Comments on: Stealing Blog Content for Fun and Profit

by: Stephanie

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:26:18 +0000

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

by: Jeremy

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:37:20 +0000

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

by: Roger Gordon

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:37:33 +0000

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

by: Alex

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:10:33 +0000

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

by: Arielle

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:44:14 +0000

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! =)

by: Steve

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:07:14 +0000

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!