Believe it or not BigBrotherAfrica.com is not the official website for Big Brother Africa. What they are though is the official scraper of the Official Big Brother Africa.
Your Web AddiCT has been monitoring the two sites for a couple of days now and this is what I’ve found.
- The official Big brother site was professionally designed, BigBrotherAfrica.com most definitely not.
- BigBrotherAfrica.com scrapes, copy/pastes, every news article found on the official Big Brother Africa site, makes one or two changes embeds a video and does not link back to the original source.
- BigBrotherAfrica.com is plastered with Google Adsense around the scraped content
I don’t know about you but this leaves a foul taste in my mouth. Is bigbrotherafrica.com violating copyright laws? Would love Paul Jacobson, the number one Web Lawyer in South Africa‘s thoughts on this. Even if the official Big Brother Africa site was released under Creative Commons the BigBrotheAfrica.com site would be in violation.
PS: You can Vote for Big Brother Africa using MXit.
Have you read these yet?
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Web fun-duh-mentals 101: When Copyright is wrong
Big Brother Africa: The Revolution
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MNET does not own the .coza equivalent either – http://co.za/cgi-bin/whois.sh?Domain=bigbrotherafrica
#sloppy
The .com scraper site is definitely in trouble.. they have MNET logos in the footer
I watched last year big brother africa. Also I visited last year MNet site. It showed some sites include http://www.bigbrotherafrica.com are official fan sites. SO I think MNet give them permission to be the official fan site. Also if you search big brother africa on google , bigbrotherafrica.com is in number one position.
Using content on the fan site is ok but they should stick to copyright guidelines and specify where they scraped the content from by linking back to the official Big Brother Africa site at http://mntafrica.com/bigbrother at least.