Creative Commons Licenses Fail To Protect Bloggers From Content Theft

Susan Cartier Liebel has a great post called "Shouldn’t You Have To Ask Permission If You Want To Take A Blog’s Feed For Your Profit?" She notes that:

This has been troubling me for a while.  And it just may go over like a
lead balloon for some of you. We all work really hard on creating
quality blog content, building
our readership, creating trust in order to sell our legal services.  We
publish it on our blogs, some under a creative commons license.  But
when we started publishing did we automatically implicitly give any one
person or company the right to gather our blog’s feed and present our
feeds in an aggregated format so they may profit off our reputation and
work….without our permission?

The Creative Commons license which most bloggers choose is the "attribution non-commercial no derivatives work license 3.0."  However, this license is inadequate in several ways. First, commercial use is hardly the touchstone since most sites include Google adwords at this point.  It is the legitimacy of the web site which is using your content that is the core issue.  Illegitimate web sites which simply harvest thrid-part content are easy to spot.  In order to protect against sites which merely accumulate feeds or copy content, we reworked the creative commons license to include the following language:

c.    License Restrictions.  The license granted in Section II(b) above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:
    i.    You may not republish the Work in full.  You may republish the Work in part or otherwise consistent with this License and these Terms of Use.
    ii.    You must include any and all links included in the Work with any republication or other use.
…………

v.    You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in this Section II above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage, search engine optimization or private monetary compensation through advertising reseller, adlink, domain monetization or other advertising schemes.  Without express written permission, you may not publish this work on any site that simply publishes, without thoughtful and relevant commentary, the work of others, accumulates third party content or aggregates syndicated feeds. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.