It's a funny thing to stumble across not just one isolated post but your blog, post by post, published (with photos) on a commercial site - obviously via a live feed. Felt odd when this happened to me yesterday anyway. (on closer inspection, it's just the first 8-10 lines of each post... but still!)
I googled 'stealing blog content' and found that this is quite common phenomenon. Odd. It must be particularly galling for the many bloggers (like me I admit) who are also trying to scratch a living from freelance writing.
I know that online mags are under pressure to find 'sticky' (I'm learning!) content for their sites - but aren't we, as authors, supposed to give them permission or something? Copyright? It seems unfair that they are running (and earning from) their own ads alongside my content.
It's a tough old world.
The diary of a British expat living in Kenya. News, views, debate and a healthy dose of trivia.
Totally unacceptable. I hope you called them on it. It's NOT legal, just cos it's online. The content still belongs to you!
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how many people also pose as others and steal blogs whihc they try to pass off as their own.
This happened to me too. I contacted one site I found my stuff on. They claim that since they get it through 'YAHOO' it's common property. It's not really true. We kind of give Yahoo and Google and search engines in general permission to search and reprint parts of our items in searches so others can find us= however, my husband says that these search engines actually do have our entire content on their servers somehow- this is why any random search can find any random sentence or key word or phrase from our blog/website. But they are not reprinting the whole thing at once, so it is not copyright violation (I guess.....) but for these other 'bozos' who do this, I believe it is wrong and they should contact us as authors and not simply copy from feeds from Yahoo or Google - especially full articles and surely not photos.
ReplyDeleteHey
ReplyDeleteEasiest way to deal with this is to do create post summaries using the "After the Jump" functionality of blogger.
RSS feeds get the first 3 lines or so of the post and people have to come to the blog to read the rest.
More here
- Ntwiga
Nooooo - don't listen to anonymous. It makes it really annoying for us who read you through RSS feeds. If someone has a restricted feed, I tend not to bother reading the article/commenting.
ReplyDeleteRe: people stealing content, I know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that jazz but really! Hope you've contacted the site and told them to remove your content.
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