"Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content?"

Ran across this article in TechCrunch.

The Fair Syndication Consortium - made up of Associated Press, Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, Politico and others - want ad networks to go after anyone "for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content."

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The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.
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This website seems to be one of those "splogs". I took the title of this post from TechCrunch itself! So there... Ha!

So go after our ad network. Oops, we don't advertise anything on this site.

"Aye, there's the rub." Oops, now Shakespeare is going to come after me for using that line from Hamlet's famous "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy.

According to Attributor (related to the Consortium), this is how much money splogs are making from other publishers' content:

And the ad networks that are helping these splogs?
"Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved."

Good luck!