Ethical Content Re-purposing?

[Tao]

Is there any (ethical and SEO legal) way that content from a site (not owned by me) that has been shut can be reposted by me?

Obviously this is stealing and I assume that Google might see it as duplicate content, but surely there must be lots of sites out there that are dead that had good content that could be reused. Obviously, they are dead for a reason, which might be due to the content being bad, so that would have to be taken into consideration.

 

[Sensual]

How would you do research for ANY content?

If you're looking at the key points, and write your own content based off of it and other content, you're not stealing. You're interpreting it in your own words. Musicians have their influences, and content has it's influences as well.

Just don't go copy/pasting, and if you spin, don't expect good results.

 

[Tao]

I could use the wayback machine to find content where sites have not been renewed and take content from there.

I know that I should be creating my own, and do, but it was more of a hypothetical question really. I was looking at some sites on Flippa to see if there were any in my niche that had traffic that I could just 301 to my site and then got to thinking about old and dead sites where the content is just lost.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The problem with it is you’re not the only one with the idea. Even if you check to see nobody else used it, it doesn’t mean the next guy is going to check. And the next.

The only way I feel comfortable doing this is if I also control the domain and all the 301’s are in place.

 

[built]

Waste of time, if the content was any good they would have enough money to renew the domain

 

[Joe]

Basically unless the "owner" of the content has expressly released the content into the public domain, it's a copyright violation to use it (not theft).

That applies, some might say ridiculously, even in cases where the owner has disappeared (so called "orphan works").

Whether or not it's ethical to copy the content for your own use is a matter of personal opinion (I'd side with "yes" in mind of the concept of "abandoned property", a record company might side with "no, we bought it and own it until the end of time, and if you even hum our tune we'll sue you").

Whether or not Google will come down on you for doing it, no idea how many faces on that dice.