Through a quick scan of Stat Counter I discovered a new food blog that simply copied the source code for my site and is using my custom template. Everything is the same. They didn't even bother to take the designer's name out of the code.
I wouldn't be so bothered if this was a generic template available through Blogger, Typepad, or Wordpress. But this was a custom, hand coded template. It wouldn't have even bothered me if they borrowed a few lines of code. But the whole damn site!?! What really gets me is that it is for another food blog. Audacity!
Any thoughts? Am I taking it just a little too personally? Has this happened to anyone else?
This Post was written by Jennifer from Taste Everything Once.
14 comments:
Another theft. A blog purporting to be about "women's issues" is stealing and reprinting complete unchanged posts and photos from my blog,apparently directly from the feed, and also from the blogs of many others, listing us as contributing to their blog! They have not yet removed my material despite being told to do so several times.
Some other victims are also food blogs, but other types of blogs are also being raided. They have even pilfered our categories, and have space to leave comments to the pilfered posts!
They have no original content I can find-except a couple of snarky remarks to the numerous complaints posted by blogger victims. (example: "Excuse me for liking your blog!"). I hate to leave the name of the thing, as I don't want to send them traffic, since they are selling advertising!
Aaaargh.
If they're using Pay Per Click advertising like Google's AdSense they'll only make money off the visitors if someone clicks. Hopefully those of us here who might want to go visit and see what they're stealing would be smart enough not to click on an ad while there and contribute to their income! For those that might want to check and see who's lifting their content, try http:CopyScape.com. You can enter an URL and it will report copies.
OK. The copiers are at http://www.allwomenstalk.com. They do not show up as copying my blog on copyscape-despite taking entire posts-perhaps because they are copying so many different blogs?
Here's the registry info:
Registrant:
vyacheslav kaushan
obolonskiy
kiev, kiev 04205
Ukraine
Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: ALLWOMENSTALK.COM
Created on: 15-Aug-05
Expires on: 15-Aug-07
Last Updated on: 15-Aug-05
Administrative Contact:
kaushan, vyacheslav vyacheslav@kaushan.com
obolonskiy
kiev, kiev 04205
Ukraine
+380675034556
Technical Contact:
kaushan, vyacheslav vyacheslav@kaushan.com
obolonskiy
kiev, kiev 04205
Ukraine
+380675034556
Domain servers in listed order:
DNS11.3FN.NET
NS2.3FN.NET
***
Next step: contact GoDaddy and let them know of the theft. They may not do anything, but then again, they could be decent about it and shut down this slimeball's domain.
Jen, that totally sucks. We all ork so hard to maintain and update our sites, it burns me to no end. Tonight I found someone stole my About Me text, of all things... you can see my site (and a new post at FBS) for details - it's wrong, just plain wrong.
Maybe I'm missing something...I found part of a recent post of mine on the allwomenstalk site (picture and the first couple of paragraphs)but the recipe itself (which in my blog is always in an extension) was not included...instead, there was a note saying "Those with watering mouth can switch to [link to Stephencooks.com] for the rest of the entry and the recipe that goes with it! Bon appetit!" To me that seems like free advertising for my site, like any link or positive reference to my site anywhere on the net. But since everyone's up in arms about allwomenstalk, there must be something I don't understand about the situation -- which wouldn't be surprising since while I can cook and take pictures I don't know much about tech stuff and blogging issues...
Can someone please explain this to me...?
Stephen and all-They have apparently changed to this more acceptable behavior after being informed by numerous offended bloggers that "quote briefly and link" was the way to do it right!Hopefully they have eliminated all the complete ripped-off posts they had on before.
Yes, they seem to have changed behavior rapidly--which is good. Maybe they just didn't know proper protocol?
OK - let's get into the down and dirty a bit here.
All of this kind of behaviour is enabled by two things. The first is RSS. They are grabbing a bunch of RSS feeds, amalgamating them (either programatically or manually) and then republishing them on a site. The second thing is that the site is loaded up to maximize its ease-of-search by Google and to maximize the number of Google Adwords ads and clicks it generates.
While this is new to food blogging it has been going on in the higher revenue (gadgets and tech) parts of the blogging world for a while.
There are two versions - the one where they take everything and the one where they 'quote'. But what they are really doing is very cheaply and effectively creating revenue out of other people's content - and the only reason they can do this is because of Google. It has recently become a huge issue in publishing and there are lawsuits in Europe that may ban Google from indexing european websites.
There is little that can be done with the ones who 'quote' - it is essentially legal (or only illegal in the sense that it would take a several million dollar lawsuit to successfully take on someone about it). The full text ones you should be able to get their hosting provider to shut them down - that too takes time but does work in at least some cases.
The only other technique is to make your site unfriendly to scraping. Set your RSS feed up so that it only gives away headlines and a teaser text. Hide content behind 'click to read the rest' buttons. Etc. The best way is to make the content teasers so good and the underlying content so good that all this site does is make lots more people come through to your site.
My new job is to do with internet publishing, lead generation, search engine optimization and more and I know now a LOT more than I once did about this stuff - for example, did you know that Google will not consider an original content site as a news site unless the URLs have numbers of at least four digits as part of the URL? Makes no sense but true all the same.
The underlying principles are still true. You own your content unless you give away or sell ownership. Good content will always win out in the long run. That's it.
Owen...thanks for sharing your understanding of this issue with those of us less well-educated. Now I'm wondering if the "reader" who emailed me to ask me to enable full text feeds instead of the excerpts I had been allowing was in fact looking to scrape the site. I think I'll switch it back and see how that goes for a while....
I am another person tht was hit, I think part of the problem is that they were trying to claim copyright over the work that was posted on the blog.
I know alot of the other bloggers were upset that they were attempting to make money off their work without permission
I am another person tht was hit, I think part of the problem is that they were trying to claim copyright over the work that was posted on the blog.
I know alot of the other bloggers were upset that they were attempting to make money off their work without permission
what are you talking about?
don't you use text of others ? or maybe you all bring out of your empty head ? maybe you are "fair" blogger pays for photos ? and mark every text of other you use ? actually all you are using in your language is words of others
if you so afraid of being coppied - shut down your site and show it on your own computer to your friends at home with closed doors (to be sure)
google/digg/dmoz/bloglines/.... all of them make money on your content and will be doing this as long as you will try to use all this system for your desire to be popular and rich just for you (often shitty) writing
if you have any problem with "using your content" just write to admin of site and all your bullshit will be blown out the site in few hours and you lost links to your site and readers who can be your long term readers and fans
fell free yo use contact form on site
Vyacheslav Kaushan / http://alwomenstalk.com
to Blog Owner:
please remove comment with my personal data from comments thread - it's just not a place to publish my contact information
Anyone can publish all personal data of everyone who is in this discussion on other places and - I don't think any of you will be happy of that - right ?
thank you!
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