Blog Plagiarism
What can you do when someone else out-and-out steals your entire posts, tries to hotlink the images straight from your site, and pastes their name on the writing, without any indication it was made by someone else? Here’s my post, and an image from the thief’s page. (Like hell I’m linking to them.)
Very little, from what I can tell. Even though they’re a business, I bet that suing them wouldn’t work. Even if they weren’t lawyers and expert at dodging stuff like that, one can bet that scumwads like this have lots of experience at evading even those determined to bring lawful action or to collect compensation.
Of course, this is probably spamblogging, where spammers start blogs to link to their own sites, and fill the blogs with copied content from wherever they can find it. Yet another way that the smegma of humanity manifest themselves on the Internet.
Contact their ISP and file a DCMA on them. We had to do this recently at one of the blogs I work for. Almost all ISPs have rules about posting copyrighted works.
How do I find the guy’s ISP? Or do you mean his web host? That, actually, is a good idea… and I did so, reporting the site to their host, BlueHost, for abuse.
Thanks!
Yeah, I meant the host, I don’t know why I always say ISP *rolls eyes*
The guy we did it to got his entire site yanked today for copyright infringement, so it may get you somewhere.
BlueHost is who I’m with, and I’d be surprised if they don’t take some action. It’s interesting that you just found this today; I was doing a web search for a buddy of mine and found some of HIS content reposted in a spamblog exactly like you outline here.
I suspect it might be the leading wave of a bunch of people doing the same thing. If they can get their fake blog listed higher in search engines than the real ones they stole the content from, they effectively snag all of the search-engine traffic.