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..

Using Owen’s fantastic WordPress plugin antileech, I have successfully taken control over new posts appearing on a splog intent on copying them. Instead of getting actual post content, the splog gets a message written by me. Right now that message advocates gambling and buying firearms, two things expressly forbidden by the Adsense TOS (read Fight dirty by entrapping splogs using antiLeech).

If you could publish any message you wanted on a splog that was stealing your content, what would it be?

Rules:

• The splog removes all markup — no IMG’s and no links.
• There is a 140 word limit. The splog doesn’t like to post long entries and truncates after about 140 characters.
• The splog makes new categories based on the categories that the post came from. For example, if I put this post in a category on my blog called ‘eat shit and die’, the splog will make a new category called ‘eat shit and die’ and put whatever message you would like in the post content.
• Like categories, the splog accepts tags and creates new ones as they come in.
• The splog takes the real post title, regardless of fake content.
• The splog takes the real author name (at the time of posting) and links it to the original post.

The overall goal should be to get the splog’s adsense account yanked for violation of terms (see the bulleted list 1/3 down for some ideas on what constitutes a violation in Google’s eyes). Secondary goals are possible as well, one example would be to get the splog booted from their webhost (dreamhost). However, I feel it is important to first make sure that the revenue stream dies. If something else happens along the way, great.

Anyone care to share their splogging revenge fantasy?

Recently, I wrote a post thanking a few individuals who had tipped me off to some potential problems this website was having. One of the problems was a plagiarism issue — a website had gone and copied a page right off of maxpower and posted it on their own site chocked full of ads (images and all). I contacted the owner of the site, requested it be taken down and got a quick reply and apology and it was removed. Problem solved right?

Wrong! The post is back up, same address as before. This is both shameful and stupid! Imagine for a moment you got caught red handed stealing. You say sorry, but then go right back at it again — only this time with more vigor! The plagiarist learned nothing so its time to bust out a lesson plan…

Consider what would happen if I were to publish the details here on MaxPower including name, website, screencaptures of what has transpired, the emails, all for the world to see (and index) how the content thief operates. Google is all knowing and not very forgiving. Future employers searching this prospective employee’s name would in all likelihood find the maxpower page at the top of the list (dare we term this idea… pagespank?). All for a little adsense scratch. Stupid.

Then again, I should have suspected this was going to happen. Here was the thief’s original reply to my request to remove the stolen pages:

ok i do it

That’s the entire email, word for word.
[more to follow as it develops]

With the rampant rise of plagiarism, lawsuits, and just the general state of affairs around the blogosphere it seems that sooner rather than later, every blog should put up a Legal Notice / Terms of Use page. A Legal Notice page for your blog is like alarm company stickers on the windows of your house, they doesn’t really do anything other than alert visitors that you mean business. Professional burglars are still going to break in and steal things just as unscrupulous Internet visitors / scrapers continue to repost your content with their ads. At least you are giving the bad guys the heads up that you are serious about your work.

My current legal notice is copied from Elliott Back (by his permission). I changed the name and website in the text of the notice and added my own little blurb about RSS use and the theme that provides the look of this website (sawchuk). Once written the way I liked, I then published Legal Notice as a WordPress page (instead of a regular post).

Now, its all fine and dandy that the Legal Notice had been published, but I wanted it to be visible at the bottom of every page ever published on MaxPower.ca. I wrote a quick plugin to do the job and I thought that maybe others would find it interesting as well. So here is a quick how to / how it works:

» Read the rest of the entry..

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. » Read the rest of the entry..

Entrap: To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act.

With the recent release of AntiLeech, an anti splog plugin for WordPress by Owen Winkler, there finally exists a real method of fighting back against content scraping thieves. AntiLeech is a plugin for WordPress that attempts to serve up fake content to known splogs. The plugin identifies splogs by either their User-Agents or IP address (user supplied). From the plugin page:

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them.

AntiLeech also offer up the option of creating custom content to serve up only to splog bots. This option is how I now wildly progistcate on how to entrap would be splogers. By using AntiLeech, a splog will publish on their site a fake piece of content that you or I write. This content can be anything…. » Read the rest of the entry..

Version 0.02 has been released addressing much of the feedback received over the past week. New in this version is the ability to automatically insert your fingerprint at the start or end of a post, or at the end of the first paragraph of every post. Of course, you can still use the Fingerprint button in the Write Post dialogue. However, the option to automatically insert your fingerprint takes precedence over any placement defined in the editor on a per post basis. Also added was the ability to search BlogLines for any reference of your fingerprint, and some general code cleanup. Be sure to read install, setup, and usage details on the main post.

Download WP-FingerPrint-Beta2

Thanks to Lorelle, BLaM, and Plagiarism Today for providing valuable feedback to make this tool better. Keep the ideas coming!