In late October I discovered that someone was plagiarising my blog posts on a website, reason unknown. The website looked to have dozens of others’ contents, presumably to game Google’s page-ranks or somesuch.
I could have shrugged. Seriously, how do you fight that shit?
I sent him an invoice.
I’m handy with a computer. I know how to run an IP lookup. I know how to find out who a domain is registered to. These aren’t difficult things to do.
That was three weeks ago. To date, I’ve heard nothing from the scraper.
Even if you run a blog on LiveJournal or Blogger or another service, content scraping can happen. This essay by Lorelle, a WordPress guru, runs down several ways of dealing with the problem. I’m not sure that it’s possible to be proactive to prevent it, but once it happens there are ways to handle it.
Billing the thief? Not something Lorelle suggests, though she does offer that as an option in an e-mail she quotes from. 🙂
If you want me to take a look at the case, feel free to drop me a line! I’ve shut down some 600+ plagiarists so I can probably at least give you an idea of where to go with this one.
Just let me know if I can help in any way!
I’ll keep the offer in mind, Jonathan. Thanks! 🙂
Thanks for this, Allyn. It happened to me recently, an entire post lifted and copied into a blog that had no apparent reason to use the content they took. (I’d show the link but I don’t want to gratify them with the traffic.)
I posted a comment notifying them that I had a copyright permission clause on my page, and haven’t heard back from them. The link you’ve provided helped me understand more of what’s going on when this happens, and what to do about it. I appreciate it.