Please Join Me in Telling the Thief Blogger to Knock It Off!

Somebody is running a thief blog, a site that leeches off of this site for its title, its look, and its copy.

The thief does attribute my posts to me. But usually only after duplicating 90-100% of the original post, so that it would be pointless for a reader to actually come to this site to read it. More than half of the posts on the thief blog come from this site. The balance are ripped off from other blogs.

Clearly, the person engaging in this thievery is hoping to use the rip-off blog to make money. Advertising is seen at the tops and prominently, on the sidebars of each page.

Several days ago, I wrote in a comment to one of my posts appearing on this person's pseudo-blog:

Look, if you want to make money from blogging, that's up to you. But do it with your own posts.

The thoughts I express on my blog are my thoughts. If, occasionally, other bloggers link to something I've written or cite a sentence or two, that's part of the dialoging that makes blogging so interesting. But what you do is effectively swipe other people's copy, most notoriously, my copy, and preface it all with advertising.

At best, what you do is mooching. More accurately, it's stealing. So, knock it off!

Mark Daniels

What the thief blogger does goes way beyong linking, citing, or quoting this blog. He's using it for himself.

I learned this morning that, even since I wrote the comments above, the thief blogger has once more posted a piece from Better Living.

So, I'm asking readers of this blog to send comments to the thief to say exactly what you think of his/her thievery.

[UPDATE: Both Hugh Hewitt and Joe Gandelman, uber-bloggers, have called attention to the tawdriness, if not outright illegality, of thief-blogging, a far more widespread phenomenon than you might think it is. Thanks to both of them!]