Keep Your Sticky Fingers Off My Content!
June 6, 2008 12:43 pm Social Media
Bloggers spend a lot of time coming up with ideas, authoring posts and contributing to the discussions that occur after publishing. Understandably, they are often disappointed to find their original content copied onto other blogs sans attribution or links. Their hard work and intellectual property has been ripped off by some random person attempting to make money from the advertising on their own site. Content theft can be hard to track, control or manage.
Finding Out I’d Been Jacked
This has actually happened to me many times. Each time I’ve found it was by pure coincidence. The latest incident was discovered yesterday. While checking my Google Analytics, I noticed that one of the popular keywords used was “Derek Onstott.” I decided to search for the keywords on Google to see if my post was visible in the results page. My blog was number 7 on Google for that keyword. I glance at the 8th result and what did I find? The first two lines in that description were a carbon copy of my own content.
What attracted my attention was that the URL to this blog was not mine. It was directed to Inter Alia. I open the link and realize that this individual scraped my post about the restaurant owner who threatened a Yelp reviewer. He did not even credit the scraped content to me. I found no link or mention of the original author of this specific post.
In the interest of comparing the content, the Yelp image in the scraped blog post was removed.
The Community Gets Out Their Pitchforks and Torches
I shared my frustrations with Joe Fowler. Within minutes, he wrote two comments on that blog encouraging the blogger to remove the post immediately. I later found that Joe launched a massive campaign against this blogger on my behalf. I looked at the comments and noticed 15 of them from the community. The following morning, he submitted the scraper’s info to Mixx and Digg encouraging the community to comment and flag the site. The comments that followed were extremely supportive.
This should be a lesson to all those who scrape content. Although there are bloggers who don’t have a strong community supporting them, some will report content thieves to the appropriate outlets. There are other bloggers who have a significant following. The mantra for those people is: “you mess with me, you mess with the community.” They will rally together and turn against content thieves. Although the scraper’s blog might get traffic, it won’t be the good kind. The community will work on blocking the site, writing evil comments, and getting scrapers banned in every social network in which they are active. In short, it is best to stick to original content.
Should you come across a compelling post written by someone else, and you simply must post on your own blog, you can do so while avoiding the content theft scenario. Credit the source through a link and an intro saying “This was written by <Name> on <Blog>.” It is also easy to e-mail the original content creator and let them know you enjoyed their post. You can request that you republish their post on your blog. Of course, you would need to include that you will add a link to their blog and credit them.
How to Protect Yourself
Great resources about what to do when someone steals your content:
10 Ways to Fight Content Thieves
Take it Back! 100 Tips to Defeat Content Thieves
What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
In the comments section, please share your worst experiences with scraping and how you dealt with the situation.
Thanks to 2 Create a Website Blog and Honest_Ape for the images.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
That is so insanely wrong. I hope there are special places in hell set aside for content thieves like that.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Best thing to do to combat scraping
is to link to yourself within the first paragraph. That way whenever someone scrapes you, you get a trackback ping in your email
and you can go screw them.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Ha, Inter Alia… that’ll learn ya real good!
June 6th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
i’ve not been scraped that i know of, perhaps never did anything worth scraping? anyway. i got to thinking it would be nice to have a service that would do such searches. i found http://www.copyscape.com/ and that looked interesting, but am at work and haven’t had time to play with it.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
… anyway had to hit submit real quick, i’m stealth-commenting. as i was saying, i think it’s important to be proactive about this, especially considering how much work and talent you put into this blog. i think it’s probably a prime target for people who are dishonest, lazy, and evil to steal, and i think catching these parasites and squishing them is a good thing.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Awe, don’t link to their site! You’ll only give them more traffic! There must be another way to get them to take it down or press charges.
As a consumer, I hate reading scraped material. I always want to know who actually wrote it. I guess it’s better if they actually give a link to the original site, but I’m not sure.
Either think of your own content or get off the freakin internet!
June 6th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I’ve had the same thing happen to me a few times… I just continually drop comments on them with links to random articles, like the “Definition of Plagiarism” on wikipedia.
That’s always fun. Especially since they have to go and erase them… but I grow bored with doing that after a few weeks.
I don’t really know what you can do, other than flag them. Hopefully enough people flagged these guys, that google will notice and take them out of the search-index.
But, my favorite part of this article, is the fact that you went out of your way to add a NoFollow link to that site, when the rest are DoFollow…. now that’s just classic!
June 6th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
@calinazaret but the best response to this does involve having to link or publicize the theft, to as many people as possible. sure, you do bump up his traffic but sending over an angry mob is often a very good way of bringing consequences to a thief.
and the “nofollow” tag (as Jeff pointed out) is a good way to insure no benefit comes from the linking. gotta send the mob over there somehow, and the more people report violations (to blogger and google) the better the chance of taking the asshole down.
