underXposed

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A brief excerpt of content may be quoted as long as a link is provided back to the source page on this blog.

Disclaimer

I am the creator of this weblog and my views of five years or five minutes ago do not necessarily reflect my views right now. My thoughts, opinions and viewpoints will change as I learn more and develop my understanding of the things I am blogging about. I consider this a necessary consequence of having an open mind. Therefore, I reserve the right to allow my viewpoints to evolve and to change my thoughts, viewpoints and opinions over time without assigning any reason for such changes.

My quotations within this weblog are intended to be used under a policy of personal use. The use of any Trademark or Copyrighted material is not intended to infringe copyright. If you see anything on this weblog that has not been properly attributed to its creator please advise me in the comment box below and I will immediately rectify that.

All material on this website is posted in accordance with the limitations set forward by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If a documented copyright owner so requests, their material will be removed from published display, although the Author reserves the right to provide linkage to that material or to a source for that material.

Fair Use Notice

This website may at times present copyrighted material, the use of which might not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available in an effort to advance understandings of democratic, economic, environmental, human rights, political, scientific, and social justice issues, among others. The author believes that this constitutes a “fair use” of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U. S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the articles published on this website are distributed without profit for research and educational purposes.

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Copyright Abuse Notice

Don’t get me wrong. First of all, I totally support anti-copyright Creative Commons for non-commercial use. (The debate continues.)

The Internet is still wonderfully wild and free for a large part of the planet. I don’t want to lose that wildness and freedom. But there is an increasing surge of laziness and greed going on out there. What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the greedy sploggers out there who scrape the entire blog post off your page, usually through feed aggregators. They may or may not include your user name, may or may not link back to your sit. It’s kind of the reverse of spam. Instead of dumping crap in your comment box, they scrape entire posts from your blog.

They do this for one purpose only: To make money from companies like Google Adsense who hire them to add blog content. These sploggers aren’t just scraping your site. They’re probably scraping scores, hundreds, even thousands of other sites for profit.

Copying and pasting content from other blogs or sites to reference a point is part of our Creative Commons. It’s what makes the Internet community so vital. Credit and links are appreciated, but not imperative. I myself grab blocks of quotes from other sites, but I never grab the entire post, and I always site the link. This is “fair use.” (See, for example, Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act page.)

The point is, “fair use” doesn’t include getting paid by Google AdSense or any other mean using other people’s content for profit when these thieves are too lazy and greedy to write their own content.

You will know if you’re being ripped off for someone else’s profit only if you can access an “incoming links” feature on your web host site (such as WordPress).

If you discover you’re being ripped off, there are several things you can do to discourage these scrapers or have their sites removed completely.

1. You can do a Whois lookup and domain search. If you contact the domain, sometimes there’s a website or email to contact and report abuse. Something like this:

http://www.worldispnetwork.com/
“To report any network abuse or spams originating from our network please email abuse@worldispnetwork.com”

2. Use a search engine and type in some identifying word or words from the scraping site. For example, I took words from the URL http://my.zestead.com/austindwilawyer/ and did a search for Austin DWI Lawyer and got this

Site name: Austin DWI Lawyer & Attorney

Jamie Spencer Law Firm Serving Travis, Williamson, and Hays County
Site owned by Jamie Spencer
URL: http://dwi.austindefense.com/
IP address: 66.219.43.92
Domain servers: NS.BNSERVE.COM, NS2.BNSERVE.COM
Owner email: jamie@austindefense.com
Registrant address:
Law Office of Jamie Spencer PC
1604 San Antonio Street
Austin, Texas 78701
United States

Phone: 512-472-9909      Fax: 512-472-9908

You can’t be certain that you’ve found the splogger, but if you can access a comment box or email, you can send a polite query. That way, you may be alerting the splogger him/herself or you may be alerting a domain of involvement in copyright violation. Either way, you’ve found a portal.

3. You can include a copyright notice at the top of each of your posts..

4. You can read Timethief’s wonderful tips page: Splog Off! Dealing with Content Theft

5. A WordPress blogger has begun a whistleblowing site called Stolen Content, which is a great database of information.

6. You can check out PlagiarismToday which offers handy sample Stock Letters for reporting abuse.

Regarding alleged infringement: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act  provides information at the U.S. Copyright Office website: http://www.copyright.gov/ including a stock complaint letter which you can fill out and send if you think your copyright has been violated.

July 9, 2008 Update: The splogger my.zestead.com/austindwilawyer has been removed. Another down, another trillion to go.

There’s a wonderful publication out there that says it all

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore.