Does this look at all familiar?
If you thought it was only ever the uber-popular kids on the block that have content scraped, without permission and then used to make money without the blog author’s knowledge - you would be wrong.
The art of splogging is nothing new — spam comments and advertising attempting to pretend it’s blogging are all quite commonplace — what sets bitacle.org apart, is the attempts to legitimise the process of stealing content and making money via content theft..
Hiding in plain sight
Bitacle are pushing the ‘aggregation’ angle to a whole new level. They state such things as, Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors and even link to a Creative Commons Deed that actually seeks to disallow the very act they are perpetrating.
They’re also making sure they have plenty of content to fall back on. Every post is faithfully archived1, all of which will help skew search results and ensure a constant supply of revenue.
Baldrick, I have a plan..
Should you wish to starve bitacle.org and their kith and kin2, then there is an answer care of Owen Winkler’s antileech.
Outing the bad guys
Just blocked another splog - digitalrightsforum.com [ip: 205.234.240.99]
- .. except of course imagery and other bandwidth hogging content that they happily leave behind (↩)
- .. by denying them the very fuel the need to survive, content (↩)
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of annoyances, google, journal, rants, search, spam.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Oct 11th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
[…] Smackfoo […]
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Oct 25th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
[…] In the latest episode - Episode 8: Dealing with splogs, posting by e-mail and more a goodly number of plugins are covered, including sig2feed and a little coverage of the joy that is splogging. […]
Oct 5th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Me? One of the “uber-popular kids”. Yikes. Claim denied.
But you are totally right on with the scum sucking scrapers stealing our stuff. Keep spreading the word. We can fight back. And it doesn’t have to involve revenge, just putting a stop to it.
Oct 5th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Exactly. Denying scrapers the very thing they use to make a profit will cause them to go elsewhere - or, shock horror, ask for it first.