I have been running my recently released plugin, digital fingerprint, here at MaxPower for about 3 weeks. By week three, I discovered that my content is being ripped off (via the rss feed) and reposted on another site in a semi-abbreviated format complete with all the tags I have used. In effect, the splog is stealing all the keywords and SEO of every article I write. No doubt, this post will probably show up there too.

One the one hand I’m very happy that the idea behind Digital Fingerprint works. On the other, I am not so happy that my content is being used in an unauthorized manner. Its one thing to copy large blocks of text and attribute them to me, its quite another to simply scrape them out of my feed and post them on your site with ads shoved in them.

So here is what I’m going to do, follow my own advice except I’m also going to experiment with the AntiLeech Plugin and Fighting Dirty, and maybe my own htaccess tricks.

I’ve already sent an email directly to the site owner — its been a week and I haven’t heard back. I also sent an email to the hosting company. They suggested that even though the site violated their own terms of service (which they admitted), they weren’t going to do anything unless they received a DMCA notice. Why even have rules if you don’t follow them? Hypocrites.

Anyway, I’m going to use this opportunity to test out AntiLeech and see if I can make the splog publish whatever I want. Expect a regular report.

In other plagiarism news, I’m eagerly anticipating the results of Jonathan Bailey (of Plagiarism Today) filing a lengthy DMCA notice with Google in regards to activity by Bitacle.