What to do?

11 Responses to "What to do?"

1 | Bryan Spondre
December 1, 2008 at 7:13 am

Hi Matt

If you had a self hosted install of WordPress you could probably block access to your RSS feed. Not to sure if you can do this with a WordPress hosted one.

If the webhost of the offender was based in NZ you could complain and probably get it taken down. If overseas you are probably out of luck.

Bryan

2 | agnitio
December 1, 2008 at 7:30 am

I wonder if it’s automated and he will copy this post:)

Byran, we are moving to self hosting soon, are you saying we block a specific person from our RSS or would we be blocking everyone from our RSS?

Quite a lot of readers use RSS so a total block isn’t really an option:)

3 | rainman
December 1, 2008 at 8:29 am

It’s just rational libertarian behaviour, surely – he is sourcing his (your) blog posts for free and, one assumes, deriving more income from advertising than the cost of running his site.

Nothing to see here, move along.

4 | agnitio
December 1, 2008 at 9:04 am

Just because it’s rational from his perspective doesn’t mean we don’t feel vioalted:)

And from memory libertatarians are big on property rights!

5 | Andrew W
December 1, 2008 at 9:11 am

Stick a copyright on the bottom of your posts.

6 | Matt Nolan
December 1, 2008 at 10:00 am

“It’s just rational libertarian behaviour, surely – he is sourcing his (your) blog posts for free and, one assumes, deriving more income from advertising than the cost of running his site.”

And as rational agents we are interested in doing what is in our interest – hence why we are looking for suggestions from our lovely readers on what to do with this 🙂

“Stick a copyright on the bottom of your posts.”

Good thinking 🙂

7 | Steve
December 1, 2008 at 10:01 am

I have the same issue on my blog. The only thing that you can do is to stop posting full RSS feeds. They’re scraping your RSS and then just pushing that onto their own site. Its not unusual and you’re definitely not the first, nor the last.

Its a side effect of having a blog. You can stop your RSS or limit your RSS to just 200 characters or something, but theres not much else you can do about it.

They steal the content and place their own advertising around it. The point being to make money from your content. This is very common with targetted content such that stays within a specific subject. But it does happen across the board. They often combine your content with similar content from other blogs and are very good at SEO. Thus, often your own content will show up in search results on their blog before yours.

Again, limit your feeds to only partial posts. Or don’t publish RSS feeds at all. There is nothing else you can do.

As for emailing the guy, I hope you use Gmail or something with decent spam filters. These guys are in it to make money, and a single email address is more money, just like each post is more money.

There are some less than “nice” methods you could use to deter them, but I wont speak of them openly. Email me if you’d like a couple of other suggestions that are less than … friendly.

8 | Matt Nolan
December 1, 2008 at 10:06 am

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the offer, but we aren’t too concerned about this – we were just wondering if there was some way we could set down that it is OUR intellectual capital, and the copyright thing does the trick 🙂

We did reduce our feed to partial posts – but we got complaints from readers. We would rather make sure that it is easy for our readers to read content then block off this guy – so we’ll just leave it as is.

We will probably be moving our site and feed relatively soon anyway – so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. I was just interested in what people do in this situation 🙂

9 | Waheed Ahmed
December 1, 2008 at 10:11 am

Is it not illegal for one blog to copy anothers posts word from word,I think you will find it is,in which case you can report the issues to his host,for protection you also need to have the copyright logo and the blogs name installed at the bottom of every page that is on you site.At the moment you do not have this so you cannot claim copyright,however the issue is still there.

10 | dpf
December 1, 2008 at 10:56 am

It is a spam blog. Was created by a spam bot, and they are trying to earn money by Google Ads. This happens more often than you would think. I just ignore them.

11 | Matt Nolan
December 1, 2008 at 11:32 am

“you also need to have the copyright logo and the blogs name installed at the bottom of every page”

Definitely think we will be going for that.

“It is a spam blog. Was created by a spam bot, and they are trying to earn money by Google Ads. This happens more often than you would think. I just ignore them.”

Dirty old – they are earning money from our writing and we aren’t, it just doesn’t seem right 😉