various attempts at businesses to either protect their rights or secure their ability to make more  money.  The reality that we all must face is that regulation of the internet is not only coming but it’s inevitable and necessary.

As I’ve read SOPA what I’ve seen is an attempt by businesses to protect their interests.  I’m a capitalist and I support this effort.  I’m a Christian and I support the moral responsibility of not taking what doesn’t belong to me. Will this impact and shape my online experience?  Probably.  But when it comes to censorship I refuse to drink the Wiki and Google koolaid that I see being passed around right now.  And that leads to my final thought.  I took some time to look at the entities that support and those that oppose SOPA and it’s pretty interesting to see.  Fundamentally this seems to be more about entitlements where those who oppose SOPA is concerned.  Is SOPA perfect? I don’t know – but I know this.  It’s illegal to steal and that’s what happens every day on so many sites it’s not funny.  Regulation is inevitable and I think it’s necessary.

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Some of the methods for tracking your site traffic are:

• Server based log analyzers - your hosting service’s servers keep data about the traffic to your site.
• Application based trackers - whether it’s a hosted service (such as blogspot.com) or installed on your own website’s hosting servers various applications either have tracking built in or allow you to install plugins that give you the ability to monitor traffic.
• External integration - some application based trackers rely on other-third party applications to get their data.  But if your website is home grown you can use the server-based logs mentioned above our you can integrate third party services like Google Analytics as well.
• Other types of trackers - there are a variety of other ways to track your site including search engine performance (careful with those – you can get penalized by the search engines for using them), third-party specific trackers (such as Google’s Webmaster Tools) and so on. My general rule of thumb is if I can think of it someone’s probably already built it or tried to build it.
• Surveys - you can also utilize third-party survey systems to collect customized feedback about the user’s experience on your site.  These can be simple and short or long and involved – but the net result is you get answers to questions that the methods above may hint at (or not tell you at all).

The first three items above overlap to some degree – particularly the 2nd and 3rd bullets. However, regardless of where your site is hosted or how your site is built you can and should be looking at your site’s traffic.

Within traffic-focused data there are some key areas to look at:

• Visits and Unique Visits - The difference between those two are simple. If a site has 100,000 visits one person can account for more than one of those visits.  However a unique visit means that (for the time-frame being examined) a person will be counted only once regardless of how often they visited your site during that time.
• Pageviews and Unique Pageviews - Pageviews are quite simply how many times your pages have been displayed to a visitor. A unique page view is an aggregate of the pages visited by a unique visitor during a visit where the page is viewed one or more times. (yeah it confuses me too)
• Top Content and Content by Title - if your tracking can detail this you should be watching how often pages are being visited specifically. This will help you understand where you’re succeeding and where you have opportunity to learn or improve.
• Traffic Sources - where’s your traffic coming from? You can get a lot of details about who is linking to your content, what search engines they’re using and what keywords they used on that search engine to find you.
• Internal Search Behavior - if you have a built-in search engine on your site you can usually track how many searches are performed and what words they’re using to perform the search as well.  This will help you identify trends and opportunities for new content (if they’re searching for something you don’t have) among other things.
• Event and Goal Tracking - some applications (like Google Analytics) allow you to track outbound clicks while some do not. The ability to track where people are going after visiting your site (based upon links you provide) can be beneficial for a variety of reason.  These features also allow you to track paths through your site to specific actions such as purchasing products or downloading data/file types.  The benefit to this is it can tell you if users are getting off-track in this process which means you need to fix something between points A and B.

The data you collect is only as useful as the volume of traffic (or submissions in the case of surveys) your site is having. Low volumes means you must look at data over longer periods of time.  High volumes means you should be looking at your data more frequently.  What is high and what is low volume? I’d love to give you a number but I don’t think that there’s a one-size fits all answer for every website. A successful site is not measured strictly by the number of visits or pageviews. It depends upon your goals, objectives and overall investment into the site. Your site succeeds when you meet your own goals and objectives.  If those include monetary considerations then we can begin to assign numbers and percentages (based upon real-world assumptions about users in your market). But this is a subject for another more in-depth article.  For now just keep in mind ‘more is better’ when it comes to analyzing data.

In the end there’s nothing more fun yet frightening as waching your traffic on a regular basis. It gives you a sense of what is going on (or not going on as the case may be) and helps you know if you’re going in a direction that meets your goals. Of course if you have a site that you monitor for fun it can be exciting just to see just how much your time and energy are being enjoyed by others.

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First - we need to understand that users by nature are browser and for the most part are interested in instant gratification.

Second - we need to understand that where search engines (like Google) are concerned our content is just content. Google is concerned with who owns the content but in the end their systems are non-discriminatory about where the content is hosted.

Third - if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. There’s no free lunch and a multitude of other cliches.

Fourth - you can take action to protect your content from illegal, unscrupulous or counter-productive use on other sites (or on your own as the case may be).

The key thought  we need to understand is there needs to be a singular source for your content. If a user finds your content on another site why should they care or need to visit your site?  They have what they want. While Google will address sites who steal your content eventually – the process is long and tedious and the net result is that content found by Google on other sites perpetuates the problem.  Again – if users find your content elsewhere why should they go to your site? So make sure your site is the only place your content can be found and don’t post multiple copies of your content on your site (more on that in a moment).

From a search engine perspective sites like Google and Yahoo do not like to find multiple copies of your content in more than one location (on or off site).  They consider it spamming and will punish all sites that are spamming by de-listing them or moving them way down in the search results. The long and the short of it is your site could be damaged in the search engines by multiple copies of your content. (this is really more complex than what I just wrote but it’s a consideration meant to motivate you to take action)

From a competition perspective you can become your own worst enemy (knowingly or not) if your content is being used elsewhere. Again – if someone finds your content somewhere else why would they go to your site? In addition a ‘scraping’ site can out-perform you on the search engines taking traffic away from you.

From a user perspective it creates confusion for your users.  If they find your content elsewhere they’ll be confused about who owns it and where they should go (for another visit) to get more information.

What to Do About Scrapers/Thieves
There are a number of actions you can take to find out if people are stealing your content and address it. First – you want to focus on your own site.  Clean it up and make sure you don’t have multiple copies of content. Second – use some of the websites out there that can help you find stolen content. Third – when you find stolen content then take action.

I will follow up this post to some comments that will provide links to resources that will help you address this issue.

In conclusion it’s one thing to syndicate your content (where you’re hopefully getting paid) and there are ways to share parts of your content forcing users to read a little and click to your site if they’re interested. It’s another entirely when you give away your intellectual property.  Keep your content on your site.

Rob

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