I was dismayed to discover that a website has been plagiarising my writing. The site – http://www.scumbagclothing.com – is running a blog whereby they are merely copying and pasting posts from othe blogs word for word, and stealing the pictures too. The actual authors are not credited: no weblinks are given to the original blogs they come from, and there is no information at all on who said posts are written by. So not only are they republishing content without permission, but they are not giving any sort of due credit to the actual authors. This is unjust, unfair and totally untoward. Even more infuriating is that there is no contact information of any kind on the website itself – no name, no e-mail address, nothing. (You can find my stolen articles in the Dressmaking category. Clearly they are just finding posts categorised under a particular word on WordPress and copying the articles on to their on blog.)
If someone wanted, or wants, to quote from my articles they would be welcome given that they contact me beforehand to gain my permission and provide adequate – and obvious – information on the author (myself). This is standard practise: I even have a copyright notice on this blog.
I have now nothing to do but go through the longwinded process of tracking down the person responsible. In the meantime, I am now signing off every post of mine with a link back to the homepage. I’m going through the archive and adding links as well. I am also trying to find out the method of adding a copyright notice to the bottom of posts in the blog’s feed. If anyone should be able to help me on how to do this, I would be very grateful.
Thanks,
Anushka
http://byanushka.wordpress.com
Hi Anushka, I did a WHOIS lookup on the domain name and this came up:
Registration Service Provided By: WEBST.RU
Contact: +7.9139079575
Website: http://webst.ru/
Domain Name: SCUMBAGCLOTHING.COM
Registrant:
n/a
Dvornikov (advertolog@gmail.com)
Nevskiy pr, 34
St-Petersburg
Leningradskaya oblast,196000
RU
Tel. +812.7163656
Creation Date: 17-May-2007
Expiration Date: 17-May-2011
Domain servers in listed order:
ns2.ablsc.com
ns1.ablsc.com
Administrative Contact:
n/a
Dvornikov (advertolog@gmail.com)
Nevskiy pr, 34
St-Petersburg
Leningradskaya oblast,196000
RU
Tel. +812.7163656
Technical Contact:
n/a
Dvornikov (advertolog@gmail.com)
Nevskiy pr, 34
St-Petersburg
Leningradskaya oblast,196000
RU
Tel. +812.7163656
Billing Contact:
n/a
Dvornikov (advertolog@gmail.com)
Nevskiy pr, 34
St-Petersburg
Leningradskaya oblast,196000
RU
Tel. +812.7163656
Status:ACTIVE
Hope that helps!
Wow, they even have your post on plagiarism on it!
I know – it’s hilarious. They’ve obviously just stolen my feed and anything tagged under “dressmaking” is automatically copied.
That is so terrible, but unfortunately quite a few bloggers are subject to this and I am not sure why – other than the websites attempting to gain traffic through google referrals, and hence revenue through advertising. I do recommend “whois” look ups by the way – normally a very good way of finding out lots of hidden details about who owns what company (I am way too nosy and like to know whether where I am shopping is independent or supporting a city fat cat). If they are a UK registered company then you can often get the UK Company’s House accounts/filings too (although you may need to pay for that)- which lists directors and people responsible.
The thing about them is that they have stolen and are republishing a huge amount of feeds – so they get the advantage in that it looks as though they have a vibrant, varied and very regularly updated blog on their website – which gives them rather a unique selling point. :(
I did email them but they ignored it and continue. The best way to cope with it that I can think of is by adding a link to my site at the bottom of every post. I know that there should be a way of adding a further copyright notice to the bottom of posts in a feed reader, but am not sure how to go about this.
Hi,
I’ve just encountered the same problem as you and I’ve had a post plagiarised by these guys. Has every single post from thereon (from the one stolen) been taken and posted onto that site? If so this is terrible :(
Yes – every single post that I put under the category “dressmaking” gets stolen and reposted.
Yikes, that is terrible. Have you ever tried to change the category name? You might also want to change your Reading RSS settings to “summary” rather than the entire post. I haven’t tested it yet, but it might help somewhat.
No I haven’t as I like the name of the category…
Good idea to try changing the reading settings – I’ll see if it works!
Do you know how to put a copyright notice at the bottom of posts as they are read in a feed reader?
Well, dress-making or dress making are all good variations of the category name – even Dressmaking (not sure if it makes a difference but it wouldn’t hurt to try).
Once you shorten the RSS it only displays the first maybe 30 words or so. I’m not sure how bothered those guys are to go into your post and copy everything (probably not very likely as I read they steal from people’s RSS feeds, though I’m not sure exactly how they do it) – it appears to be automatic and there’s not a lot that can be done :(
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