Please Don't Steal This Web Content

I've run into a few scraper sites - they repost my content, or repost someone else's content that had used a photo of mine, for instance. Scum of the earth, and they'll die first, as Chuck D almost said. And I don't even write long posts: how hard would it be do avoid plagiarism?

Please Don't Steal This Web Content:
Movement is afoot to stifle “scraper sites,” which scrape content off blogs and repost it on other sites to profit from ad impressions.
... This is automated digital plagiarism in which software bots can copy thousands of blog posts per hour and publish them verbatim onto Web sites on which contextual ads next to them can generate money for the site owner.

Such Web sites are known among Web publishers as “scraper sites” because they effectively scrape the content off blogs, usually through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and other feeds on which those blogs are sent.

VanFossen's Lorelle on WordPress blog is an authority on the Internet for blogging dos and don'ts. One of the no-nos is using content from other sites without getting permission.

and here is how Ms. VanFossen finds stolen material:

VanFossen has several ways of checking to see if other sites have scraped her posts. She puts full links in her posts to other articles of hers so that when one of her stories is posted on another Web site, it will link back to her story, and she can see the Trackback. Trackback is a “linkback” method Web publishers use to identify who is linking to or referring to their articles.

She has set up Google Alerts with her byline so that she will get notifications any time Google comes across a news site or blog with a reference to her. She also does a keyword search for her name on Google search, Google Blog Search and Technorati. In addition, she uses a WordPress plug-in that allows her to insert a digital fingerprint, a series of unrelated words, into her posts that she can search on in case her byline is stripped.

I only really search for my photography being re-appropriated. I don't mind a blog borrowing an image of mine to populate a post, as long as the blog links to me somehow, and doesn't claim my photo as their own.

I often see posts of mine ending up at link-farm pages, as described here:

There are many aggregator Web sites that collect content from a variety of sources, often related to a specific topic area, like real estate or cars, around which they can serve contextual ads. While some of the sites reproduce entire blog posts or articles from other sites (CNET News.com included), others offer just headlines or the first paragraph or a few paragraphs. Many include attribution and a link back to the original article. But providing attribution does not preclude a copyright violation, experts say.
...
The scraped site can even appear on Technorati before the original content, he said. And in some cases, images are getting scraped and “hotlinked” back to the original site, thus depriving that site of bandwidth and costing them money, he added.

I usually find scraper-scum when I put a link to something I've written previously in the first paragraph or two, and IceRocket or Technorati informs me of a new link to the previous post. Oh well, I consider it a side effect of the wild, wild west nature of the blogosphere. Information wants to be free......

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, copyright, fraud, Free_Speech