Wednesday, September 19, 2007

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!]

3 comments:

Jann said...

Responding as you suggest will merely increase the number of hits registered by the thief and INCREASE his ad revenues. A possible solution is to inform the thief that he is in violation of the copyright provisions of the DMCA and liable to prosecution and civil judgment and FINES.
Since his only goal is obviously to make money off of someone else's work, a threat against his pocketbook is the only useful weapon.

Mark Daniels said...

Jann:
I appreciate your suggestion.

But, as I understand it, this person's ad revenue will only be enhanced, at least in the case of Google AdSense advertising, if people actually click onto the ad.

Mark

Carmen said...

Mark,

I don't think the DMCA will be effective here. The blog template is a generic blogger template - not custom, the posts are from the RSS feed at your site (implying permission for others to use) and his name is original even if it's a modification of your blog's name. You don't have much recourse through DMCA. Even if the DMCA was effective and could be used as a tool against this type of parasite, he/she won't care because they will kill the URL/blog and move on to create another splog. The best thing you can do against sploggers is to be on the offensive.

My blog (content) has been ripped off several times by sploggers for use in Made For Adsense Splogs so this is what I've done to protect my content and brand:

1. Report the offending URL / site to Google at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=18386
- trust me they will take it seriously.
2. Modify your RSS feed to excerpt/summary mode instead of full post. Sploggers will still be able to "steal" your content but with a summary only visitors to the Splog will be directed to your site when they click "read more".
3. Create a custom or semi-custom blogger template/design. I would be happy to help - just let me know. I have lots of online resources for free blogger templates.
4. Keep an eye out for sploggers by searching once a month for your domain name or RSS Feed and when you find sploggers / blog thieves then report them to Google Adsense Abuse or to Google Abuse. Google hates spam and splogs more than the rest of us (if that's possible :) ) and they will take action.