Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Don't Be Fooled By Imitations


So it was recently brought to my attention that someone out there has been copying all my posts for their website. They've been stealing--yes, stealing--since February 11th. I won't link to that site because I don't want to encourage them. And I don't want to improve their technorati score by any means! I don't think technorati is smart enough to discern those weasel-ey sites from the real deals. I can only hope that the site has zero readers and will become discouraged sooner rather than later when it comes to outright theft. The caption for the site says, "if it's worth reading, we've written it." Which is mind-boggling to me. The capacity of some people, some individuals. I don't know if you've ever had this happen to you or not. I'd love to hear from you if you've been in this position. What have you done? What can be done? What should be done? If you've got tips and advice, I'd love to hear from you!

© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

23 comments:

Julie P. said...

That's just unbelievable! I hope it works out for you!

Douglas Florian said...

Now you know how it feels to have your entire book scanned and posted on the internet for anybody to see in its entirety free of charge. Google did it to 7 million books including many of mine until the Author's Guild sued them!
douglas

Ana S. said...

Oh wow. Some people are just such losers. I'm sorry you have to deal with that, Becky :/ I don't know what can be done, but I hope there IS something!

Anonymous said...

I would contact their service provider or the web service hosting their site, and tell them that you're happy to provide proof of plagiarism. I guess first, though, I would contact the person and tell them that if they don't pull the posts you will take this further action -- give them a chance to pull the posts first.

Scummy people out there.

Anonymous said...

Definitely contact their web host! How awful and intrusive.

Lenore Appelhans said...

Wow. That's awful. I tried to find this evildoer via google, but no dice.

Zibilee said...

I am so sorry this is happening to you. How crappy! I am doubly irritated by the quote. I hope that something can be done for you.

Shelley said...

I don't even understand what would motivate someone to do that. It sounds like you've gotten some good suggestions.

Jill said...

That is infuriating, Becky! I hope they take down the plagiarized material quickly and desist. I'm sorry to hear you have to deal with this. :-(

Anonymous said...

I should have sent you this link when I emailed you earlier about it (I found it because one of your posts - well, their posts - pingbacked to my blog):

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/08/how-to-defend-your-blogs-copyright/

That article was just written this month and is the best piece of advice on what type of action you need to take.

Anonymous said...

Oh. They don't seem to have ANY readers. There alexa ranking is 20,961,873 which is pretty pathetic. And now this post is on their front page!

Becky said...

Thanks, Natasha! You really have no idea how thankful I am that you brought it to my attention. And thanks for sharing the link. I think that may prove very useful.

And thanks to everyone else for being so supportive!

bermudaonion said...

I'm sorry that you're having to go through this.

Stephanie said...

Holy cow!!! *faints* I can't believe the level of crap-bag-ness that exists in some people! So sorry you have to deal with this kind of garbage. :(

Laura H said...

There can only be one Becky , the rest are just posers.

Anna said...

That's just awful, and it makes me really mad! I hope it gets taken care of soon.

--Anna
Diary of an Eccentric

Cheryl Vanatti said...

I saw this is the kidlitosphere Yahoo group before checking my feeds. Even reading it a second time makes me shocked and angry.

Please keep us posted. Hopefully it'll be taken care of quickly!

Serena said...

I agree, contact the site owner and have them pull the posts. If that doesn't work contact the service provider with your evidence and they should help you get those posts pulled or the site shutdown.

Kailana said...

That's crazy! I hope you can do something to resolve the issue!

Chris said...

Splogging is, unfortunately, not as uncommon as it should be. Do you provide your full post in your RSS/Atom feeds? That's usually how sploggers pick up your content. Going to brief feeds generally helps.

I have a non-WordPress hosted WP blog and there are different plugins that make content theft less tempting. I use one that appends "this is stolen content if you aren't reading it from my site or my feed" to my brief feed.

KT Grant said...

Have you emailed the person who is stealing? That is so , so wrong what they are doing.

Carolyn Crane said...

This might be sort of high-level, but here's an article on stopping people who scrape stuff from your blog:

http://seoblackhat.com/2006/07/14/ip-delivery-to-stop-rss-content-thieves/

Melissa said...

That's horrid. Here's crossing my fingers that you can figure out how to fix it...