Jun 13, 2009

Oooo I'm MAD!

Wow. I've been spammed. In the worst way. My post of yesterday was duplicated by someone here: http://diary.edublogs.org/2009/06/12/dogear-diary-my-orphans-of-the-wild/ (I won't give them the honor of a live link) with a terrible translation- it's looks like someone ran it through one of those automatic online translators from english to something (russian?) and back. I'd be more angry if I wasn't laughing so hard at the horrible way my sentences got mangled. I guess it's time to copyright my blog. I really don't mind if someone wants to quote me or something, as long as they give due credit, but this is just a rip-off stealing my content. Has this ever happened to you? what did you do about it?

20 comments:

  1. Anonymous6/13/2009

    Luckily, it hasn't happened to me, but I know it happened to Becky of Becky's Book Reviews. She has someone who was literally copying every review and posting it as theirs.

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  2. I don't call that spam, I call it plagiarism. How did you find it?

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  3. You automatically own a copyright on original work now, you don't have to register it. Its "faster and easier" to enforce if you register it. And you don't need the mark either - simply posting and keeping a record of the date is enough now.

    Just so you know.

    Better luck and have fun! - Bob

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  4. Ugh, that just stinks! Hasn't happened to me yet, at least not that I know of...

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  5. It is called scraping. I've had some posts lifted verbatim, and I had one that was lifted like that. Sometimes you can contact the platform they use (edublog, Wordpress, whatever).

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  6. It happens to me pretty frequently; I just ignore it. They're weird sites anyway, that I can't imagine anyone really frequents! :)

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  7. I found it by doing a google blog search for the title and author of book I had just reviewed. If it's an obscure book, I do that to find other reviews to link to- only this time I found one that had copied mine!

    It's actually pretty funny to read, as it's gotten mangled into gibberish and doesn't make much sense.

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  8. It happens to me too from time to time. Your blog will probably outlast the site that scraped you. As many people have already mentioned, you automatically own the copyright it you're based in the United States. Other country's copyright rules vary.

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  9. Wow! I wouldn't even begin to know if this has happened to me or how to copyright my own material to ensure it doesn't happen. I'm sorry this happened to you--even if it was a little amusing to read the mangled writing. Sorry Jeane :(

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  10. That happened to me a few times at my old blog. I hated it.

    A lot of blog themes now have a copyright notice incorporated right in the footer.

    You can nose around over at copyscape.com or creativecommons.org.

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  11. Wouldn't know if it has happened to me or not. What would someone have to gain from doing that?

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  12. Ugh, how infuriating! People can be such jerks sometimes.

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  13. I had no idea that kind of thing happened! Thanks for alerting us.

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  14. Yikes! Seriously, what's with stealing posts? Surely someone - people, I gather from other commentators here - doesn't have to steal a whole post? What's with that? But how maddening, too, that something you or anyone has written, someone has passed off as their own. I'd get good and mad too. thanks for telling us about it, Jeane. And sorry it happened to you, or anyone else.

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  15. After looking at this a bit more, my husb suggested it's a foreign student who had posted my article in their own language, and when I looked at it, google automatically tries to translate it back into english for me. The host server is a teacher/student blog thing. I still don't get why someone would take my entire text, though. Not as mad anymore, but still pretty irked.

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  16. This happened to Becky too. There are a lot of great articles out there if you Google "scraping" or something to that effect that will talk you through the steps that you should go through to have them remove the content. I wouldn't let them get away with it.

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  17. Anonymous6/15/2009

    Wow, that sucks! I agree with Natasha, don't let the dude get away with it. I'm still having trouble with my e-mail, which has been hijacked by spammers want to sell stuff under my name!

    Stoopid Klowns!

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  18. I was going to send them a letter demanding it be taken down, but I can't find out who the author is- there's no contact info, profile, email address or anything on there.

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  19. Update: it's gone! I contacted the host site and they removed the entire blog. Problem solved.

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  20. It's happened to a couple of my posts and from the sound of it, by the same place.

    I attempted to contact the blog admin but after several threats (which I was reduced to after being nice), I have yet to receive a response.

    If you find some way to contact them (as I think it is the same people), let me know.

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