Are They Content Thieves?
I came across a website that has my last 2 posts on word for word! What makes it worse is that under each posts it states that it was written by them. Of course it is not just my posts that have been reproduced, as there are quite a few other posts from other blogs that I recognise such as Weblog Tools Collection.
I think it may be a fair assumption that all of the content has been taken from other blogs.
I am not sure it is a good idea to link to them but I suppose with claims like this, evidence is a good idea, so here are my previous 2 posts:
http://www.planetwordpress.com/2006/05/11/more-translations-for-wp-and reas09/
http://www.planetwordpress.com/2006/05/09/lightbox2-plugin-for-wordpre ss/
Unfortunately there does not seem to be an obvious way of contacting the website owner to ask them who they are, what they are doing and why do my post appear on their site as if they wrote them.
I’m not really sure what to do about this. Is it fair use, or should I be complaining to them about stealing my posts?
I think my £500 per article fee may just have been created. Now if I can just find out who to send the invoice to, 
Note: I have posted this under WordPress etc categories to see if it also gets republished.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Site News, WordPress, WordPress Themes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:59 am
I just looked, and yes!! Your “Content Thieves” post is up as their most recent. Looks like they are mirroring you post for post. I wonder if that includes comments, too?
May 12th, 2006 at 2:52 am
http://www.planetwordpress.com/2006/05/11/are-they-content-thieves/
I wouldn’t have cared, but there is way too much AdSense links in there to make it look like any serious project. Make sure to post a lot of £500-entries before they are forced away.
May 12th, 2006 at 2:55 am
However, they do link to the original authors. Kind of. But the AdSense to Credits ratio is 200:1, and that’s just not good.
May 12th, 2006 at 2:57 am
And just to make it even better, look at the theme URL in the footer. Monetizing the web? Oh yeah, make money from other peoples content. And they are even kind enough to licence the articles away as CC-licensed material.
Since they obviously do it for the money, just send the bill!
May 12th, 2006 at 5:06 am
You can identify their ip and ban it from your server. I don’t know if you’re on windows or linux, but linux has .htaccess files that can shut ‘em out.
May 12th, 2006 at 7:20 am
The link to the post author is new since my post. It did say “written by planetwordpress.com” without a link! It is a welcome addition but I still think what they are doing isn’t right.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
There are tons of “planet style” aggregators out there. I run one myself. Although I did get everyone’s permission to start, and the rest have been added by request. People have found that planet aggregators drive a lot of traffic to their sites. Some do a better job of displaying the author than others. Planet Gnome does a wonderful job of it, for example. There is a list of a lot of theme at the Planet website. Here are some other examples of them(the ones I’m on):
Emerging Church Blogs
RVA Blogs
May 12th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
I have nothing against aggregators and there are some fine examples out there that are useful and I would agree that they can be a good source of visits.
However this particular website did not link to its sources when I wrote the post. They have since started to link but not by post title and credit link as I would prefer.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Write to http://www.whoisguard.com and tell them what’s going on. They should be able to sort it out for you.
The owner of the site is currently hiding behind WhoIsGuard, under the email address of 24badf81e1454fbaa93d63a6860bf0c8.protect@whoisguard.com so if you talk to WhoIsGuard, they’ll probably close them down. Especially if you mention “lawsuit”.
May 22nd, 2006 at 11:19 am
I have had this happen with several posts, and as you say, it is impossible to contact these people. I had it happen with a really personal post too. Not good at all. How can we prevent it?
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
I don’t think we can prevent it.
Maybe personal posts should remain personal. Publish them with password protection and only give the password to those who you want to see the posts!
May 25th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Well, if you want to prevent them you could put a few extra lines in your .htaccess:
order allow,deny
deny from 70.87.46.164
allow from all
It would keep them from getting to your web site from their server and so it wouldn’t be able to update.
May 25th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Nope, sorry for the junk comments… see the formatting here
May 26th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
[...] The new planetwordpress.com site seems to have the sole purpose of generating money from adsense clicks based on other content which I’m sure goes against the licence I have my content under (CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0) and as such I have contacted Google to complain about the sites participation in the adsense program. Searching Google for mentions of planetwordpress.com it seems like I am not the only person to notice there content being stolen. Comment on this post [...]
May 27th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
If I remember right, there are 3 sites this particular person or persons use;
Planet Wordpres - planetwordpres . com (don’t want to leave a link)
WordPress Station - wpstation . com
Both link to my blog (blogrolls do not have my blog listed)
Planet WordPress looks like it is down for maintenance.
The orignal author’s link and blog is under the title of the post. From what I’ve seen, there is very little original content on the site - just a lot of teasers from the original article, if not teasers the article isn’t much.
I installed a copyrite plugin on the site so it displays it at the bottom of each article.
I’ve had the same thoughts like you on these 2 sites, but haven’t removed them from access yet. Even if access is removed, the content of the article is still there.
For now, I’ll take the link (for technorati reasons) and keep an eye on the content and trackbacks to my articles.
May 30th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Mac: wpstation.com is not one of his sites this is run by miklb who spends his time searching through the feeds he reads for interesting WordPress news and writes about it.
May 30th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
And a good looking site as well. Looks like it could be one of Andreas’ designs.
As far as the content theft goes, I think it maybe difficult to stop. Myself, I am not too worried as long as there is a link back. It is just too easy to do!