Warning about Garden Blog Content Theft

If any of you blog, a particularly nasty scraper site is diligently ripping off every garden blog they can get their hands on. My blog is not specifically just about gardening, but has enough garden content I was hit.

They use an rss feed to get your copyrighted material, put links to ads in it all over the place and republish it on their site, so they plan to make plenty of money by stealing content. Adding insult to injury it means you will get penalized by search engines for duplicate content as they put your same content up on their site.

After I started a small garden riot amongst some garden bloggers, the nasty site went down for two days but then came back worse than ever. Despite my cease and desist notification they stole 8 more of my articles.

They now are trying to masquerade as a "free garden blog aggregator service" but now have a contact you can use "if there is any question about copyright." This time they quickly removed my content before I had time to get to their isp to get the site taken down again.

They are counting on people not understanding how it works and not realizing they are being ripped off. They probably are correct and will make money doing this.

If you have a garden blog you can pm me and I will give you the site url (I am not giving them any publicity whatsoever) so you can check to see if your content has been stolen. I recommend this article by a knowledgeable person as to what to do when your content is stolen at http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/.

I am still quite annoyed, to put it mildly.

mulchmania

I have never heard of such a thing. These people have a site of their own? Is this a sight anyone has ever heard of? If so, shouldn't they be reported to .... someone? the police? the fcc? the Attorney General?
I don't have a blog, but I would be very complimented that they wanted my stuff. Of course, if they are stealing your art work, that is seriously criminal and should be reported, probably to the police.

It appears to be a fairly new site, at least in its current form. Legally, the situation falls under copyright law. Art work is only one portion of work covered under copyright law. Writing is a major area protected by copyright law.

Most serious bloggers copyright their work because they put a lot of time and effort into their writing. The purpose of stealing copyrighted content is to avoid having to create valuable content. Advertising cannot be sold effectively without valuable content on the site so these scraper sites steal other people's content and use it to sell advertising.

It is not a compliment to have your work stolen for someone else's profit and to your own damage. The detriments are loss of traffic and revenue to your own blog, damage to your reputation, and even further loss of traffic due to search engine penalties for having duplicate content on multiple websites. It also is highly damaging and offensive to have your writings altered to include links to advertising throughout the article.

The main avenue of protection is to first give a cease and desist notice to the thieves, and if that fails, use the DMCA copyright protection to force the hosting isp to take down the offending website. The hosting isp will take it down quickly because it protects the isp from copyright infringement actions if they do so.

In this situation, the site was taken down. Instead of removing stolen content, they rearranged it, stole a lot more, and resumed business trying to masquerade as a free aggregator service, even though that is not what they are. Calling a skunk a rose still leaves a big stink in the air, and this whole site reeks of deception and thievery.

They will get away with much of it because, like you, many people do not understand what is going on. Once I told them I was going to their hosting isp, they immediately removed my content. If I hired an attorney I could take them to court for damages, but the expense would far outweigh any settlement I could get.

The hosting isp will not take down the site if the stolen material has been removed from the site. Since the thieves have now put in a system to quickly remove it when someone knows enough to assert their copyright protection, they are essentially safe from consequences.

So they are busily selling advertising on the hundreds of stolen articles and photos that in many, probably most, cases the original owners do not even know have been taken. Copyright protections are not enforced if the owner of the copyright does nothing to assert their rights.

Many times content is stolen by people who are just clueless about copyright law. In those cases, not even a cease and desist is needed, just a clearly informative explanation is usually all it takes to correct the situation.

However, these people clearly know exactly what they are doing, so I skipped the polite stage and went straight to cease and desist with them. The part that baffles me is why they go to such effort to steal when with the same amount of effort they could create a nice legitimate site of their own!

If you want more information about stolen content issues, Lorelle's article I referenced in the first post on this thread goes into vastly more detail than I just did.