post theft (part post)
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Hi all,
Yesterday I published a post (http://piabelly.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/the-shopping/) on my blog (http://piabelly.wordpress.com/) and last night received an email saying there was a comment for moderation. It turns out that it’s not a comment, but someone who has just copied and pasted half of the first sentence to their blog (it seems to be their first post) and provided a link to my blog as the source (http://gunnarjostjif4y.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/the-shopping/).
There are no contact details for the owner of this blog, and I’m not sure what I can do to have this removed and prevent it happening in the future. Sure, the post references mine, but I don’t feel comfortable about my work being lifted and used elsewhere without my permission.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks!
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Well, that weblog seems like it’s some website by some person where he/she collects interesting posts, collects them and gives you a trackback. Basically I don’t really think you can do anything about that. You might want to contact support to complain against the blog.
http://wordpress.com/contact-support/ -
If they provide a link back to your blog, and only post a sentence or two, it typically comes under “fair use” and is not a violation of copyright. With just a sentence or two, if the people are interested in they will click on the link and go to your blog to read the rest and may find other things you have interesting.
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Half of a sentence with a link? This is not only a legally protected practice, but it’s good etiquette. Basically they are driving people to your blog with proof of how good your writing is, and a selection of text that small is not only polite, but very conservative indeed. This is a common practice and one that I encourage you to adopt, yourself. It is one of the main things which connects the members of the blogosphere.
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Hi Raincoaster and others – I guess where I come from, polite is a little different. Conservative yes, I said from the outset that the person had just used half a sentence. If they’d lifted the whole post, I would have felt differently, and copyright would have been a concern.
My concern was more that rather than linking with a selection of text and a post of their own, they just linked my post with the text. I’ve seen plenty of examples of the former, and it’s never bothered me on any blog if someone does this, because as you say, it’s a good way to connect people. It’s more the strangeness of linking to a post with no context of their own that made me feel uncomfortable.
But I guess it takes all types, right?
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No: it’s a common post format for a certain type of blog; in fact, I get paid to make posts like that on an independent gossip blog. That’s called a link post, and they’re popular with techies who have lots of things to share but don’t want to be wordy about it, and with gossip blogs, who have a sort of syndicate where they all link to one another every day. You just haven’t run into this before, but it’s been around for years.
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@noodling
IMO this is not a case of “content theft”. As raincoaster has explained using an excerpt and a link back to your original post is common practice and it is in line with blogging etiquette and will result in traffic back to your blog.IMO there is no grounds for an actionable DMCA complaint here so I’d like to point out that the option to mark this thread “resolved” is found in your original post.
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So what about times when I post (eg http://piabelly.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/diet-thief/ or http://piabelly.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/the-other-side-of-the-coin/) and then it’s immediately picked up by the same blog that’s linking to the majority of my posts – http://weightloss.anything08.com/diet-thief/ and http://weightloss.anything08.com/the-other-side-of-the-coin/.
In this case they have some weird randomly generated (it seems) username for my posts – “Kirk”, “dietgirl22” and even “erika83 | Diet, weight loss, fitness blog”.
I’m saddened to be linked to by blogs like this (and http://0d1.info/diet/, which also links some posts), because they both seem to link to a lot of junk and advertising sites. Sure, that’s how they make money, but I don’t really want to be included in that.
Is it the case that there is nothing I can do about this through WordPress?
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There’s plenty you can do about it, but nothing through WordPress unless WordPress hosts their blog. Do a search for “Blog Scrapers” or “Splog” and you’ll find lots of suggestions.
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