Content theft and copyright breach in progress.
http://newjobq.com/ is stealing my posts and publishing them without attribution. Is there actually anything we can do about this?
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The Scientist
Life and Times of a permanently bemused British postdoc in exile.
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*snarl*
- Date:
- Saturday, 31 May 2008 - 01:49 UTC
Last updated: Saturday, 31 May 2008 - 01:49 UTC
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Comments
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There seem to be a bunch of these sites where people just register a domain and then aggregate stuff from all over the web.
The best I can suggest is that you get their IP (“host newjobq.com” → 72.167.210.14), run it through whois and see where they’re registered. In this case – GoDaddy.com, one of the major DNS registrars. Who have an abuse department: abuse@godaddy.com.
I think most people recognise these sites for what they are – nothing – but it is really annoying to see your content without attribution. Someone stole a whole website of mine some years ago. I sent them an angry email and it disappeared the next day – so it can work.
Richard – well worth trying to nobble them… but I guess you could consider it a compliment! Or possibly a stalker. Ulp.
This seems to have been happening quite a bit to the ScienceBloggers, so they may know more about what to do. Although it may involve cephalopodic hoards.
They might be wanting to have some content on that site before they’ve put up their actual site, such that the url has some ranking in the search engines already. I too would recommend you complain and would think you have good chances they’ll stop it, though they are likely to just chose to echo somebody else then.
Some years ago I came coincidentally across a poem of myself without any sources that had apparently been copied from my website and made its way through various other websites. I found this really disturbing. Upon my request they either removed the poem or added a referral. Either way, here as in many other instances regarding webby things, the legal situations would need to be clarified.
I had the same thing happen to me a couple of years ago. It stopped after I kept visiting the site and entering comments that the post was taken without permission from [my blog].
Good plan Betsy. I’ll try that.
You can also licence your blog entries and post a prominent “terms” statement — plenty of blogs do that.
If these “nicked” posts are your NN blog posts, if it were me I would check the NN “terms and conditions”, as there is I imagine a licence policy there and the NN webmaster might take this up for you with the other site. We sometimes find journal and other licenced content reproduced without permission on 3rd party websites, and we tell the people concerned to take down the content – which they do, in the cases I know of.
See comment at the end of my related (but not copied!!!) post – there is no need to register for copyright or display a licence policy or copyright statement. Copyright is yours from the moment the text is created until you sign it away.
Richard – if you think you’re hard done by, take a look at this
That is the freakiest thing I’ve seen in a while- its almost like identity theft in a way, because you put so much of yourself into your blog.
I’ve emailed abuse@godaddy.com . Googling godaddy is interesting, they have a really bad reputation for customer service.
Googling godaddy is interesting
DNS registrars are the bottom-dwellers of the internet. The best you can say is that they are licensed, legal bottom-dwellers.
They wrote back quite quickly, with instructions to follow the instructions here .
The Nature Network terms are here. They include this wording:
This website and its content are protected by copyright, database rights, trade marks and other intellectual property rights. No right to use or licence of any of those intellectual property rights is granted except as explicitly set out in these Conditions.
It might be useful to send this link to any “nickers”, Richard?
Thanks Maxine. I shall use that information…
Finally, got around to going through points (i) – (vi) at B, and sent off a PGP-signed letter.
Whee.
(0×9F5687DB if you’re wondering.)