Some of the content from your blog has been stolen
I received the following email message this morning. I was about to detail it as spam when I decided to check it out. I was actually a little surprised to find out that indeed, there is another blogger using my posts as his own work. Now I consider the internet a pretty open place and usually value freedom of knowledge flow over copyright protection, but this is really annoying to me. How hard would it have been to put a link back to my blog or a couple words giving me credit? What would be the point of trying to pass off my blog as his own?! Very annoying and a little creepy. Let me know what you think about this whole issue.
Here is the email I received from Nick Hine:
Hello, I’m Nick and I run PlagiarismWatch at http://plagiarismwatch.wordpress.com. Currently it is just me running a small blog dedicated to informing bloggers that they may have had some of their content stolen. At this moment in time I am only tracking one Scraper site, run by a Brandon Berkovits, and I know of him because he stole content from my blog.
So, the post at http://famartinniemi.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/timing-is-the-new-location/ (which is yours) is copied in it’s entirety without crediting you as the original author at the url: http://school-and-other-crap.blogspot.com/2009/03/timing-is-new-location.html by said Brandon Berkovits.
I absolutely guarantee you I will not charge you at all for this information etc, or supply your email to people trying to sell you herbal medicines and the likes, as I dislike spammers almost as much as I do scrapers.
Currently claiming a Copyright Infringement notice at a Blogger blog is difficult, but I can email you a little something telling you how if you’re interested in bringing a sort of justice to this guy. As a preventative measure I recommend licensing your work under creative commons, as they offer a range of licenses dictating just how your content can be used. This is available at http://creativecommons.org
Regards,
Nick Hine
this is where you and everyone you know post a comment on the guys blog. public flogging is fun for all the family
Wow! He stole your “Timing is the New Location!” That’s outrageous! I’m infuriated! He doesn’t have the courage to stand back and admire someone else’s genius. How very sad.
You guys rock – thanks!
There are no comments on his blog yet – we need to out this guy.
Why would anyone do this? It’s not like he’s getting a grade, or money from it, is he?
Lol, you do realise that giving exposure to them like this is exactly what they’re looking for right?
You should remove the link above as you are simply sending backlinks to them which is generally their sole purpose for existing. Back links -> Google juice -> Advertising -> Happy splogger! Even if the link is nofollow’d the sploggers aren’t that smart and probably won’t notice (nofollow’ing links stops them from passing Google page rank between pages).
The easiest way to do deal with these types of people is to simply ignore them. If no one links to them or visits their site at all, then they will have little hope of generating any traffic for their site. Even visiting their site means that they’ve at the very least got you to visit it which could be a potential revenue generator from a single Adsense click.
If they’ve set themselves up properly then there won’t be any backlinks back to your original content either. If there are only backlinks from your site to the sploggers site then there is a very real risk that Google may mistake the Sploggers site as being the home of the original content and assuming that your site is the splogging site due to the only links between the two being from your site to theirs.
In a nutshell … don’t worry about sploggers. If you really want to screw them over then file a complaint with Blogger (or whoever their webhost may be) and if that doesn’t work, then move onto a formal DMCA complaint. Anything else is futile and will probably do more harm than good.
Thanks, Ryan. Gosh it has been so long since I blogged. Your comment has motivated me to get back into it.