A Blogger’s Nightmare
I’ll be following the developments over at Book-a-rama as Chris deals with the contents of her entire blog, along with the content belonging to several other bloggers, being re-published without their consent on another site.
As Chris and the others share how they manage to get out of this mess, I’ll share or link to it here.
Update: In a thread discussing the stolen feeds, Trish Collins provided two links to Lorelle at Wordpress on how to deal with content theft issues – here and here.
Update: Useful Wordpress plugins to look at after hearing about Chris’ situation: Antileech, Copyrighted Post, Digital Fingerprint.
Update: Looks like the site no longer is hosting the stolen content, and there is a post over at Book-a-rama from anonymous about the content being removed.
Update: This may be something that all sites can use to check if your content has been stolen – http://www.copyscape.com/. I have not used this, but it may be worth checking out – I saw a button for it on the sidebar over at Bookishgal.
Update: Lorelle left a comment below with some additional advice and insight into content theft, as well as a recommended link to Plagiarism Today.
© 2009, A Few Minutes With Michael. All rights reserved.
Thanks to Mishel at mis(h)takes
Thanks to Deb at Bookmagic
12 comments
WOW! Unbelievable! The nerve of some people. I had to have a look to see if anything of mine was there. Thankfully not but apart from Chris’s blog I spotted another blog that I read.
Cindy S.´s last blog ..Books Bought Meme #12
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Michael Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I’m making some additional changes behind the scenes this weekend on my blog after reading about all this – could happen to anybody’s blog that offers an RSS feed.
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I’m going to go check things out over there too. This is really disturbing.
Kathy´s last blog ..Happy Birthday, America!
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Michael Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I think perhaps a ’security blogiesta’-type event would be very good to have in the near future.
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The sad thing is it happens everywhere. I am on Flickr and you always hear stories from there about the same thing.
I wonder if blogger has the same thing?
Anyway nice news there is an award waiting for you at my blog here.
Caspette´s last blog ..Blog Awards & Welcome to New Followers
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Michael Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Hi Caspette, thank you for the award. I appreciate getting it, this is my first one.
And thanks for building a stronger blogging community.
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hi Michael – you’re Michael right? not Superman? Or is this just a nightmare? Wake up!!
Rather leave the bravery for the superheroes.
We do it ’cause we can.. Would you love a few minutes with yourself?
Maybe Symantec/Trend Micro might save you.
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Michael Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Good luck with life.
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Wow! This is terrible. As far as I can tell, nothing has been copied from my site. I have seen people with a copyright protection on their page – I put one up earlier today – just in case. I am not sure it will do any good though.
Cathy´s last blog ..Read-it-First: There’s Something About St. Tropez
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Michael Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
I’ve not looked into the options to make Blogger more secure, since I’m using Wordpress for this blog and have it hosted on a separate server. There are a far number of options for securing it when you host it yourself – I’ve gone through a fair number of them this weekend, and will continue to tighten it up throughout this month.
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Thanks for spreading the word that copyright protection of your content is your choice, you can choose to let others use your content for free or not, and how easy it is to protect your content and defend your rights.
However, I never recommend publicizing any offenders as that can actually hurt you more than it hurts them.
Also, the issue of copyright violations has nothing to do with WordPress or any other blogging platform. It is also not personal. Abusers come grabbing feeds and copying your content manually by hand as well as with bots. It happens to everyone, unfortunately, but if we fight back as a team, we can beat them down, but we all have to work together.
I also recommend you check out Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today as he has the most extensive information on online copyright violations and actions.
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Michael Reply:
July 16th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Hi Lorelle,
Thanks for your advice. And thank you for your brilliant site – I’ve gone back to it more than a few times while learning about Wordpress.
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