(Don’t) Steal My Content

The New York Times published an article recently called “Please Don’t Steal This Web Content.” It’s another random story about how low-life scumbags are ruining the Internet in order to generate ad revenues. That is, until it happened to me.

In addition to this blog here at InfoWorld, I also have an earlier blog I created called www.theopenforce.com (now somewhat neglected) as well as a blog on music and guitars called www.guitarvibe.com, and a satirical web site called www.valleyofthegeeks.com (no longer active). I also occasional write articles about disruptive technology published on my brother’s site www.ondisruption.com. Over the years, I have written hundreds of blog entries and another hundred technical articles for various print publications ranging from Byte to Microsoft Systems Journal. While I’ve never made much money off my writing, I still have an author’s pride. So I was somewhat shocked when I accidentally stumbled across a site that had hijacked articles I’d written at www.guitarvibe.com.

It was an eery accidental discovery. I was doing a follow-up article on a rather obscure guitar, and noticed that one of my blog entries was near the top of the Google search results page. The odd thing was, it wasn’t on my site, but on another site I’d never heard of. I recognized the fragment of text as my own writing and then clicked through to see where I was being quoted. The problem was, I wasn’t being quoted. The entire article, along with two dozen others I had written, had been scraped directly from my site and published along with the works of several other bloggers. All of this was done without anyone’s consent and in direct violation of copyright law. Note, this wasn’t accidental or an excerpt being used in accordance with the doctrine of “fair use.”

Why steal blog content? Well, if you want to put up a Google ad farm quickly without all the bother of writing, you can easily find tools that keep your site up-to-date with the latest content that some other poor slob has written.

So what do you do when this happens? First of all, you should protect your own content with explicit copyright notices. Secondly, contact the owner of the site, letting them know of the violation and demanding that it be corrected within 5 days. Finally, if that doesn’t work, I recommend contacting the ISP and/or Google to let them know the user is in violation of copyright law. Typically such copright theft is not tolerated by ISPs or Google and they’ll remove the offender immediately. There’s a great article by Lorelle on WordPress called “What to do when someone steals your content” that is also cited in the NY Times article.

In my case, the offender (whom I won’t dignify with a link) removed the content within a few hours. But now I know to keep a watchful eye on things. If you’re blogging, maybe you should too.