It really bugs me when someone blatantly steals what I am writing. I take time away from my family when I am working so I want to at least justify that time with either money or fame 😉 so when I get neither from my own work it really stinks.
The blog located at blogright.net (no link because I’m not sharing my google juice with them too) is taking every article I write at the RSS Applied blog and passing it off as if it is their work.
Now, while we may decide to go to change to partial text feeds, here’s the question I’m asking. If I allow full text feeds, am I implicity allowing my content, my original writings, to be published for someone else’s monetary gains.
If I’m allowing her fair use of my intellectual property just by offering up full text feeds, maybe blogging isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…
Do you know which advertisers the false blog gets? If so you could take your complaint to Google Adsense, etc. I think bloggers need to band together on issues like these.
I didn’t pay attention Kate. I just noticed it was Bidvertiser.
Maybe I should fight this…
Edited because I said it was Google Adsense and it was not. I’ve sent an email to Bidvertiser (and to the blog owner’s whois email address). We’ll see what the response is.
While I never heard back from Bidvertiser, aside from a lame autoresponse, I have since noticed the blog owner has removed my content and has begun posting her own work. While I think the phone call she received had more to do with her decision than Bidvertiser (I doubt they did a thing), I’m glad to see she’s taken down my work.
Robyn, thieves will always be with us. At least we have tools to discover situations such as the one you describe (and which I blogged about several months ago:
http://www.ddmcd.com/integrity.html
Not that this would solve the problem of outright thievery, but do you have any copyright or Creative Commons licensing information on your blog? This won’t protect you but at least it provides public knowledge that you take your intellectual property rights seriously.
One issue you raise concerns others making money by claiming authorship of your intellectual property. What if someone makes money by linking to and aggregating (say, via tags and RSS feeds) a subset of the data that is preent on your standard web page? Do you think you should receive conmpensation for this re-use of your intellectual property?
– Dennis
You know, I had CC on here at one point, and in my limited understanding of CSS and PHP I think I have inadvertantly removed it. I need to put it back on here.
To answer your monetary question, I’d like to point you to the discussion on the RSSApplied blog here: http://blog.rssapplied.com/public/item/131104
It’s not the compensation I want, though her profiting from my work and only my work on her blog really ticked me off, it’s that she implied that the work was her own. It’s one thing to pull from several writers, and make it clear you are ‘pulling’ their work. It’s another altogether to set up a blog with the sole intent of pulling one person’s work. Without a disclaimer it implies ownership.
Look at it this way, if I pulled 10 blogger’s work, and linked back to their page, I might actually drive them traffic. However, if I just pull, say Seth Godin’s work, verbatim, and nothing else with no disclaimer on the page, people may think his ideas and work are mine and I may gain clients that should rightfully be his due to my syndication of his work alone. Not really fair to him…