Stealing Blog Content for Fun and Profit
I’m furious! I came across a site today, technorepublic.com, that reproduces my entire Blog entry “Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV)” (which was on the Digg front page and has been linked to from a large number of places) without my permission. This guy has the audacity to copy and paste my entire posting (with apparently some minor reformatting) to his Blog. The Blog is, of course, littered with AdSense and other banner advertising. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the images contained in the posting are linked from my server. So I get to pay for the bandwidth, while he gets the AdSense revenue.
The site contains no contact information that I could find. A more thorough analysis of his site reveals that almost all Blog entries are lifted from a large number of sources, including a recent posting from Guy Kawasaki. Of course, technorepublic.com doesn’t credit most of his sources. Not only that, but his site claims “Copyright 2006 TechnoRepublic.com”. What a laugh!
Especially annoying is that he rips off a lot of Blog entries written in the first person form. So now he has a Blog claiming “I just added Flash-based (FLV) video blogging support” (no he didn’t! I did!) or “Ever wondered how you draw a ribbon in Adobe Illustrator? A while ago a reader e-mailed me with this question.” or even “Blog reader Curtis Thompson asked me a very good question a few days ago:” (the last one taken from the posting by Guy Kawasaki, the other from a designer’s extremely cool blog).
This freeloading idiot even gets comments on his stolen Blog entries such as this: “Hi Neo, Thanks for the tutorial. I have added a link to it from my tutorial site […]. Look forward to seeing more in the future.” That really pisses me off! This guy is riding the coattails of bloggers, profiting from their (our) work.
Now, there is of course the gray area often referred to as “fair use”. You quote my Blog entry, publish an excerpt (as a number of sites have done for the very Blog entry copied by technorepublic), but you send the people interested in the full article over to my Blog — great! Thanks a lot for that. That’s the way this whole thing is meant to work. You’re doing me a favour. And if you ever need a backlink from my site, just ask.
But the guy running technorepublic.com lifted over 100 Blog entries in their entirety from other sources in October alone. That’s not fair use. That’s large-scale copyright infringement.
His “About TechnoRepublic” page simply says
hmmm.. site got a nice name, however still dunno what to write about this site. Help me!
Gee. Hmm.. I think I could come up with a couple of ideas. Give me an email address where I can send them.
Ironically, his first Blog entry is
been wanting to have this blog site a looooong time ago, due to my tight scheds, didnt notice that everyone is doin it, so why can’t i?
Why not?? I can tell you why not! Because you’re an uncreative and unscrupulous THIEF. That’s why not. If you COULD publish a blog, what with your tight schedules and everything, then you probably WOULD. And you wouldn’t have to take other people’s copyrighted content, litter it with your ads and pass it off as your own work.
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add this post to digg.com
Bookmark on reddit.com
December 6th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
For better or worse, the internet is challenging all intellectual propery concepts.
Napster and other music sharing sources brought it to public notice, and YouTube made themselves billionaires from other people’s copyrighted material (as well as original material) uploaded by third parties.
My favorite part of this is when companies making file sharing software plead for payment for use of their products.
I also had a page that aggregated headlines, and synopsized copy, but always linked back to the source, and gave credit. Actually, this is also what Google news does.
I don'’t think use of other people’s property without their permission is right, but Web technology like RSS and so on make it very challenging!
April 19th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Hello Daniel, I just wanted to say that I have been coming back to this article and have cited it in one of my entries. I hope you don’t mind the link back, cheers! =)
June 28th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Hi Daniel,
I once did an Instructable at instructables.com and it got ripped of. I was really angry and thought: how could he do this? Copying my work without giving me credit.
After some hours I thought, well, at least my work is worth enough getting ripped of.
At the long run, stealing content will not pay out.
Regards,
Alex
July 9th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
I know the feeling
I wrote an article on full contact karate last December, next thing i know some joker has copied it word for word and has it ranked on google.
OK it was never going to get much exposure like your post but it hurts none the less
March 25th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Hey Daniel. I had a similar experience recently with a site called virtisys. Like technorepublic, virtisys was wholesale stealing blog posts from me and others without source crediting or linking. My first course of action in situations like these is to directly contact the party responsible. There’s always the possibility, however slim, that they made an oversight or didn’t realize they were breaking the law. However, like in your situation, the offending website listed no contact information. I even did a WHOIS lookup on the domain but the contact information was private. So, no way to get in touch directly.
Fortunately, virtisys was being hosted by a third party hosting company called SoftLayer. I sent a notice of copyright infringement to SoftLayer (a copy of which I’ve posted on my blog) informing them of the DMCA violation and requesting that they investigate. I also posted a blog entry about it, and spent some time tracking down sources for some of the other stolen content and notifying the bloggers whose posts were being ripped off. Within an hour, my post was removed from virtisys, and by the end of the day (the same day!) the entire site was taken down.
I believe these folks are always going to be out there. The potential ad revenue one can make doing this probably outweighs the repercussions when bloggers retaliate, but I was really encouraged by the support I got from other bloggers and by how rapidly the situation was resolved.
Cheers and good luck,
Jeremy
October 31st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Yes! This same kind of thing happened to me. Although it was not my blog, it was my DELETED myspace account information. There it was- photo and all the info on something called Spock.com.
They wouldn’t return an email or anything. The instructions on their page have you sign up to even send them an email. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?
Consequently, my Facebook has no personal information. If they want to know something, they can email me.
Blessed Samhain!
Stephanie