Saturday, March 7, 2009

Wonderful - Now There's Copyright Infringement

So someone on a wordpress journal has copied, word for word and link for link, my A Conversation I Want To Have.

I've capped the page. It's dated the 6th. And I really want to know what the point of copying might be. They put up no contact information. And apparently if I want it taken down, I have to give Wordpress/DMCA * my name, address and telephone number. Along with an electronic signature. WTH?


ETA: * - It has a wordpress login, but the personal info stuff seems very DMCA familiar. I have to prove who I am, even when the comments and linkbacks all over the place are in my favour? And they have ads up?!

ETA: Is it copyright infringement or content theft or both? Also I guess this means that page got a lot of readers or something? Just how random is this content theft shit - they've got a whole bunch of other entries, some even obviously showing they are by a different author on a different site in the midst of the weird copy/paste.

ETA3: So reported to Googleads. Still don't know if I want to give information for the DMCA.

ETA4: This is their WHO IS.

ETA5: Attempting to report them as a spam blog (they've got newspaper articles in there) says they're not wordpress. I'm currently disliking the wordpress system a lot though. Also found this link about Wordpress Direct. Wordpress Wordpress Direct? You suck.

6 comments:

  1. Some answers:

    This is a spam site passing as a blog. As in, copy and pasted from blog entries across the web at random.

    It is both copyright infringement and "content theft." However, to use the DCMA means that you are registering an actual legal complaint, which means that you have to identify yourself as a complaintant (thus the need for "personal information"). However, seeing as this site is housed and served from the nation of China, the likelihood of the site being taken down or "blacklisted" or its content removed is slim to almost none.

    And there you have it.

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  2. ugh >.<;;

    I've had sites copy word4word my posts too... I hope you can get something done about this :( *offers hugs*

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  3. HeavyArmor:

    I did look up splogs and it seemed to fit the situation - but yes, they're not hosted by Wordpress and I came to the conclusion that other than contacting googleads there wasn't much point - especially since their contact information seems to lead right back to a domain they might own (not quite sure on that).

    Best response I've read online has been to put some kind of notice at the bottom of every entry and to almost always include links back to myself to make it obvious to anyone reading the scraped content that it is not original at all.

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  4. That really sucks. But, um, this tells you that spammers like your content? Maybe they intend to compensate you with FREE Pen1s Enlargement.

    A couple of things:

    Linking to the ripoff page as you've done has the potential to improve their PageRank; you should probably add rel="nofollow" to your anchor tag.

    Also, as far as I can tell, the WordPress team / Wordpress.com doesn't have anything to do with WordPress Direct, so they probably aren't the ones who suck.

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  5. Violet

    I've changed the suckers to Wordpress Direct and added the rel="nofollow" - Thank you for that bit of information.

    I guess I'm too used to net citing.

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  6. Violet & Heavy Armor:

    The content thief now has a note up asking to be contacted (apparently the email I found was legitimate) if an article infringes. Other articles now have: This article comes from: and a url.

    Violet especially, you mentioned the rel=nofollow and now I wonder if adding a link to where the article originally came from, while giving credit doesn't also increase page ranks or something. Then again it might just be a response by them to match up to Googleads' expectation.

    Suggestions? I'd really appreciate them.

    ReplyDelete