I’m always amazed at the audacity of some people. Yesterday I ran across some idiot who was sucking in my RSS feeds and putting them on his site surrounded with Titan Poker banners. I contacted him (via his WHOIS contact information), his hosting provider, Titan’s affiliate support reps, and his hosting provider’s ISP. He was clearly in violation of my CreativeCommons copyright and he responded about 12 hours later saying he had pulled my content off his site but then tried to blame me because I made my content available via RSS. I emailed him back informing him that the copyright on all content pages of the website as well as in the RSS allow for personal use of the content but specifically prohibit:
Commercial Use – Throwing Titan Poker affiliate banners all over my posts certainly violates this one.
Attribution – No attribution was attempted other than internal links in articles pointed back to internal pages.
The copyright also states that if one wishes to resuse the content that they must make clear to others the license terms of this work. That was not done either.
So, with one content thief thwarted you know I went through the roof when I caught another jackass doing the same exact thing. He’s also pirating content from Felicia, Iggy, PokerProf, and PokerFilter. This guy was a little smarter though and has gone to the trouble to use an identity hiding service in his WHOIS records. Still, I emailed the contact for the domain, the hosting provider, and the upstream provider. This guy hasn’t slapped banners on our content yet but my guess is that that is only a matter of time. In the meantime, I’ve taken a little vigilante justice on my own and done a little techfoo on him.
And just as I’m getting ready to hit Submit, I run across ANOTHER ONE!!! WTF?!?!
Ok, so I’m going to rat out the sites:
First guy mentioned is at:
http://www.allpokerworld.com/
It looks like his entire site has been taken down.
Second asshat is at:
http://poker.aviiva.com/
I’m still going back and forth with his hosting provider. I’ve also CC’d Felicia, Iggy, and Poker Prof because the guy is lifing content from their sites as well.
[UPDATE]: This site has been taken offline.
The third asshat is at:
http://pokerstockpile.com/
It looks like he’s lifting content from A Fool and His Money, Big Slick, Poker in the Arrears, Poker.com, HDouble, and Poker Prof. I haven’t started on his ass yet but he’s next.
If you have a blog and it burns you that these guys are ripping off your content (mostly with the intent of throwing ads all of it and making money from your work) I highly suggest that you introduce yourself to Google Blog Search. You can type in your URL and then subscribe to an RSS feed for that search. It will give you a daily update of who’s linking to you (which could be fun just to see who is sending you visitors). Here’s the query string for my own site:
http://www.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:billrini.com&um=100&i=blg
Use it and enjoy!
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
You guys are all stupid. If maybe you spent more of your time in navel-gazing posts about how your old corduroy pants are blousy and make you look like you have a crotch goiter, then maybe you wouldn’t be running into problems like this. Since the content thieves have figured out that bitching about an ex-wife doesn’t sell affiliate codes, I’ve been in the clear.
It’s your own fault(s), really.
Re: BG
AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.
Umm.. Punch and Pie.
Dont be so stupid…you have actually changed the images on your own site to prevent hotlinking…
How dumb can you get?
Your actually removing your own content so others cant use it, what about people that do include a link to your site?
Stop being so pedantic and get a life.
Stephen,
Sorry you got caught hotlinking to my content.
I have a very simple and generous copyright policy. The only people who are impacted by me enforcing things like “no hotlinking” are people who have opted to ignore one of the few rules I do place on using my content.
Just as an example, the first guy I mention above just cut and paste the post and put it on a high traffic message board without ANY attribution. Then it got picked up on Digg and there was a huge traffic spike. Since he hotlinked all of the images, guess who gets to pay for all of the bandwidth without getting ANY credit?
See the big issue here is why does one need to cut and paste my content onto a message board or even their own site? There’s absolutely no reason. Why not a link? What’s the goal of reproducing the content elsewhere? In the vast majority of cases, it comes down to the fact that the copyright infringer wants to obtain traffic (or credit) from my work but doesn’t actually want to send people to the original source.
But what about if they put up a link back to my site? Well, that’s why I have rules about atrribution.
Lastly, because you weren’t clear, you said that I changed the images on my own site to prevent hotlinking. That’s incorrect. My original posts ON MY SITE have the correct images. If you are seeing a “No Hotlinking” image it’s because your browser has cached the No Hotlinking image after viewing it on a site that has hotlinked the content. Clear your chache and reload. Should work just fine.
Again, the whole problem goes away if people don’t hotlink (and follow the author’s copyright). If you own a website or have spent more than 15 minutes on the web, you should know that hotlinking is wrong. Just Google for hotlinking and you’ll note that this is a HUGE problem for webmasters.
Bill