Blog Digest…what’s that!?
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Hi everybody, I have a doubt here: I’ve just logged in my blog and found that Akismet blocked a comment as spam. It’s from a blog called “Attualita Blog Digest” and there is this link to their site where they publish one of our articles, providing a link to our blog. It looks kind of shady…So I don’t know what to do here; they are collecting articles in italian from different blogs, putting them in a page with “ads & Co”.
The link is http://attualita.fixedblogging.net/article/201998/Il-pozzo-senza-fondo:-cera-una-volta-lItalia/Should I be worried about something in particular? Is that a case like bitacle or blogs scraping?
I really thank you for your feedback.
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This is exactly the same thing I’m experiencing right down to the identical theme and spelling error in the footer. We have blogbots running wild and scraping rss summaries from our actual blogs so those who created them can rake in adsense profits. Here’s the post I put up on the same subject http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4897&replies=5
There’s nothing that we can do about this that’s actually worth the time and effort. -
Thank you for your reply. I read your post and I understand that the only thing to do is to mark these comments as spam, right?
What bothers me is the idea of people making (or trying to make) money out of our contents, and that we have no means against it.
On our site we put the Creative Commons badge and the Copyscape one as I saw them on your site and on some others too but I still don’t have an idea on how well they work.
What can we do for our feeds, at least to let people know whose content is the one scraped? -
Yes, you mark them as spam. What the people who set up the bots to do this are counting on is that you will be so desirous of receiving and posting comments and trackbacks that you won’t do that. If you do post their stuff then they hope your readers will click on their links.
If you have followed these fake comments/trackbacks back to the spam blog then you will notice that the content they scrape is the rss summary which is available to any feed reader.
Technically speaking there is action you can take and you’ll find information and links in the forum search box about that if you type in “bitacle”.
I feel the same way you do but I’m coping with two deaths right now and two others are pending in the very near future. I’m in a state of grief and I do not have the time or energy to pursue this.
Best wishes -
http://writing.galacticforum.com/
I’ve been experiencing something similar, but I don’t get evidence of the “lifting” of my posts from Akismet. Instead, when I visit Technorati, I see links to my site from the above. Small consolation the page that links directs me to doesn’t quote quite all of my very short 299 word posts, and does provide a link back to the original site, so, I guess, as much as they are using my stuff as content to host attach to their ads, it’s hard to say what damage that does me.
Oddly, and shadily, the creepily, the page proudly proclaims in its footer to be hosted by Woddpress (note the typo). So, that, at least, is very much below board.
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@davidbale
There are other low life in the blogosphere who download and use free blog templates from wordpress.org hence the “powered by wordpress” on the footer. They choose names with spelling variations like the one you have provided or like this one wordpres with a single “s”. One of these was “Blog Digest”.
Some time ago now I discovered “shadow blogs” with names similar to my own that were scraping my posts and I set my rss feeds to summary.
The argument some of these people use is that if bloggers make contents available by rss then everyone can use it. Some feel an obligation to give a link back to the originator and others do not. Without doubt the reason they help themselves to content without permission is so they can create the facade of having a blog in order to collect advertising revenue (google adsense, yahoo, chitika, etc.)
IMO this is creepy and unethical behaviour but some think differently. They believe anything one can do to diversify their income sources by getting a free ride and then profiting from it by ripping off content is “fair play”. -
Um, guys? Why are you give working links to these sites? All you’re doing is giving them link credit. Sort of like putting the guns into the hands of the murderers. :(
fixedblogging.net is on keymachine.de. They’re known for doing sites like that and appear to blackhole all complaints.
Ditto the the forum one which i can’t pull up here.
Regards,
-drmike -
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Oh David, you are so not a moron! In fact, I’m glad this topic showed up again. I noticed that weird linking thing on technorati just the other day: a blog seems to be taking all my posts and putting them up, with at least a link to me. Still, it’s annoying. Am I right there’s nothing you can do about it, short of setting your rss feed to summary, something I don’t want to do?
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@davidbale
I think you’re writing is brilliant. Don’t worry about the link. I’m sure a Moderator will delete the link in the 5th entry down soon.@bloglily
I’m also annoyed. I have been aware of “shadow” blogs scraping all my blogs except those that are private for months now. Technically, if you set your rss feed to full text anyone can help themselves to all of your content. As they are not purporting it’s their own content and instead are providing a link to the original article it’s not a copyright violation. :( -
It most certainly is a copyright violation.
If I post the newest song my my favorite artist online, even if I don’t pretend it’s my own work, it’s still a copyright violation.
Using somenone’s creative work without their permission is a copyright violation under U.S. copyright law. Using work without attribution is plagiarism, which is a different matter.
That being said, it could be difficult to do anything about it. You could complain to their host or provider, perhaps.
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@daemok
Indeed you are quite correct about the distinction. It’s a copyright violation. Thanks for correcting me. :) -
I don’t know if I’m regularly being scraped, but one thing that you could do is limit what’s posted in your RSS—I almost always use the “more” functionality for a number of reasons (keeps my home page shorter, lets me see what people are interested, and so on).
Another thing that occurs to me is that if this is a recurring problem for someone, perhaps they could put a “© 2006 by me. All rights reserved.” or whatever at the end of each post, and it could include a link back to the blog or post. That way, your name and link would appear on scraped posts. Of course, they could remove the line, but then they’d presumably have to modify their bots, right?
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The same thing’s happened to me recently. A bot has latched onto the “My writing life” tag and is takings bits of posts from mine and other wordpress blogs and pasting them onto its own blog.
It claims to be hosted by “Woddpress”. There are ads displayed on all its pages. Here’s the site if you want to look into it:
my-writing-life.turboblogs.net/
Is this legal? It gives back links, but I still don’t like the fact that parts of my posts are appearing on this site.
[Link broken so not to give them credit – drmike]
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Oh, lookie. It’s hosted by keymachine.de. What a surprise. :(
They host sites like this like crazy. We’ve discussed them before. I don’t think anyone has been able to get a complaint answered from them though.
Feel free to submit a complaint to abuse at keymachine.de as well as abuse at turboblogs.net. Gotta admit though that I would be surprised if you got a response out of either one of them. I don’t think anyone has yet out of keymachine.de
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As Darmok says, it’s possibly not legal, depending on how much of your work they post. If it’s the entire thing, then it’s a copyright violation in the US and other signatories to the same set of treaties. One problem is that some of these sites are hosted in countries where copyright law is different, and there you would have to research it to see what the law was. You can complain to their ISP, but that often falls on deaf ears.
I’d extend darmok’s suggested tagline to include “Please read this and other posts on the original website at ______” which should indicate to people that other sites don’t have your permission to post that article.
Interestingly, BoingBoing has started linking to a blogscraper site like that recently. I noticed they’ve changed the link now, but they have done it a few times; the site has a disclaimer saying they get pictures emailed to them anonymously, but no; in fact, they posted the pictures in exactly the same order as on the site they stole them from. I hope that BoingBoing won’t be making that mistake again and giving legitimacy to a site that is not only illegal, but immoral as well.
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Great, thanks for the replies! If this bot is only copying posts with that tag, I think changing the tag to something less common will end the problem.
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@fantasywriter
What I did was post a small copyscape image at the very beginning of the first sentence of my posts and then I typed only a teaser paragraph followed by a <!–more–> tag. Feedreaders stop when they hit a more tag.Copyscape image code:
<img SRC="http://banners.copyscape.com/images/cs-wh-88x31.gif" ALT="Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape" WIDTH="88" HEIGHT="31" BORDER="0"></a>
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