June 6th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
On my old blog, monkeypup.com (don’t look, it ain’t there anymore), I had about 1,000 hits a day, which I guess made me popular enough to steal. I had a guy who reprinted each and every one of my posts. I finally found a way to foil him through the use of a wordpress plugin called Anti-Leech.
It takes your content that is stolen by scrapers or splogs and replaces it with whatever nonsense shit you want. Mine was:
“Hey, you reading this! You’re seeing this message because the shithead who runs this blog steals shit from people like me. He’s a fucking moron and likely has sexually transmitted diseases. He may also be a pedophile.”
It was something like that, anyway. And it worked like a charm. He stopped doing it right quick.
Anyway, Reem, you know we’ll always have your back!
June 6th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
D’oh! Here’s the link I meant to add.
http://redalt.com/Resources/Plugins/AntiLeech
June 6th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I add as many url references as I can without ruining the user experience. Some take the time to rip my content and pull urls since I’m one of the few in my industry creating original stuff. For those that don’t I like creating posts that make them look silly, by embedding content that’s totally useless and marked as spammer bait.
June 6th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I had fun with a scraper once. Click on my website link on this comment. It will take you to a carbon copy of my own blog posts. However, read the first paragraph - this thief scraped it exactly as it is and left the embarrassing comment in…
June 6th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Reem
I’ve never posted any of your items, but there are others I follow on Twitter that I have. I believe I follow the Rule of Attributing - Trademark that one.
I’m still pretty new to this W2.0 world, even though I started that blog almost 2 years ago. In the past couple of months I’ve rediscovered W2.0 and the whole internet. I’m having more fun with it, than I’ve had in 5-6 years.
Mike
June 6th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
This happened to me recently and I was surprised because it was a pretty well known site. My guess is they have no idea what one of their bloggers did. On other blogs I’ve had content scraped a lot - with one it got to be pointless even trying to keep up. I always seem to find it randomly, too, or a reader will find it. Pathetic!
June 6th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Wow, I’ve had the same thing happen to me but I never thought about leveraging so much social media force in retaliation. Nice work!
June 6th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Similar thing happened to me in April (in terms of how I found out about it) - but in my case someone plagiarized a paragraph of mine. The kicker was that the article was published on MSN India - not exactly a scraper blog. If you do a search on [MSN India plagiarism] it pulls up what happened afterwards.
(I accidentally deleted the comments during my recent WP migration, but the fall-out was that a prominent Indian blogger/podcaster contacted a higher-up at MSN India and held their feet to the fire. She and I both blogged about it and MSN India had a little egg on their face - probably the most I could have asked for in this instance.)
June 6th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I decided to hit more than one of his trashy blog items with this:
Dude, do you think you messed up when you “borrowed” Reem Abeidoh’s Blog Restaurateur Tries To Censor Yelp Review: EPIC FAIL.
Obviously not, because you haven’t taken it down yet!
Do that Now! or ….
Spam, thief, jackass, plagiary, Rat, dipshit, jerkoff
Hoping those keywords will hit him.
Mike
June 6th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
This totally sucks but you gotta love Joe. He’s always on the right side of the fight!
June 7th, 2008 at 1:18 am
Keep Your Sticky Fingers Off My Content! | nerdd.net…
\r\nThis should be a lesson to all those who scrape content. Although there are bloggers who dont ha…
June 7th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Recently a friend of mine made a reference of some financial news from CNN Money, but forgot to credit them, you know what… a CNN Money editor or representative made her a direct phone call, I was with her when the receptionist told my friend that the call was from CNN and we freaked out, what the hell…. Thanks God, the man, a polite person only said two things, that she didn’t request permission to reprint part of the article and that she didn’t credit CNN Money.
We thought they were to suit her, but the man said that CNN Money urgently needed her to credit the reference….
Lesson: My friend realized that she made a big mistake and apologized to CNN, but in the end CNN got what they need (a credit and a link to the source), nobody lose an arm and nobody got suit. Of course this situation won’t ever happen again, she promised to herself.
I prefer to let everybody takes my content if it is credited in the end is very difficult to start hunting scrapers. I use a Creative Commons approach.
June 7th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I had a similar situation to newone above, only it was the big guy using my material inadvertantly. I have a trade blog for the scrapbook industry and apparently a print journal was circulating something I wrote via email in their offices as “an issue we should keep an eye on.” Well, somehow, my entry ended up word for word as a news blurb in their magazine! (It was only a couple of short paragraphs.)
Since I’m a subscriber to the magazine, I happened to notice “hey, that looks kind of familiar…” I contacted the magazine and they were very apologetic and we worked out compensation for the piece. They also printed a correction attributing it to me.
Fortunately I had previous contact with this staff and was on good terms with them…that helped.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
We have been victims to content theft as well. You just inspired me to compose this ’solution’.