Update on "Copy-Gate"
November 30, 2007 by Sarah
Filed under Read These!, Uncategorized
Warning: this post contains boring information about blogging plagiarism. If you are not a blogger, you’ll probably want to read this post instead!
I posted yesterday about someone stealing all of my content and republishing it on their own site. I got several helpful comments and some people said they were encountering this problem as well. I thought I’d post about how I discovered it and what I’ve done so far. I have no idea if it will work.
How I discovered the problem:
- I did a routine Technorati check to see who is linking to me.
- I found a site I didn’t recognize that had many links to me, so I checked it out.
- The links came from internal links embedded in my posts. (It’s a good idea to link to yourself so you can pick up the links when someone else publishes your content)
Darren at Problogger.net has a good article on how to handle plagiarists. I know he has more, but I can’t find them right now. Here is what I did:
- I commented on the blog, and asked them to stop copying my entire feed. This seemed like an automated program that inserts my feed’s email subscription, so I don’t know if that will accomplish anything.
- The site actually included the part where it says, “You are subscribed to Real Life, you may unsubscribe by clicking this link.” So I clicked it. I unsubscribed them. I also unsubscribed them from the other blogs they were copying. Hee hee! I think this worked, because they haven’t posted my articles in two days.
- I reported them to Google, since they run Adsense (Darren recommends this route)
- I considered reporting them to Blogger, since they have a Blogger-hosted blog (about 20 of them). However, that scared me, because they say to consult a lawyer before you report, and if you submit a false claim you will have to pay fines. I don’t know the law. I don’t know exactly what is covered under the Creative Commons License. Hey, Darren, maybe you could write about that!
- I also alerted the other blogs that were being copied. Maybe if we all gang up, this site will go under.
- I also added the following statement to the end of my posts. I don’t really think copyscape can do anything, but it may deter someone from auto-posting my feed.
If you can see this statement on any other blog, besides www.reallifeblog.net, please contact me. (notice the link)
- The only other recourse is to move to partial feeds, which I really DON’T want to do!
One commenter shared a link to a friend who is encountering the same problem. She has some good information on finding the owner of the offending blog.
Ben also shared this link to some great help from Lorelle on WordPress.
This article from Plagiarism Today gives some information on the Creative Commons License
I never think about this. Thanks for posting, but I am so sorry you had to deal with it.
You know, I am never surprised anymore at what people will do. I don’t like lazy people…and those stealing instead of writing their own posts are lazy with no morals.
[Reply]
Very clever! I wonder what the motive could be though? If they are somehow making money off of your content?
[Reply]
Thanks for the info! Hopefully there will soon be more help for those who are having to deal with this. It really is a shame!
[Reply]
I haven’t had this happen to me… exactly. I do regularly get sites that take excerpts of my posts and then link back to me.
That’s almost as bad. Potentially, Google could classify them as a link farm, see links to my site and penalize me for it. Google says that is rare, but it still happens.
There is a good article in the WordPress community on this issue HERE. It gives some good tips on what to do and some good tools to help.
I wish the laws would catch up with the technology so some of these spammers would go to jail and quit slogging up the internet.
Very annoying.
[Reply]
I hope I could do something to get rid of that thieves… I haven’t found any solution for me as well…
Where can we find that the site is subscribed to our blog? I want to unsubscribe them as well but I can’t find any clue which subscriber that stole my content.
I would love to hear from you if you have any news or solution for this problem..
Thanks for the link as well I learn from your post too.
[Reply]
I just had the same thing happen to my blog. This jerk had the nerve to copy and paste my text and post it on their own blog. The post copied was about viral linking strategies, and couldn’t even come up with their own text. Fortunately I have Google Alerts set up, and that’s how I discovered it.
The jerk in question has since deleted the post, but there’s no telling how many other posts have been stolen. I’ve found it happens quite often with non-English blogs, where the blogger copies English text and translates it over to their own language, but still has links to the original blog.
I posted about it, and informed the Google Complaint Department about the offending post, and Google replied very promptly that they were looking into it.
[Reply]