Applaud Those Who Warn You: Your Blog’s Content Is Being Stolen

I’ve seen a huge jump in the number of bloggers stunned that they, little blogs on the blogosphere map, are having their content stolen and abused through their feeds. Over and over they say the same thing: “I thought only the top bloggers got their content stolen.”

BULL.

The joke about size doesn’t matter applies to blogs. Some splog scrapers don’t care about who you are, what you blog about, or how “big” your blog is. They grab what they can, when they can. And they republish it as theirs or as if they have your permission to republish. They are using and abusing your hard work and making money on it.

They are winning the battle because you don’t care enough about your blog and your writing to check regularly to see if your blog content is stolen. And when you find your blog’s content has been stolen or your copyright abused, they expect you won’t do anything about it. After all, it’s up to the big bloggers to fight back, right?

WRONG.

Content theft can hit anyone. Big, little, talking about politics, religion, sex, drugs, rock and roll, technology, porn, movies, music, television, work, shopping, fads, celebrities, anime, games, cartoons, horse sex, school, teachers, parents, children, programming, it doesn’t matter. Every blogger is a potential victim of content theft or feed scraping, and your hard written and generated blog content could be being ripped off right now.

Even Plagiarism Today got ripped off bitacle. Talk about a blog you do not want pissed off when you are stealing blog content!

In a future post, I will be talking more about what you can do to help put a stop to scamming splogs like bitacle, but for now, check out What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content, The Growing Trends in Content Theft, and Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements to help you get started. If you have a WordPress blog, check out Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft and/or AntiLeech Splog Stopper: Fighting Back Against Content Thieves.

Applaud Those Who Warn You That Your Blog Content Is At Risk

What I want to do today is cheer on all those online heroes of ours who are doing something about stopping splogs. We need to link to them, applaud them, and speak out on their behalf as much as our own.

These are the folks who have publicly or anonymously told the world that they are being ripped off and spread the word that your blog could be ripped off by content thieves, scrapers, and splogs. They have joined together in a great chorus shouting:

What’s mine is mine and we will stop you stealing our content!

They have told their blog audiences that their writing, photographs, poetry, and stories belong to them and they want control over how it is used. If the original author wants to use them to make money, fantastic, but if you take our hard work and use it to make money while expending little or no effort of your own, without our permission, and not sending any money our way, we’ll put a stop to your evil ways.

One of the new heroes is Stopbitacle.org, started by a WordPress.com volunteer who decided to bring the bitacle battle to public attention and collect information, tips, and techniques for stopping splogs like bitacle.

The problem is that the fight doesn’t begin or end with Stopbitacle.org. We need to work together to stop all sploggers who scrape our feeds and use our content as theirs, making money, getting into search engines, and using our effort for their income.

Working on that fight are more of my online heroes: SplogSpot, Splog Reporter, and Fighting Splogs bloggers.

Here is a list of some of the fighting-against-splogs heroes I’ve found who are sharing their stories of how they have been ripped off by slogs, especially by bitacle, and what they are doing to put a stop to it:

• A Moof’s Tale
• All Pumped Up!
• Taste The World
• Mamalogues
• Little Bald Doctors
• Kath-leen – Unsettled
• Allan Jenkins, Desirable Roasted Coffee
• Snackiepoo
• N.Design Studio
• Sea Slugs! Anime Blog
• MamaTulip
• Shel Israel
• Spoken-For
• KBCafe – Destroy All Malware
• Bagmomma
• Plagiarism Today
• Mother Pie
• White Pebble
• Blogs Are Stupid
• Graduate Student Insider
• 2803 Henri Labarre
• Blueheart Blossip
• The Reverend Dr. Sherwood Forrester
• A Complicated Salvation
• Smackfoo
• TCRA: The Christian Right
• Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog
• Blogging for Dollars Blog
• Talking Out of Turn
• Monkey Notions
• Frenchy’s Fracas
• Blogger’s Block
• Jogy’s Weblog
• Hollywood2020
• Three Sticks – Moses Edward Miles III
• Milienzo

Have you or someone else spoken out about copyright infringement, copyright violation, or content theft? Want to add them to the list? Who are your heroes who helped you discover your blog’s content had been stolen? Let the heroes be publicly applauded! Their work spreading the word helps make everyone aware of the risk and together we can put a stop to splogs.

And expand your range to hand out visible public notices to those who want to steal your content that it is not available for the taking with some Stop Content Theft Buttons and Badges.

Related Articles

• How To Spot a Splog
• Reporting Spam Blogs – Splogs
• Blogs That Look Like Blogs But Ain’t – Splogs
• One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging
• The Bitacle Battle of Blogs
• What are Feeds?
• Digital Fingerprints Help Track Blog Content Theft
• AntiLeech Splog Stopper: Fighting Back Against Content Thieves
• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
• Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements
• The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking
• Copyrights and the Blogger: Protect What is Yours
• Biggest Copyright Infringement in the World But Nobody Cares Enough

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