WebProNews

This isn't some Phantom Menace grabbing content from a Yahoo blog, but another blogger who's dropped a whole YPN post into a blog and slapped ads alongside it. Michael Mattis at the Yahoo Publisher Network blog expressed his unhappiness over some copying and pasting performed with his site's content. Fair use excerpts are one thing, but a full snatch-and-grab has him riled.

"It’s frustrating when you go searching for a piece of information and you find the same info, written in exactly the same way, on a hundred different sites. It is a bad experience that just doesn’t help," he said.

People with Yahoo Publisher Network ads appearing alongside their cut and paste content should expect no mercy from Mattis if he or the YPN team discover it. He called it a "sure fire way to get kicked out" of the program.

Such copying happens constantly, to the consternation of those who create the content in the first place. Mattis suggested Creative Commons as one destination where someone with a need for content and the capability to position it in compliance with the CC license could go.

Sites and publishers who do repost content probably won't bother with Creative Commons. As much as people dislike the DMCA, it does offer a way in the US to get copyrighted content taken down when it appears online. Advertisers who don't adhere to Yahoo's "no copying" standard aren't going to be affected by anything less than seeing their affiliates get knocked out for taking content.