Help! Scrapers plagiarising my blog posts and WP Support always closed
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Can someone please help me? I have read through the Plagiarism posts in the FAQ’s and I have a similar problem in that my blog is regularly scraped by horrible plagiarisers who steal my posts, taking large chunks, copying them wholesale and publishing them verbatim a few hours later on their site under their own name. I find out through a pingback. They use a wordpress.org template in some cases and link to advertising and commercial sites as well.
This is despite prominent Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives No-commercial works 3.0 License displayed from day 1 of my blog, in the sidebar and a copyright symbol with my blog name at the bottom of the posts.
I cannot ask WP support for help as they are always closed whatever time of day I look.
I have tried contacting the ISP of the respective stealing blogs, which I will list below as a warning to others and in a vain hope that someone out there might be able to help. I am so fed up and instead of enjoying writing, and feeling able to write creatively, I feel inhibited and am thinking of giving it all up.
Here are the offending urls:
newsmusic.freehostingz.com/serse.html | IP: 207.226.183.66
hobbies-news.info/jazz-guitar-blues-41-is-too-young-to-die | IP: 64.13.192.33
music.xpk2.com/2008/02/09/leontyne-price-on-youtube | IP: 74.52.60.2
music.xpk2.com/2008/02/08/mein-handel | IP: 74.52.60.2
The newsmusic one at the top of the list, was obviously a ‘bot’ scraper as it took a large chunk of the revised post of “Mein Handel” originally posted 090208 (although that time the *bleep* had the gall to say my post had been created by them the day before) which later included my frustrated words about the plagiarisers.
Please, please, somebody….can WordPress admin help or has it got the power to shut these awful people down? They are spoiling things for me and I would imagine lots of other people. Can’t WP do something, like have a firewall or a plugin that will prevent these people from scraping for plagiarism? WordPress.org have two plugins to try and help, why can’t WordPress.com have something similar?
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This topic has been discussed extensively in the forums. Do a search on “blog scraping” or perhaps someone with more time on their hands right now can come by and post some of links to the discussions. You will find numerous suggestions in those threads.
You can also read Lorelle’s excellent posts on this topic:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/content-theft-and-wordpress/
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/how-to-stop-content-theft-the-best-tips/Unfortunately, the bottom line is that, no, these parasites cannot be shut down by WP.
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If you get your own self-hosted wordpress.org blog you could install the plugins you mention. If you had a self-hosted blog you could also delete the RSS feeds to make it harder for these people to scrape your content, but that could hurt real readers of your blog who want to be notified of updates. You could notify them through email instead with a plugin but some people still prefer RSS.
But as Mark says on wordpress.com they can’t give you that level of control. Sorry but that’s the price you pay for having a free blog and not having to worry about keeping the software updated.
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WordPress.com just hosts the blog. They don’t offer legal services or assert your copyright for you. Bloggers can indeed take action, and you can find out how by reading the threads Jennifer posted above.
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OK, thanks a lot folks. The links are very helpful, I am not sure how I didn’t see them before. I guess I just need to decide whether to continue blogging or keep my writing off the Internet. Having read through the linked articles, I will probably stop blogging.
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An alternative is to set your blog to private. You’d be able to invite 35 readers for free.
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