Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves

"Thief" may not be the correct legal term, but I think it's the simplest, most accurate description.

A splogger is someone who runs a splog, or spam blog, according to Whatis.com. One of the tricks of sploggers is to use search engines, RSS feeds, and set-and-forget software to steal content from blogs. (There's more at Whatis.com.)

I'm no expert on this topic. I've been a webmaster for several years, but don't remember running into the term "splog" before: Not too surprising, maybe, since my experience with blogs started last month.

As a blogger and webmaster, I'm interested in the problem of splogs and sploggers. There's a pretty good discussion of a particular splog attack in a discussion thread on blogcatalog.com, How Do I Stop A Splogger?

I realize that this might be controversial, since quite a few people seem to believe that anything they find on the Internet is free for their own use. Others, or maybe it's the same people, believe very strongly that there is something distasteful, degrading, and/or unethical about monetizing Web pages and blogs.

My view is that intellectual property rights need to be defined and respected, and that making money isn't evil/insensitive/bourgeois/whatever.