I am being Plaigarised

Go to Creative Commons and get yourself a “badge”. For an example, see my blog’s sidebar. Here’s a link to my license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ Basically, I’m saying folks can copy, but they must attribute. I don’t care who grabs what I wrote as long as I’m credited.

When I find someone grabbing my feeds and not attributing, I write a post about ’em. They don’t like that so much when it shows up on their site. ??

If that’s just a bit too liberal for you, try this copyright plugin. It only adds the copyright info to the feeds: https://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-to-automatically-add-copyright-message-to-your-rss-atom-feeds/2/ Pretty slick.

“Basically, I’m saying folks can copy, but they must attribute. I don’t care who grabs what I wrote as long as I’m credited.”

He is attributing it with a link at the bottom of the article which says “Original post by Alistair”. However, I agree, it’s still unethical. Furthermore, Somebody, somewhere along the line has decided that this type of behaviour is acceptable, which it’s not.

Do a google on “Autoblogger Pro” and you’ll get to a website which sells this type of content theft as a “service”. This article shows some specifics.

One way of dealing with this is to set the syndication feeds in WP admin to show the summary instead of the full text.

You don’t need to buy a service, reblog and feedwordpress can do it just fine. ??

So long as they attribute, hard to do much about it. Set your feeds to excerpts only, definitely.

-d

Hi,

if he republishes your content, he breaches your copyright. Period.

Check the TOS of his host, if it contains a “no copyrighted material” clause, send the host another complaint. Don’t do it by email, print it out just nicely on paper, make it serious in tone and look, include a threat regarding copyright infringement fees (or whatever else your own country’s legislation proposes for such an offense) to be slapped onto the host if he does not comply within the next (your choice of time) days and send it first as a fax and parallely as a snail mail letter (with receipt).

At the same time, I’d try to find out who is setting up that host with a backbone connection. Maybe – if you’re lucky – he is a reseller anyway, or co-hosts. It is my personal experience, that practically all western backbone companies also have a strict and active TOS where it comes to illegal matters such as copyright or porn. They force hosts set up with them to sign these on contract and they can force a host to comply with their own TOS if the host doesn’t enforce it with his clients. Usually a mild reprimand by a backbone provider suffices completely to take any recalcitrant host to task.

I use this policy now for more than half a dozen years whenever I see instances of copyright infringement of my work or work of my clients, though mostly it’s pictures, stories and art, not blog posts, and this very quickly sees results. When they get snail mail and have to sign for it, they usually take it seriously, and they sure as hell take a threat of loss of backbone connection seriously.

There are different ways to deal with eastern country infringements (which you don’t want to know *VBEG* )…

Lol. clearly I’m the casual one here. But I have to somewhat agree with the OP’s host: I’m offering a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed…

The opinions are interesting to read though.

Based on the “greetings-new-readers” post which shows that author copied the entire post they are in fact in violation of the Fair Use policy. Here is part of the applicable section:

Fair use or fair practice is utilization of a portion of a copyrighted work “as is” for purposes of parody, news reporting, research and education about such copyrighted work without the permission of the author.

He/she clearly hasn’t followed that guideline.

While I wouldn’t suggest you not place a Creative Commons badge on your site (by all means go ahead) in reality it will more than likely be ignored by scum like this.

Recontact the persons host with the reference to the Fair Use link and see what happens.

I would also recommend you install the Blog Copyright Plugin. It places a notice at the end of every post you publish to your RSS feed.

If a site scrapes your feed via some type of “auto scraping software” the notice will appear on their site as well with a note to contact your “legal department.”

I have a feeling the scumbag you are having the problem with is manually stealing your posts but the plugin still goes a long way in stopping others from theft of your copyrighted work.

For anyone that is interested to see if their own work has been copied to other sites use the Copyscape website. Interesting enough it will even return cases of your own site quoting other sites.

I agree with Marc – this is a violation – what a nerve! I just tried to leave a comment, in your support, on the plagiarist’s site and got redirected to some other rubbish. The token credit link this person provides at the end of “your writing” is just that – token. The credit should be stipulated at the outset and the body of the text presented as a “blockquote” – you have been plagiarised and, in my neck of the woods (Australia) at least, you have grounds to have that site shut down.

Can I just say, thanks for all your help and support, I really appreciate it ??

