Another Article Theft

BlogCharm did the right thing and are giving the blog owner 72 hours to remove my content from their blog.

I noticed also that the blogger is trying to rip-off Darren Rowse over at http://www.problogger.net/ by making another "Problogger" blog.

It's great that BlogCharm is doing the right thing.

Thanks for that tip, Chris!

I thought "Pro Blogger" sounded awfully familiar!

I appreciate the link to the real site.

It burns me up when this happens and I don't care if it's another 9-year old ripping and republishing our stuff or an 80-year old -- they know what they're doing is certainly not right and the rest of us pay by losing our hard-earned work to others who pilfer it for their own devices.

That is horrendous, David..how did you discover that? I cannot believe they would do that - glad they are doing the right thing and removing it...

How did you find it? - It seems to me it is a good way to lose credibility real quick. I'm certain Blogcharm doesn't want their name associated with such behaviour and will be keeping an eye on the offender. At least I hope so.

There is the Fair Use Law that says it is ok to take portions for writing reviews or to comment on.

For example taking a paragraph out of a news article and commenting on it or a piece from another blog etc.

Found a good article on it here. - Lessig Blog on Fair Use -

Hi Wendy!

Thanks for the support. There are lots of ways to find out this kind of thing. If they can find me, I can find them. BlogCharm is a new blog hosting service from Blog Explosion so, yes, I'm certain they want goodwill in the blogging community to stop this kind of behavior.

Hi prying1!

There are search bots you can employ to watch your back. You can also use other investigative services to root out the unfair use of your work. I don't want to reveal too much here because the truly bad guys are always interested in finding ways to thwart you.

Yes, if a paragraph had been quoted with proper attribution, no problem. It's the wholesale copying without permission that is the crux of the problem.

Your link didn't come through! You can just copy and paste the raw URL in your comment and it will get auto-hyperlinked when it is posted. If the link runs off the page I'll fix it for you if you want to post it again.

sorry to hear about this i am glad you are fighting back and i hope you can fight them

Thanks, clem!

It is frustrating. Fighting back takes many forms.
:wink:

can you give us a little advice on how we can protect this from happening

My advice is to be vigilant with searching for your own content on the web. You can email me for more information on how to do that. Look every day. There's always something out there that's being ripped from you.

i was surprised blogcharm got involved i thought it was the person doing the posting who had to work it out.

Both the hosting service and the individual are both in legal jeopardy.

The person who did the copying and pasting is in trouble, but so is the blog host service because they are the means to the publication -- without their server and connectivity the Copyright would not have a way to be made public so they have an inherent duty in protecting the unapproved republication of Copyrighted material from appearing in their domain.

72 hours is overly generous to get the content offline. It should have been done immediately to right the wrong.

Yeah...indeed frustrating to see you work being taken for a ride. There needs to be more stringent laws...I recently saw a similar problem pointed on ProBlogger

regards,
jane

Hey Ms. Jane!

I sent the ProBlogger guy a heads up about what's happening here and I thank you for the link to the article on his site.

This kind of thing boils me alive in my skin.

The latest post on my blog is about stolen layouts. I recently found someone who is selling custom blogger templates for almost $100, but has stolen the code from someone else's free templates to create some of these layouts. I've contacted the person whose code the designer is using, but I don't know what else I could do. It really annoys me that this person is making money of someone else's designs. I'm hesitant to actually give a link to who the designer is who's done this, should I “out” this person?

Hello krome.obsession!

Code is a difficult thing to protect because you do a View | Source or use some other kind of "Web Developer" extension and the whole world is there to for you to copy, paste and modify.

Protecting code and images are extremely difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt because you can always mix things up a bit, change a color, save in a different file or image format and claim a modified ownership of the material or an “inspired by” defense.

Copying and pasting written articles, though, is harder to hide because if you break things up or change a word or delete a phrase the stolen goods don't fit together any longer and the thief wonders why they went to the effort of the pilfering in the first place.

I added an ugly and clunky Copyright footer to this blog because BlogCharm wanted something tangible here to point to in order to show the thief my creative rights were violated -- I pointed BlogCharm to the Copyright law of our land but that was not good enough for them act.

That's very true, but here's the catch. The designer who's stolen the code gives "credit" to the person who actually wrote the code. Yes, as stupid as that sounds they have listed who wrote the code, but the person who wrote it had no clue they're work had been taken and used against the terms on their site.

Ah, I see what you mean, krome.

It looks like the entire offending site has been permanently removed from BlogCharm.

Big Yay!