Saturday, December 29, 2007

Blog Thief !

This is so pathetic that I almost didn't write about it. But since it is clearly not only me who this is happening to, I decided to share. Some goof ball with a European web address on WordPress is stealing my writing and photos, possibly yours too. There are entire posts from my blog that this person has lifted and copied on their site. No permission, no credit given, nothing. Pretty lame, right?

I hesitate to share the URL because I obviously don't want to generate traffic to the site, but if you have a wine or food blog, check this out - they are simply stealing lots of people's work and passing it off as their own.

Any ideas on what to do here?

Thanks to Jeff at Indiscriminate Ideas for pointing this out to me.

11 comments:

musiklvr said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Jeff said...

I also found a case where another blog was copying a post from Dr. Debs at Good Wine Under $20 - http://goodwineunder20.blogspot.com/

RougeAndBlanc said...

Holy crap, that is awful. Judging from the contents and the way they are posted. Whoever created this blog is site scrapping other food/wine blogs and performs an auto-post with ton of advertising spam.
The ip for Maxblog.eu is owned by eurodns.com and it info is here:
http://www2.whois.eu/public/whois/GetWhois.htm;jsessionid=C723926A52DEDC09D175803B051A2B68
Neil – You may want to contact Jeff and other blog owners to petition eurodns.com to ban this site due to its fraudulent nature.
However, sites that dedicate themselves to spam are a dime a dozen these days. I can guarantee that even if this site is banned, there will be others spring up in the near future doing exactly the same thing.
One note to bear in mind: Domain names with .eu are generally not highly regarded by the therefore a lot of shady business may park there domains there.

Marcus said...

eu.

A suitable domain name. I've seen this kind of thing before with my stuff too so I'm not clicking on it.

Some of these pages spawn pop-ups that encourage the download suspicious software.

peter said...

There is a "report abuse" button at the bottom of the page that sends an email to admin@... It might make a difference, or it might not. Lame.

The Fashionable Kiffen said...

If you want to get really serious, you can follow this advice:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/

Might end up being more trouble than it is worth though.

Brooklynguy said...

thanks so much for your helpful and supportive comments, and nice to "meet" you kitten - welcome to the site. i'm still trying to decide what, if anything to do. i kind of realized the other day that maybe i just don't care...

Anonymous said...

This kind of thing is all over the internet. A good friend of mine who has been blogging for ages (I call him the blogfather) has battled with this for years. If they at least give him a link, he'll ignore it but an outright theft like this should be dealt with.

The monetization on this site is clearly Google Adsense. I'd say cut off the revenue stream and file copyright infringement with Google. That should not only kill the revenue, but also get the domain booted from Google — where they are certainly relying on SERP traffic.

David McDuff said...

Neil,
You may want to consider adding a Creative Commons License to your site. I don't know how easy it is to enforce copyright in a situation like this but, so far, I've found that the CC license (or just luck?) has kept pirates from outright theft of my stuff. I've had a few sites that appear to be nothing other than copy-cat monetizers take stories verbatim from my site, but they've all linked back and given credit so I've been essentially forgiving of it.

Brooklynguy said...

Hi Tim - thanks so much for the information and for the links. I really appreciate it.

And Hi David - I will look into that. thanks for the link.

Anne Coleman said...

Me, too. I notified Google since they run Google Ads--we shall see...