I have emailed the host again, they are xxx.colo-cation.com , informing them about copyright on Marc suggestion but they have not got back to me.

In the meantime, I have cut my feeds to excerpts but this means that I cannot use the Blog Copyright Plugin as it needs the full feed.

I had thought about the creative commons liscence but I think that they will say that as they are leaving credit back to me , even if it is a token credit (a rubbish one in my book) then they are doing nothing wrong. Is there such a thing as a harsher creative commons liscence or am I getting mixed up about creative commons— is it for situations like this ? I mean I know that they will probably ignore it anyway but it would ne nice to point someone somewhere.

All these points about “Fair Use” are interesting, but what you’re forgetting is that under copyright law, the copyright holder is allowed to give away their content if they choose to. They don’t have to sell it or prevent copying, it’s their option as the owner.

When you publish an RSS feed…. it might very well be that you are choosing to give away your content for syndication, voluntarily and for free… Has this question been answered in the Courts?

Certainly the first way to prevent syndication of your writing, is to disable your RSS (by deleting RSS related PHP files in your WordPress install).

Hi,

@dgold: Not viable. When you write an email to a maillist or a post to the usenet, thus specifically distribute it, you are also not giving up your copyright (much as many might think to the contrary). Syndication is just that: distribution and a specific one at that.

aliferste’s posts are not read from distribution, they are being posed as own content and are republished and entered into that site’s RSS stream. Totally different ballgame.

@aliferste: stop pampering that host! Send him a written legal notice, by fax and by registered letter.

Have a look at their service provider’s AUP:

https://www.napoftheamericas.net/aboutaup.cfm

Quite clearly they state that copyright infringement is expressly not allowed. That host had to sign this AUP when setting up with them, even though – as they obviously are – they are an adult hosting service, which might explain their slightly off reaction.

Make it legal, make it uncompromising and I would also contact their service provider.

Any content on the web is automatically under copyright. It does NOT matter if you state it as such or not.

Contact a law firm and state your problem and they will let you know if you have a case or not. Most law firms will do this for free. ??

If so, then sue their asses off.

I agree with dgold. Before blogging became popular, RSS feeds were called newsfeeds and used almost exclusively by organizations and news agencies to distribute news articles, announcements, and press releases. The purpose was to engage the media to use these. No one in their right mind would issue a press release on RSS and then ask people to NOT copy it. The whole idea was that they WOULD copy it! Yes, please, please, please put my press release in your newspaper!

To suddenly expect a sea change in that practice is unreasonable. Sending information out on an RSS feeds is akin to copy permission. But one expects this to be beneficial to the author.

Blaitant duplication word for word and not providing atribution is, of course, not what anyone expects, so using the ‘excerpt’ or ‘–more–‘ function ideas and if you can identify plagarists then take care of that in htaccess.

What ever you do, DON’T call an attorney unless you just want to send a letter or issue a TRO. Copyright lawsuits are unbelievably expensive.

I’d use other means to stop him. I’d figure out his ip, both his server, and his home connection, and add them to my firewall. Or I might get more clever than that and use .htaccess rewrite rules to direct him to a static page that looks like my site and rss feed, but never changes.

I’d also write something about him on my blog. And maybe put a paragraph about his at the beginning of every entry for a while. And I’d do that for all of the entries he’s already sucked, in case they reload after a cache expires.

And I would just be getting started.

@manstraw:

he he he – the “loneranger”-version of course also works just nicely :-))

Have you asked yourself why your content is being copied?

When I see blogs that are full of copied content like this, it’s hard not to think splog (spam blog). I’ve checked some of the other content and that’s copied too (from https://www.midcurrent.com/news/). Splogs work by ripping off content (often with rss2blog) and using Adsense ads to generate revenue from visitors clicking through. Splogs are a huge problem on the web although this one doesn’t have any Adsense ads yet.

What can you do? Find out all you can about the blog and its host. Check your access logs and see if you can identify any activity to a particular IP – then block it. Write a post about the problem. Keep complaining to the host and mention the word splog. When Adsense ads appear, inform google and quote the Adsense publisher number. If you see any links from the site follow them and see where they go. Contact the other site being copied as well – what do they think?

If this is just republishing, then you have provided an RSS feed so probably not much you can do. But if this becomes a money-making splog, then I’d take action by complaining to google.