Stolen!
We take a break from our usual troll through the filings to talk about someone who is stealing content from a number of the top business bloggers, including this site as well as The Big Picture, Random Roger, Trader Mike, Jack Ciesielski and even Eric Savitz of Barron’s. Many of us have already sent cease and desist letters to the person operating this spam blog or splog and not so surprisingly, have received no response to our multiple emails and requests to stop stealing our content.
Rather than give you the name of the site doing the stealing, which would only serve to drive up their traffic, which judging by a quick skim of the person’s Technorati profile is minuscule, I would encourage you to contact Google (GOOG) AdWords, since this splogger is stealing all of our content to generate revenue via Google’s popular AdWords site. You can also contact his hosting company Host Monster and tell them to take the site down.
Trust me — I’d much rather be digging through SEC filings than dealing with rip-off artists looking to make a quick buck off of all of our hard work. But this type of thing is unacceptable and needs to stop. And since the person perpetrating the crime refuses to respond, the only thing to do is bring public attention to it.
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 8 Comments » |
December 21st, 2006 at 12:26 pm
How about having a mass ad clicking on one of the splog sites? That way the adsense account would be flagged for click fraud as the click through rates go through the roof and they will be banned forever. You can’t stop splogs, but you can take away their revenue.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Gotta be careful contacting anything like Host
Monster. Who knows what they do w/ email addy.
Did contact Google. See David’s Circuits today.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/
The Netiquette Diaries
Last week, I wrote in this weekly e-column that the nastiness online seems to be intensifying. If Digg, Slashdot and my own blog are any indication, there.s less and less meaningful discussion, and more and more jerkiness and backstabbing.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Love this site, but good luck getting anyone at Google to do anything. They’re fully aware of splogs, and splogs are reponsible for a huge portion of their revenues. In fact, they own tons of squatted URLs specifically so they can get unearned revenue of their own.
This is part of their business model.
Nothing evil about profiting off the work of others. Just ask them.
December 21st, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Believe it or not, the splogger actually copied my post about him stealing our content verbatim and posted it, which leads me to believe that it’s an automatic feed. Grrrr…..The site was just taken down at 5:55 pm eastern by the host company. Thanks to everyone who helped in this effort.
December 21st, 2006 at 11:12 pm
I’m glad you got the material taken down.
In general, I believe the magic words are “DMCA takedown request” which requires service providers to remove infringing material upon written request. Stop dealing with the owner and go after the ISP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCILLA
Good luck
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:15 am
Thank you for the heads up. GOOG is pretty good about this so let’s hope they take care of it quickly.
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:17 am
Here’s what I have to say about that:
I’m glad you got the material taken down.
In general, I believe the magic words are “DMCA takedown request†which requires service providers to remove infringing material upon written request. Stop dealing with the owner and go after the ISP.
LOL
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
As a final postscript, here is the letter that I received from the owner of the site in question. I will note that I only received this after a DCMA request went out. It’s also pretty clear why this person needed to steal content from all of us — his writing skills are a bit lacking, to say the least:
Michelle
I am the person you have been trying to contact. Apparently the email address on the site is not set properly because I have never received one email from you and I am sorry If you feel as though I was just ignoring you. I always remove sites that do not want to be included when they request or ask. I will remove you from the pool immediately and you will not need to worry about your feed being republished on the site. Now each and every one of your republished feeds has a link back to your site with attribution to you and your site. You state that is does not provide attribution in your claim, regardless I do not want to step on your toes in any way. If you want me to remove all past post I will be happy to do this, if you want me to leave them up for the SEO (as little as it provides to you at this point) I will do that as well.
If you are worried about me profiting on your work, I will tell you I make less in PPC and affiliates than the cost of the domain name. Well that was true until today, when I noticed actually gaining any CTR’s on that site. I found it strange until I received the DMCA notice and saw your thread that must have gained me traffic. Like I said before I really do not want to make enemies and most bloggers do not mind the links. Of course I wait to be contacted from those that are unhappy and that didn’t work in this case because of an over site of mine.
You also mentioned some others that were trying to get in touch with me to have their site removed. If you could please forward this email to them so they can contact me to have their sites removed as well, it would be appreciated.
Again I am sorry I caused you this inconvenience, It is never my intent to keep re-publishing peoples feeds when they do not want them re-published.
–
Raymond Jenkins