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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Wellsphere scandal - 1800 "contributers"?

Do you consider yourself a contributer?
Gianna wrote a post on Wellsphere and it's merger to Healthcare that is a must-read for those who are member of this thing.
I've spend the whole week sending e-mails to Mr Rutledge asking him to get my content out. I've just left a comment on his blog asking it again.
I didn't sign anything giving Wellsphere intellectual property rights and I believe that nobody did.
"Over the past year, Wellsphere has experienced tremendous growth, having grown from less than 100,000 monthly visitors to a current run rate of more than 4 million monthly visitors (yesterday we served more than 160,000 visitors to our site in one day!). At the same time, our Health Bloggers Network has become the world’s number one community of health writers with more than 1800 active contributors serving our users daily. Over the past year, Wellsphere has experienced tremendous growth, having grown from less than 100,000 monthly visitors to a current run rate of more than 4 million monthly visitors (yesterday we served more than 160,000 visitors to our site in one day!). At the same time, our Health Bloggers Network has become the world’s number one community of health writers with more than 1800 active contributors serving our users daily." (emphasis mine)
This is from Dr. Rutledge site.
I believe we work to hard the other way and we don't want such connections. Now I've spend time, energy and, of course, emotions writing this post because I don't want to be part of any site that sells drugs.
They have deleted an answer I wrote on SSRIs. I'm sure it's because I didn't say how wonderful these drugs work.

Update: I've just received an e-mail form Mr. Rutledge telling me that my profile and content was deleted.

There are many bloggers posting on all of this. Lee Ann, whose blog is about diabetes, wrote her experience and some of her friends here:
"...It wasn’t only those of us who had entered the unsavory agreement who felt screwed. Wellsphere apparently has lifted content such as vlogs posted on YouTube without attaining the creators’ consents,... (emphasis mine)

6 comments:

soulful sepulcher said...

Well now that this has happened, I'm going to write a story about the pharmaceutical sponsors that HealthCentral is famous for...and even more reason to remain on as a member; is that people reading will read anti-pharma posts, they might be able to delete comments on their site, but they cannot edit our blogs (which are linked up to their site via our personal profile pages at Wellsphere).

Recently, I've had several emails from Wellsphere readers telling me they read about my daughter, had the same thing happen to their child, and that they want to go after the FDA. So, it's an interesting twist, to keep spreading the word about pharma right where pharma sits or quit.

Mark p.s.2 said...

Damn! I hope you get your writing removed.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't mind the link if helped people realized there are ways besides drugs.

I am still not understanding about the intellectutal rights

Ana said...

Stephany,
I'm glad you're having this opportunity.
I didn't feel the same.
All my posts were directly linked to Wellsphere and I believe it was making it more difficult for me because my blog is only 9 months old.:)
There are plenty good mental health blogs there.


Mark,
Thank you!
They have deleted!

Naturalgal,
They don't have intellectual rights.

Anonymous said...

It's unfortunate that Wellsphere had to lure bloggers in this manner... I have made the great escape/exit myself, and probably just in time.

-shanti *t

Clever Elsie said...

I don't know if anyone is still trying to extract themselves from this mess, but I'm trying to spread the word about what it says in their HealthBlogger Network Participation Agreement. Here's a quote:

As someone whose blog was ripped without my permission, I'm trying to spread the word about Wellsphere's Health Blogger Network Participation Agreement, which you can find on their site. Part of it reads as follows:

"You hereby grant Wellsphere a royalty-free, paid-up, non-exclusive, worldwide, license to use, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and publicly display your Health Blogger Content on Wellsphere.com. If you request that any of your Health Blogger Content be removed from Wellsphere.com, the foregoing license shall terminate and such Health Blogger Content shall be promptly removed from Wellsphere.com. To make such a request, please email Wellsphere at support@wellsphere.com."

So as long as you request that your content be removed, Wellsphere has no further legal authority to use it. I hope that's encouraging to anyone who's still unwillingly associated with Wellsphere!