Is “Cricket” stealing your genealogy blog content? I would recommend that you find out. I filed a DMCA complaint against this blogger today through Google/Blogger. This person has been taking entire posts wholesale and representing them as his/her own work. While there is a link to the “source” for the material, it is not considered acceptable practice in blogging to post an entire blog post written by someone else. Quotations and even block quotations are considered appropriate, but what this person is doing is wrong, and he/she could be doing it to you. Go see at http://familyhistoryideas.blogspot.com/. Don’t support this person’s efforts by clicking on ad content or by linking to him/her unless you use the rel=”nofollow” tag. If your content is being stolen, I urge you to protect your work by filing a complaint. Here’s how: Digital Millennium Copyright Act on Blogger.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if this post is stolen, too?
Technorati Tags: dmca, copyright, genealogy, blogging, theft, blogger, google
Without having looked at the site, just knowing the host, I’d say odds are it is a spam blog. I agree that the DMCA is probably the best way to handle this though Google can be very difficult to work with on this issue.
However, if you play by their rules, they will remove the site. It just may take a few days or weeks.
Also, thank you for mentioning that one should not link to it, that is something that everyone should obey in this case.
Good luck with this matter and let me know if there is any way I can help!
Too funny! LOL! It is! Your post on Content Theft is on that spam blog!!!
It seems to me that most of the content being stolen is from Ancestry… so all you have to do is write up a blog post stating as much and word will get out to Ancestry that someone has taken their content without their permission. That will put a quick end to that blog. Ancestry won’t stand for anyone helping themselves to their content 😉
Dana:
As Jasia says, your Content Theft Post is there. So these must be triggered automatically, not by any human interaction.
All five blogs claimed to be authored by this person contain content from other blogs – word for word. I would also hazard a guess that English is not this person’s first language.
Were you to contact some of the other sites with stolen content and join forces you might have a better chance of putting this person out of business.
Good Luck!
fM
Thanks everyone. I have been busy with family and career and will be starting grad school this fall, so I wasn’t updating this blog as much anyway, but knowing my content is just going to appear on this other blog makes me not want to post at all. I believe it will be obvious to Google what is happening, but until the site is shut down, I’m not sure I’ll do any posting at all. My family history is very personal to me, and for someone to come along, steal what I said about it and my pictures, too (despite the fact that I’ve disabled hotlinking in my blogs) — it just makes me feel sick.
My posts, except for this one, have all been removed from the other blog, but the blog still exists. I think until Google acknowledges it’s a scraper site and totally shuts it down, as well as the other blogs this person maintains (all of which are similar to this one), I can’t post anything here. It will just be stolen. As I said before, this is too personal to me to allow someone to steal it.
Good luck with graduate school. I searched my bloglines for the offender and thank goodness didn’t find it listed – I have over 250 feeds I attempt to read and I can’t really keep up with all of them some days! I will miss your posts. Thanks for the heads up and the link to Google’s policy and the DMCA. Copyrite is an important and serious matter.
This family history blog is excellent. I linked to it because of a family relationship to Moores and Jouetts. I would like to know how you begin such a blog so that the family history contents can be accessible to others in the extended family or those doing research on the family.
Go Bulldogs, Dana. (UGA graduate)