Archive for the ‘Copyright Infringement’ Category

Facebook Face Off?

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Many Facebook users are angry or at least concerned about Facebook’s revised and more aggressive terms of service (TOS).

Consumerist has some good info here about Facebook’s perpetual content rights grab, and WebTechLaw explains the legal ramifications and what Facebook’s revised terms mean for your content.

I’ve never been a Facebook fan and now I like it even less. But at least it’s provided inspiration for a new limerick:

Facebook Face-Off
By Madeleine Begun Kane

Greedy Facebook has published new rules
Which play all its users for fools.
It’s a content rights grab—
A perpetual nab
Of your stuff just for using its tools.

UPDATE: Facebook has reversed itself about these new rules as a result of bad press and membership ire. I’ll be activating my account and I’ll see how it goes.

Victory In My Battle Against Feed Scraping Content Thief 4Comedy.com (Updated)

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Last week when I was bitching about 4Comedy.com’s stealing my humor blog’s content, I had no idea I was dealing with a “feed scraper” site. All I knew was that I was being ripped off — every time I posted in this humor blog, my entire post appeared on 4Comedy.com within minutes.  Needless to say, I was a very pissed off blogger.

So what did I do?  First I posted comments at 4Comedy.com demanding that its thievery stop.  At least I tried to.  But not surprisingly, my comments never appeared there.

Next I reported its copyright violations to Google AdSense, via a link at 4comedy.com’s site.  The following day I received an email telling me how to formally report a Google AdSense DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) Infringement Complaint. 

Unfortunately, the procedure involved tons of time-consuming work, requiring me to assemble all sorts of documentation of 4Comedy.com’s  many infringements.   Then (I’m told) this documentation is forwarded to the alleged infringer.  And after that, heaven-only-knows-what happens.

I responded to Google’s email with a request for some accelerated action.  My justification was that in this post http://4comedy.com/?p=463, 4comedy.com had reproduced this post, in which I called it a content thief.

I didn’t receive any response to my email, but apparently it got their attention.  How do I know?  Because today the Google AdSense text ads disappeared from the top of 4Comedy.com’s site.  Hallelujah!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. While I was waiting to hear from Google, I did some research on how to deal with RSS feed scraping content thieves.  And I found some great resources,  including:

1. AntiLeech, a plugin that “helps prevent content theft by sploggers” and  a detailed article explaining the benefits of AntiLeech Splog Stopper: Fighting Back Against Content Thieves;

2. An interesting article with the enticing title How to stop rss scrapers from stealing your content plus revenge; 

3. A tutorial, Blocking bad bots and site rippers (aka offline browsers);

4. An article entitled How you can stop dirty feedscrapers in 3 easy steps; and

5. This article about Attacking scrapers and content thieves legally.

I found the material posted at all of those links very informative, and I’m planning to give that AntiLeech plugin a try.  But I was feeling a bit lazy and I was looking for some instant gratification.  And, happily, I found it: A commenter named Robert posted the following suggestion here:

Alternatively, to curl up even less unproductive work, add this line to .htaccess:
Deny from 74.52.58.162
Which would even allow you to block a whole range of IP addresses in case it proves necessary…

Armed with this simple-sounding solution, I decided to try it.  My first step was to identify 4Comedy.com’s IP.  So I checked its trackback data, which identified its IP as  74.53.110.146.  I then confirmed the IP number by pinging 4comedy.com, using my computer’s Run function:  ping 4comedy.com.  Next I checked my logs and verified that 4comedy.com’s IP was routinely showing up there.

Now that I had the infringer’s IP, I added this code to my .htaccess file:

Deny from 74.53.110.146

Finally, I FTPed the revised .htaccess file and, like magic, 4Comedy.com’s content thievery came to a halt: MadKane.com has been freed from the slings and arrows of 4Comedy.com’s feed scraping infringements.

Of course, that low-life feed scraper is still taking material from other sites like Comedy Central. Hey Comedy Central!  Try this. You’ll like it.

UPDATE WITH ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: As I learn about additional good resources on this topic, I’ll be adding them here.  Feel free to make suggestions via a comment to this post.

a: What To Do When Someone Steals Your Content is a must read.

b: Dnsstuff.com is a source of many fine tools, including a “DNS Lookup” tool — helpful in ascertaining IP addresses.

c. Plagiarism Today is an excellent source of information about plagiarism, content theft, and copyright issues online.

UPDATE 2: 4Comedy.com seems to have disappeared.  I can only hope it stays that way. 

UPDATE 3: 4Comedy.com is now resolving to a different domain — domainnamesbusiness.info/4comedy/index.php. But the IP is the same, so my blog should still be protected from its feed scraping.

4Comedy.com Is A Content Thief (Another Update)

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

4Comedy.com keeps publishing my blog posts without permission and ignores my requests (via attempted comment posts) to remove my material  and stop stealing my humor posts.  Right now dozens of my posts are at that site, mostly in a section labeled Limericks. 

Perhaps this will get 4Comedy.com’s attention.  STOP STEALING MY HUMOR POSTS AND REMOVE MY POSTS FROM YOUR SITE! 

UPDATE: Ha! Ha! Ha!  The thieves even stole this post!!!  Their theft is clearly automated:  Here’s their repoduced copy of this post: http://4comedy.com/?p=463  (I’m deliberately not linking to them, so you’ll have to copy/paste to see it.)

I wonder if an actual person will notice it and remove it.

UPDATE 2: My updated  post appeared on 4comedy.com as a second post.  Does that mean that this second update will trigger a third post there? Stand by and I’ll report back.

UPDATE 3: So far, this post hasn’t been stolen for a third time.  Is 4comedy.com’s bot slacking off?  Human intervention, perhaps?  I don’t think so, because the first two versions are still on 4comedy.com’s front page.  Surely a human would notice and remove posts accusing the site of stealing content.  Stay tuned for further reports about 4comedy.com’s copyright infringement of my posts.