Is My Blog Worth Stealing?
Apparently to some, it is.
I was helping a co-worker with the same issue that I blogged about in my last post on how to improve SharePoint list item delete calls. When I Googled (Binged if that makes you feel better) on the subject trying to find a clear answer to her question I found another blogger who had written on the same subject. Cool! Maybe he has the missing piece. I opened the link to find … my own post. There it was, in its entirety. With no clear attribution as to its original source. There was a link on the page back to my site, but why would anyone click it since the entire post was there for their reading pleasure.
So, tonight I did some more searches and found at least two other copies of the same post, one with absolutely no link back at all to my blog. More searches turned up other copies of my posts. So, am I upset? Heck yeah! What can I do about it? Probably nothing. I did a WhoIs search on one of the domains and practically had to download a new font to display the name of the registered domain owner. I won’t mention the sites here as I am loathe to do anything to raise their SEO rankings.
My approach then will be (for now): to not care. I will make a small gesture of adding a copyright notice to the bottom of each posting, even though legally this is not necessary, and, perhaps, adding a “Posted By: Andreas Zenker” tag as well. I’m not really thinking that this will actually stop these sites from scraping my content into their little pay-per-click campaign but maybe there stupid little servers will have to waste a few cycles parsing out some text before they copy my blog over. I’m sure the increased power consumption will cripple them. Take that! ;-)
Update: 9/19/2009
Actually the one site is in English, just hosted elsewhere. Funny thing is I see a new track-back from that site this morning. Once again my post is copied in full, the only reason there is a link to me at all is that I embedded a link to my blog in this post. Maybe that is the secret! I will make the copyright tag a link back to me. Also, they didn't waste any cycles on removing the copyright tag, it got copied as well.
Posted on ASP.NET Weblogs © Copyright 2009 - Andreas Zenker