Content Stealing Jerks

Posted by Kevin Pang on 3/28/2009 | Comment

I've grown somewhat accustomed to seeing my articles regurgitated on some random blogger's site and passed off as their own. Usually I just send the content stealing jerk (CSJ for future reference) an e-mail asking that they provide some sort of link back to my original article and leave it at that. Sometimes they comply, oftentimes they don't. In the end, life goes on. After all, it's not like I'm going to press charges over it.

It's a problem that's existed ever since the advent of blogging. In general, I think bloggers have pretty much become desensitized to it. Every few months you'll hear someone cry foul, but that's about all we can do. Personally, I'm not a big fan of smear campaigns, especially since they tend to give the CSJs more traffic than they would have gotten otherwise. However, it seems that the CSJs are finally evolving from no-name bloggers with 5 readers to large, professional-looking CMS-type deals.

Thanks to some heads-up readers e-mails today, I found out that some site called delimitdesign was featuring an article on their home page that was copied word-for-word from my blog.


My post	Delimitdesign's carbon copy

I promptly sent them an e-mail which thus far has gone unanswered. I also left a couple replies to the post which were not approved (surprise, surprise). I even @replied to them on Twitter without any luck. What's worse, it appears that I'm not the only one they've ripped off. Out of curiosity, I took a look at another one of their articles featured on their home page:

http://delimitdesign.com/inspirational/101-ways-to-know-your-software-project-management-is-doomed/

A quick Google search revealed that it was a carbon copy of an article written by someone else:

http://www.codesqueeze.com/101-ways-to-know-your-software-project-is-doomed/

After some more digging around, it became quite clear that every one of their posts was turning up a separate, but identical, blog post written by someone else. In other words, the site appears to be dedicated to digging up old, popular posts and regurgitating them as their own.

This is nothing new of course. I think most bloggers have put up with it so long simply because thus far the CSJs have been relatively harmless. But what do we do when the CSJs become more established?

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how to react. My only recourses, thus far, have been to politely ask them to stop and to notify the public of their behavior.

It's not just the blogging CSJs we have to worry about either. As Jeff Atwood noticed today, someone seems to have ripped off the entire StackOverflow site:


StackOverflow	CNProg's carbon copy

What do we do in this case? It's not like Jeff has a copyright on his CSS, javascript, or design (edit: as pointed out by several commenters both here and on Reddit, he very well may, but whether or not he can enforce it is still questionable and dependent on where the infringers live and possibly how much is copied). It seems his only retort -- as well as mine -- is to cry foul and throw a little mud (exactly what I'm doing here). I think Jeff, and anyone else who has had their content ripped off, would agree that mud slinging isn't all that satisfying.

The only solution that I have devised to curtail this is to take away the CSJs incentive for ripping off other people's content (e.g. their visitors and thus, their advertising revenue). I propose a new site: ContentStealingJerks.com, which would let people flag articles they recognize as blatant ripoffs of someone else's original content. It could come with a firefox plugin that would redirect users to the original article when they visit a flagged page. What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Or already implemented and I just haven't realized it?

Edit 3/29/2009 3:58 AM:

Thanks to the comments readers have left here and on Reddit and Hacker News, I've learned that there are indeed things I can do. I have now reported Delimitdesign through Google Adsense's complaint feature (which should eliminate any monetary gains they've gained from their content ripping) as well as through Google Webmaster Tools (which should remove them from Google's search index). Tomorrow, I plan on filing a DMCA complaint as well.

I also discovered that Delimitdesign didn't bother to swap out the images when they copy/pasted my article, meaning their article is using images hosted on my server. So I took the liberty of swapping them out. Here's the final result:

Yes, I know. I missed a golden opportunity to use goatse or tubgirl or something along those lines. Don't think I wasn't tempted. In the end though, I'd rather just get the message out rather than gross out their (presumably) innocent visitors.

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Comments

that's a tricky one.
what's to stop CSJs from entering the site and flag real content providers as CSJs?
and also you would have to get people to install the browser plugin in the first place.

This makes me angry too. This didnt happen to me (yet) because I just started my blog in December. I think the site idea is excellent, but it will only work with tech savvy users, there are bloggers out there that dont know what a Firefox plugin is. If you decided to start developing the site please let me know, I'm will to help out in testing.

Hey, I think this is a good idea.

But like imonsei, I think there should be a way to prevent the original content from being flagged as stolen content.

@imonsei

Very good points. I think you could prevent gaming the system with a combination of voting and moderation (e.g. X votes before a site is automatically redirected, with users being able to report anyone who is obviously abusing the site).

Unfortunately, I'm not sure about how to get around the fact that most people won't bother to install the plugin.

You could just find out their hosting provider and file a simple DMCA complaint with them. That's usually my first step and 90% of the time, that's enough to get the content taken down.

The point isnt that only tech saavy users know ( or will ) install a ff extension but rather that it illustrates a step in the path of pushing this solution through the various phases of the web architecture stack, an extension first, a standard proposed by a fringe group of progressive developers with an itch to scratch, a standard with a rough draft implementation of the standard, and before you know it Microgooglehoo has decided they will adopt it and our steering the standards bodies to write it in RFC stone.

If its a good idea it will percolate to the foundations.

Unfortunately there isn't a lot you can do. A lot of these people are in other countries which do not honor (or enforce) copyrights. One example would be India, where there is a horde of people trying to make money off the web by scrapping content wherever they can and adding Ads.

The only thing I image you could do is to contact their host. That might not be effective depending where it is hosted.

I'm not sure what country you're in, or what country the servers of this site are in, but you should read up on the DMCA. If the site's host won't respond to DMCA takedown requests, then at the very least you can file a DMCA notice with Google (http://www.google.com/dmca.html). That will (eventually) lead to the site be taken out of their index, and since they seem to be using Adsense, they will likely be banned from that as well.

Yahoo and MSN have instructions on how to file a notice with them as well -
http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtinfrg.htm

This happens for liberally licensed open source projects too. Take this project as an example (I happen to be the maintainer), original Codeplex site:
http://www.codeplex.com/LINQtoCRM
Copycat site by some Rumanians called "Softpedia":
www.softpedia.com/.../LINQtoCRM.shtml

While they are probably within their rights to do this (at least as far as the source code goes), they are still jerks.

Make sure you find a search term that returns the infringing site. Then use this tool

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

More help on DMCA

labnol.blogspot.com/.../...right-infringement.html

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

This has existed for years : http://www.pirated-sites.com/ list sites that have ripped off designs off other websites

I originally read this article on some CSJ's website which is lucky as I wouldn't have found it otherwise. You should subscribe to the CSJ feed on feedburner, lots of good stuff there.

Haha, kidding, but it could happen once they work the kinks out of their ' automatic content aquisition' scripts. :)

@On, @Manu

Thanks! I'll do just that. :-)

Click on the "Ads by Google" image. Click "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw" at the bottom of the page.
Click on "Also report a violation", check "the website", check "The site is hosting/distributing my copyrighted content". Done.

@syboor

Thanks for the tip! I did just that (and a few other things). I've edited the post to include the steps I've taken to hopefully curtail the sites' behavior.