It looks like our efforts to get Google to take action against that thieving “blogger” in China have paid off. I was going to set up a fax to Google HQ with all the legalese necessary as outlined in Lorelle’s very helpful comment here, but as I see on the site, the Adsense ads are already gone.
Whoot!
I’d break out champagne, but it doesn’t go well with morning coffee, and besides: the stolen writing and photos from dozens of wordpress.com bloggers are still there.
I’m going to bookmark that comment for quick and easy reference for the next time this happens. Thank you Lorelle!
Next question: what to do about scrapers and slimers who steal your stuff but don’t use Google Adsense? My previous post asking for help in the fight against the Chinese thief was stolen by another thief called Buy it or DIE who uses something called Bliggo.
How stupid can these thieves be, anyway? They obviously don’t care whether anyone reads the site or not. My comment asking Steal it and DIE to take down my material is still there.
© 2007 lettershometoyou
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Reading your post carefully and thinking some more, I want to add this.
I think these thieves may simply be using automatic computer programs to steal contents. I don’t think they actually “read” the content. In fact, I think they are simply playing the numbers game by stealing a lot and all over the place.
Just my 2 cents.
kempton,
you’re right that there are a lot of automated splogs and scrapers that just harvest without looking.
though i think that thief in china was careful to delete the copyright symbol in my post. whether that was done automatically or by wetware is anybody’s guess.
Hi. I hadn’t checked your blog while you were soliciting help on pulling the ads, so thanks for sticking with this.
I thought about writing you with an idea I had for dealing with blog thieves. I wouldn’t have time to take it on sola, but maybe with a few others it could work. But then they stopped stealing our pieces, too. We’ll see what happens.
hey where’s your fuelmyblog widget? am I suffering from domestic blindness?
hi good nurse,
your eyesight is still 20-20.
i went for nearly a month with zero clicks on it, so while doing the sidebar shuffle i decided to let it drop. no reflection on the community at all.
It’s truly unfortunate that wordpress.com rss feeds do not have a copyright on them. On wordpress.org blogs a plugin for this is available. As well one can have a digital fingerprint to verify their authorship of any “lifted” material. And to get the commenter’s real IP address, there is get Check IP Behind Proxy.
These tools are of course not going to stop the thieves from their “liftg” but what they do offer is a way and means to state your copyright, locate stolen blog content, and to find the “who” lurking in the dark places behind proxies.
The only way these could be used at wordpress.com is to install them across the whole blogging platform. See this forum post for more.
hi timethief,
you make that plain in your forum post there, but is anyone at wordpress.com reading? the more i look, the more i see this problem growing. i’ve had a small victory here, but how long ’til the next battle?