One of the certainties of the Internet is that if you write long enough, some idiot will eventually try to steal your material.
Remember grade school, where the world was divided into people who did their homework so they’d be able to pass the test, and those who tried to copy the answers? Well sure enough, the world is still divided that way.
This morning when I logged into my Sacramento Real Estate Blog I found an incoming link to one of my posts, and the title of the link was a jumbled title based on the original title of the post. Sure enough, when I went over to check out the post, everything except the title had been copied verbatim from the original post. Not only had this moron copied my post — they copied what I consider to have been one of the worst posts I’ve written in several weeks.
Fortunately, Google has a relatively easy way to respond to copyright violations on that you find on Blogger blogs (typically with a URL like ImAnIdiotCopyingYourWork.blogspot.com). I’ve read other bloggers complain that the process takes some time because you have to submit the request by mail or fax, but I just submitted a complaint following the instructions there, and it took no more than about twenty minutes.
Tags: Copyright, Copyright violoation, Spammers
December 27th, 2007 at %I:%M %p
John – Man that is the worst. I just don’t understand people that copy others work. I recently had an agent copy my salutation word for word over at Active Rain. She took exactly what I wrote and just changed the words to reflect her area. She did the same thing with my market report – Just changed the towns and the data to reflect her market.
December 27th, 2007 at %I:%M %p
Hey Bill,
Thanks for the comment. Boy, looks like there’s a bit of a bug in this comment entry field, too, so thanks for helping me find that!