The End of the Did You Rob Bill Gates Scraping Saga?

Hopefully.

 Yesterday’s post was not scraped. When I checked the Technorati Links in the WordPress Dashboard, all the posts that were linked came up with a Great Big 404 error (page not found). Hurray!!!

Understand, Did You Rob Bill Gates is still stealing other peoples content, just not mine (fingers crossed). So, I wanted to share my thoughts on what may have worked, at least in this one instance.

As mentioned in the earlier FeedBurner post, I commented on their blog asking & then telling them to stop stealing my content. I also blocked their IP address so as not to allow access to the blog itself. Of course, nothing happened with these steps, but I felt it was the right progression to cover any further steps I would take.

What Might have worked.

On each of the linked posts, I clicked through to DYRBG as each of my new posts were linked. Of course, AdSense is right at the top, so I clicked the small Ads by Google link in the Ad Box. Within the popup screen there is a way to send Google your thoughts on the site you are reading.

Clicking that brings you to another page where you can tell how relevant the ads are to that post. Below that is a link to report a violation of AdSenses TOS. Clicking that gives you a choice of Website or Ad Violations.

Click Website, and you get a list of violations, including but not limited to, distributing your copyrighted material. Once you click that it will ask for examples of the infringement (you must type something in there, eg Your Link) & e-mail address (optional).

It’s doubtful that this worked, because the site is still there and scraping.

What I think may have worked.

Since they were scraping my RSS Feed every time I posted something new, that was the place to start.

I have been using the RSS Feed Signature Plugin by Smackfoo to put the copyright for WAHI in the footer of the feeds. The plugin works great, but some people have no respect for other peoples work even if it is protected. You can actually put anything you like in the footer, links back to the blog, advertisements, whatever. So, I put “IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON “DID YOU ROB BILL GATES”, IT IS STOLEN CONTENT! PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY ADS, IT WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE THIS THIEF!”

This showed up on EVERY post of mine they scraped so that if someone read their posting of my article, they would see it and possibly take heed and Not Click an Ad.

I don’t think they felt any guilt, but maybe it affected their pocketbook a bit. Maybe even enough to take down they posts they stole from me.

Actually, I don’t know if it was any one or combination of the above that worked, but something did. At least for the time being.

So, if your material is being scraped by such a Splog, maybe some or all of these steps will help stop the problem in it’s tracks.

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

August 7th, 2008 at 12:04pm | Posted by Joe | RSS, Spam | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

FeedBurner COULD Help Fight Content Scrapers IF They Wanted To

 If you remember, the other day I wrote about how “Did You Rob Bill Gates Blog is a Thief” was stealing content from this blog’s RSS Feeds. It still is. Not only from me, but from many others as well.

I did a couple of things to try to alleviate the problem of content theft.

Here is a few of the things I have done.

• I commented on their blog asking and then telling them to stop using my content without my permission.
• I contacted AdSense  (Google) stating that they (that blog) were infringing on my copyrighted material to no avail.
• I searched for and Blocked their IP address so they couldn’t access the blog directly.
• I even added a line “IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON “DID YOU ROB BILL GATES”, IT IS STOLEN CONTENT! PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY ADS, IT WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE THIS THIEF!’ to the Copyright in the footer of the RSS Feed, which showed on their blog.

All with no discernible result.

However, there COULD be another way to solve the problem of SPLOGS Scraping Feeds, at least on FeedBurner.

As you can see from the above, they have this report in Feed Statistics called “Uncommon Uses“.

 So, they already have an idea of people, bots and IP’s that are doing things that are a bit out of the norm. They even give you the option of telling FeedBurner that you know can trust the URL that they have tagged.

However, they only let you tell FB that you know the URL but they do Nothing with it. They don’t give you the option of Blocking it.

Since they can already track who or what is subscribed to your RSS, it makes sense that they have the ability to Block That Subscriber.

I think they should give us the option of Blocking Scrapers, especially since they can already identify them.

What do you think? Should FeedBurner give users the option of Blocking Scrapers in the Uncommon Uses portion of the reports?

July 29th, 2008 at 04:29pm | Posted by Joe | FeedBurner, RSS, Spam | 3 reader remarks | Print This Post

Did You Rob Bill Gates Blog is a Thief!

For the past couple of weeks, “Did You Rob Bill Gates?” has been scraping my RSS feed, including the copyright on the bottom.

I have left comments asking them to cease on MY posts on their blog. There is NO contact information, no about page, nothing. Apparently, there is not even an author, since the one post I did find was signed “Contributing Writer” (unless that was stolen too!)

Since they are a Splog and Google AdSense is plastered all over the place, I contacted AdSense to inform them that they are Infringing on my Copyrighted Content as well as other Bloggers I know. I did get an e-mail response from Google, and they want me to jump through too many hoops like sending my complaint by snail-mail or fax in order for them to even investigate.

Ain’t gonna happen. If Google wants to pay them and be labled an enabler of SPLOGS, then so be it. But I doubt it will bother big brother much since they own Blogger, the biggest splog enabler of them all.

Now, I did block their IP address on my Host, but that only keeps them off the site directly, it can’t block them from RSS. I looked round and round on FeedBurner (also owned by Google) for a way to block them from my Feed. NOT! Even the Forum on FB has multiple complaints of similar instances, but they just say they’re sorry, nothing they can do. But, I DID add a little note in the footer of the Feed, just for DYRBG.

Here is a list of TODAY’s front page of STOLEN CONTENT:

Genius Level Toilet Seat Innovation

25. July 2008 Dan Gould

Event: Ignite NYC on July 29

25. July 2008 Christine Huang

PSFK Conference SF Liveblog Recap: New Art

25. July 2008 Lauren Isaacson

Designers Rethink Starbucks

25. July 2008 Dave Pinter

My 30 day Journey with Twitter

25. July 2008 Teresa Morrow

Working at Home Blog Carnival-Ninety-fifth Edition

25. July 2008 Joe

Confessions of a Natural Born Follower

24. July 2008 Wendy Piersall

Circos Genetic Mapping

24. July 2008 Michael Harvey

 The reason there are no links is they all lead to DYRBG, but If your name is on the list, contact me. We have to find a way to stop this.

July 25th, 2008 at 11:22am | Posted by Joe | RSS, Rants | 1 reader remark | Print This Post