Content Theft – DMCA’d!!!!
May 23, 2011
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen this around here… but I had one of my recent posts stolen. I won’t link to the site that stole my content – I believe it may be attempting to do something illicit, possibly by running spyware or malware. I’ve reported the site to the hosting company’s security staff. But this is a new experience for me. I’m a little disappointed that it happened, but not really surprised. As continued blogging raises my blogs profile, this is going to happen more often.
[Edit: After contacting the host provider, I’ve now filed a DMCA. My first ever DMCA! Boo-yah!]
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First published, now plagiarized. I tip my hat to you, sir. 😉
I’m on a roll! 😉
If only I could be so important too. *sight* We colleagues can only sigh in wonderment and envy…
Heh… This has nothing to do with importance and, I suspect, everything to do with spam and driving traffic. The post that was stolen linked to and commented on a fairly widely-read post on a bigger site – but my stolen content was from a relatively low-trafficked site by comparison. It seemed the content-thief figured I was easy-pickings. Too bad they were hosted with someone with a relatively easy and straight-forward DMCA process (host gator, for the record).
Lol, that was “sigh” not “sight” ha ha
Oh no! Well, at least that site has been reported–whoever they are. *raises pitchforks*
I expect it’s a drive-by spammer/Russian malware enthusiast of some sort.
Upon reading this comment…I suggest that since my ethnicity is unknown, you refrain from Russian jokes. *snarls*
Not a joke, actually. It’s a statistical fact that the majority of malware and spammers originate in Russia (though I understand places like China are catching up). It’s not a commentary on the character of the Russian people but a commentary on the people of malware/spammy character.
Hmm, well maybe I’m Chinese too…
But no, in all seriousness, that sounds about right, like I’ve heard it before. Russia is a big country. (Inhabited by many Russians, so I hear.)
I daresay it’s probably inhabited by many non-Russians these days, too… But yes, that would make sense. 😉
How awful Stephen!!! But in all honesty…did it make you feel important? 🙂
Well… for one brief moment… until I realized that this can and does happen to the blogs of nobody-importants all over the world…
How did you find out??
Good job! 😀
Actually, credit for that goes to WordPress, in part. WordPress automatically keeps track of Trackbacks when other blogs or sites refer to one of your posts. In the post of mine that was stolen, I linked back to a few others of my own posts – I do a lot of internal-linking. Whoever stole my content was lazy (I assume it was done algorithmically), and they didn’t even bother to change my internal links – so they popped up in my spam queue as possible spam comments on the posts I had linked to. When I investigated, I found they linked to a site that had copied the entirety of my post verbatim. So I did a little “whois” query on the site, identified the host, and contacted their customer service through which I was referred to their DMCA process. Whole thing took probably 5 minutes, if I compressed it together (it was 5 minutes spread over a twenty minut period) – which would be way too time-consuming if this happened often, but luckily it doesn’t.
Wow. Scary world we live in.
Sometimes, yes…
Blast, I was caught! *Ev-ell Laugher!*
Actually, this is where Copyscape can come handy. Smack one of dem there badges on your blog and dare people to steal. (www.copyscape.com)
I’d rather not dare folks to steal… 😛
Aw why not? That could be fun.
Certainly this is one part of putting stuff online that is terribly scary…imagine some scientist putting a theory on twitter before publishing it…or a writer putting up a really good metaphor, only to lose it through retweets…Easy to imagine it happening, especially with the newer ‘tech oriented’ generation
Yes, that is a danger… but at least with each of those examples, it’s always technically possible to trace the idea back to its origin. Which was the case in my little battle with plagiarism as well… Although the bigger issue isn’t so much that the idea is traceable, but that nobody will have a true memory of it.
From a technical standpoint I’m intrigued – do you think it’s more likely that some ner-do-weller read your article and then manually copied it or was it perhaps a spider-bot that crawls blogs and copies article that hit certain keywords or numbers of hits? Not that I’m trying to devalue you’re having been plagiarised in anyway – go you!
Heh. I’m not feeling exactly “proud” of having been plagiarised. I do think it was something more like a spider that crawled and copied my page. I don’t think there was actual human intervention where someone said “hey, this looks really interesting, I’m going to copy it”. As evidence of this, I take the fact that the plagiariser didn’t use a real name: usually if someone steals something because they like it, they’ll tend to put their own name on it. Instead, this thief just used a default name like “admin” as the poster’s name.