Plagiarize me once, shame on you. Plagiarize me twice, shame on me.

On Halloween I filed two DMCA notices with the Google Adsense program. My goal was simple, stop known plagiarists from profiting from my words. Yesterday, Google got back to me regarding the notices I faxed in:

We have received your DMCA complaint dated 10/31/06. We are currently reviewing the complaint and will contact you when we have completed processing the request.

We appreciate your patience during this time.

Regards,
The Google AdSense Team

Today, I checked the two sites I caught stealing from me and I could not find a single Adsense ad. I did see the spaces where the ads used to be. » Read the rest of the entry..

Abstract

33Rockers.com is a website created, written, and developed by Karthik Kastury — or at least that’s what he’d have you believe. His website has risen in the ranks and gained some notoriety since it’s inception due to the quality and insightful articles published online. Turns out that Karthik Kastury has been stealing not only other people’s words, but their blog designs as well.

The following post is written in the spirit of education. By making an example and exposing Karthik Kastury for the plagarising blogger that he is, I hope that others can learn why his actions prove not only unprofitable today, but stupid in the long run due to pagespank as a result of public shaming. I hope other bloggers learn that stealing content and claiming it as your own original work is foolish and possibly detrimental to your future career.

Full Text

Karthik Kastury is a plagiarist. Consider his most recent post, “The Hottest Map Based Mashups” posted on November 2, 2006. Here is a small snippet:

Of late, map mashups, applications based on on-line map services, have gained considerable attention. A map mashup integrates user-data on top of a geographical map pulled from an on-line map service such as Google maps and Yahoo! Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/). Several such applications are being rolled out daily.

Wow. Pretty good stuff. Unfortunately, its been stolen from an article entitled, “Location-enabled webfeed holds promis,” found at www.m-indya.com. The original author is one J. Murali and he posted his article on October 30th, 2006. Here is a snippet from his article: » Read the rest of the entry..

Over the last little bit a few visitors to MaxPower have let me know about a couple important issues / problems. This is my chance to thank them in a public manner:

Drunkey Love creator Kevin Wetzels alerted me to someone that had copied an entire post of mine, reposted it on their own site, and claimed it as their own original work. For shame. Kevin is a talented graphic artist and has created a great set of free icons (Drunky Love) as well as a very beautiful WordPress theme. Check out both at his website, Drunkey Love. Thanks Kevin!

Matt Oakes sent me an email to let me know that a page I had on MaxPower was now mysteriously disappeared. Turns out, somehow, it became marked as a private. I never noticed a problem because I could see the page fine (as I was logged in). Anyway, problem solved! Matt is a talented Javascript programmer who write plugins that use the jQuery library. I think his Catfish plugin is particularly intriguing. Thanks Matt!

Recently, it has come to my attention that there is a new type of insipid blogger. Unlike splogs which are created to promote commercial websites and contain mostly garbage text, these new blogs look polished and contain seemingly pertinent content of value.

The problem is, the text within has already been published by someone else. I name these plagiarist’s doppelbloggers.

» Read the rest of the entry..

So, dumb ass has gone and copied some of my content. I left a comment on his blog asking him to please link to my content and not simply copy and paste it. His response was to alter it subtly and delete my comment. Reading over the rest of his posts and doing some basic googling, I have found that the vast majority of his postings may be ‘lifted’ from other web pages.

So, what would you do?

• Name and shame? - Create a detailed list of this guys copy paste antics and publish it here to let others judge him;
• Another letter or two? - One didn’t work, did he think I would go away?;
• C & D - Doesn’t that only work for one post that I wrote and he copied, so it wouldn’t help the others;
• DMCA - I’m a Canadian, can I use that evil piece of legislation for ‘good’ even though US laws don’t apply to me;
• Combo - one or more of the above;
• Zfactor - Your input, any suggestions?

FYI: The pages this tool has copied from look to be largely, backwards, out of the way posts by authors who have long left the online world. So I expect little help from the others this guy has ripped of should I contact them. Also, the guy is using a cheap blogger account.

Any advice from someone in a similar situation would be greatly appreciated.

Update for John302 (aka the doppelblogger):
Both screenshots taken April 18th, 2006.

Now, I suppose, given an infinite number of monkeys with blogs in an infinite number of universes, that the same list could have been written twice. With all three tables in the same order. With the same capitalization. Co-ink-y-dink? I think not. Fess up plagiarst. You have already admitted to removing the images once I imposed hotlinking protection, why not admit you copied the text verbatim?