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!