Protecting Your Blog Content
I’m a big fan of good writers. I especially admire bloggers who write exceptionally well. I mean, with all the crap out there that people try to pass of as writing, you could easily distinguish the good from the bad. Writing on a free, open platform such as a blog does not give one the license to throw grammar school lessons out the window.
Yes, some people are lazy, and write gibberish for all the world to read. Okay, they’re forgiveable. But when there are some people who are lazy and steal their way to riches, then that’s probably the time to ring the church bells and round up the people with their knives and pitchforks.
I didn’t realize blog content theft was so rampant until I visited the Stop Bitacle.Org blog.
The people behind bitacle.org steal content from other’s weblogs and place it on their own website. Their practices are criminal and/or abusive, because these people violate the copyrights on the original content, of their holders. Not only copyrights are violated, licenses such as those of the Creative Commons are not respected as well.
Stolen content from weblogs is placed on bitacle.org’s website, between commercial messages for which the people behind binacle.org are being paid for by advertisers. At this moment Google places commercial messages on bitacle.org, but this company is requested to reject bitacle.org as their client, because of bitacle.org’s criminal/abusive behaviour.
DMCA? They’re in Spain, for crying out loud. So a DMCA won’t be their silver bullet. There are other—legal—ways to fight back, like writing Google to cancel their AdSense accounts, or inserting notices on your blog posts (so people reading their site would know it’s your content. But it seems Bitacle is just the tip of the splog iceberg. Just checking my referrer stats, I come to stumble upon backlinks from doubtful sources. Guess what I see when I visit their site? My content, with AdSense splattered all over.
Lazy people. Tsk!
[tags]plagiarism,copyright,content theft,pirate bay[/tags]
Great post! I would recommend that authors use Numly to register their digital works for copyrights. Numly assigns Numly Numbers (Electronic Serial Numbers) for digital works including blogs. These unique identifiers enable rights statements to be associated with digital content as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright via real-time verifications. Numly Numbers are simple to generate and act as an electronic timestamp. They also allow you to track who is viewing your content and when it is accessed, monitor ratings, and can be used as permalinks.
Numly Numbers can be verified and help authors protect their orphan works. I have also noticed that many of the splogging sites fail to strip out these Numly Numbers for the original content making it easy to track down the original author by going to verify.numly.com/esn (where esn is the Numly Number).
Chris Matthieu said this on October 19, 2006 11:49 am