We’re all for easy, efficient access to information about marketing and advertising. There’s nothing more satisfying than finding a website that contains every single tidbit of relevant news you could every want – except when that site steals the content in full and does not link back to the original source. One Massachusetts based company has just launched such a monster.
Here’s how the service is described in their press release, “Massachusetts based advertising agency Mass Reach Interactive has built a free peer to peer (Linux/PHP) database allowing advertising executives to share content and creative with one another. https://www.thebriefcase.org contains content offered by Mediapost, emarketer, ClickZ, Business Wire, iMediaConnection, Ad Rants, Reuters and many more free of charge. You could just go to each site and look for the right article, but it may no longer be available. Often you would have to search 50 sites to find the article you need. We aren’t reinventing the wheel here, just trying to make the life of road warriors a bit easier.”
So there you have it. Because “the Briefcase” is a repository for articles cut and pasted from other sources without proper attribution, Mass Reach Interactive is stealing not just content but advertising revenue from all the news sources it contains on its site. Oh, they do list sources but the links, while the site says they must link to the original source, just circle back to the full text of the article on “the Briefcase” site. In fact, here isn’t even a field to enter a source on the submission page. We found no links on the site’s articles to original sources.
We’re no lawyer but this sure sounds like the blatant breaking of some kind of copyright law. Or at least a high degree of idiotic stupidity.
UPDATE: It appears Mass Reach Interactive has read this article. They’ve made some changes to the site. The link to the original article is now included and, rather than pasting the entire article onto the site, they’ve wisely included an excerpt, albeit, a long one, of the original atticle.
