We're being link farmed, and I have mixed feelings about it. I was googling a bit and found 3 different websites that feature our podcast and recent episode show notes prominently on their front page. But the rest of the site is clearly a "link farm," a collection of ads to generate click-through money like the Google ads we often use when between sponsors.
According to our Creative Commons License, this is 100% legal, and there's nothing we can do about it. Anyone can take our content and redistribute it, as long as they credit us, and our logo is all over their site, so I'd say they fulfill the legal end. Our whole goal was to get information to parents and families, and they're helping us do that.
At the same time, link farms are the web-equivalent of spam. They show up in search engines looking like useful content, but they actually just offer a collection of words and no actual value to anyone, so in some way, we're supporting that business. At least they have a podcast player on their site so you can listen to our show there, but it's not a true podcast directory of any kind.
Will this create a problem for CCL websites? I don't think so. They'll take a "Don't ask; don't tell" approach and ignore it, which is likely the best approach. If someone took a snapshot of my face and painted it as a mural on a house, I might be embarrassed, but as long as people understand that I had nothing to do with it, I'm not too worried. People will either see the site and think it's another podcast directory (which is what it looks like), or they'll recognize that it's a link farm and ignore it. Either way, they've seen our logo and name, which will help get the word out about us.
Anyone else have thoughts on this? Has this happened to anyone else? Do you care?