A recent article on CNet, featuring Lorelle Vanfossen entitled, Please Don’t Steal This Web Content, describes the ever growing problem bloggers are facing with having their blog content scraped. According to Lorelle, scrapers are now targeting WordPress.com blogs.
Lorelle has a post “WordPress.com Blogs Feeds Scraped,” where she tells bloggers how to respond if their WordPress.com blog content is being used in violation of their copyright policy.
I recently had a blogger whose blog was hosted at Wordpress.com publish one of my reprint articles. The blogger removed my byline. They did not just do this to me, but several authors.
There was no contact information on the blog, so I politely left a comment requesting that they add my byline back to the article or remove my article. The blogger deleted my comment and ignored my request.
I sent a DMC request to Wordpress and was pleased how quickly Wordpress staff handled the issue. Within a day the offending parties blog was suspended.
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5 responses so far ↓
Wrote: Aug 10, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I would put my website address and contact info in the middle of every article and comment…. Then, the scraping would work for your advantage
Wrote: Aug 10, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Carl, I’m actually using the Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter, which inserts copyright messages into Feeds. Hmm, maybe I should insert my address in there too.
Either way I don’t want sploggers making money from my content.
In my case recently, my content was not scraped, but used from an article directory and my byline was removed.
Wrote: Aug 10, 2007 at 10:06 pm
I agree. But, unfortunately, people are going to scrape content no matter what. So.. it’s best to be able to fight back and get a little piece of the action.
Wrote: Aug 12, 2007 at 4:10 pm
I was not aware of “scraping”, I’ve always just called it stealing.. but I had no idea they had bots to do it. What’s the point? Of course they are getting “free” content, but in addition to wrecking your search engine listings they are wrecking their own… and if they are so lazy they can’t even produce content, how are they getting visitors to their scraped content blogs?
Wrote: Aug 12, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I had a blogger on wordpress.com steal my content a while back, change a few of the links and get it on the digg homepage! Lucky for me someone tipped me off and within an hour it was removed from digg and their wordpress.com blog was removed as well.