Yes, I came across this website (http://make-easy.com) and he has a software which completely copies articles from other webmasters/websites. Not few lines, but the complete article. I have given already few warnings to him. But he hasnt responded. Should I complain to adsense? Because his site is monetized by adsense.
Nah, threaten him with the action of: - Reporting him to AdSense - Filing DMCA request with Google Explain his website will be de-indexed entirely due to the DMCA request to Google and order him to comply within 48 hours else you will proceed with above actions. Worked for me. Pete
I have had my articles reprinted without my permission from time to time. When I find them, I send an e-mail pointing out the copyright violation. The second e-mail says I am disappointed that there has been not action. The third e-mail I mentions the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even if they do not respond to any of the e-mails, mentioning the Digital Millennium Copyright Act seems to get action. I have found if you can contact the owner, you usually get action. What I find the most frustrating are Blogspot sites that reprint the articles I distribute without the links to my site. Often there is no way to contact the owner and blog comments go unanswered. That leaves me with the option of deciding to let it slide or printing out a DMCA letter and mailing it to Google (they do not accept them by e-mail or web form). Frankly, I am not thrilled with either option. I have reported sites to Google through the AdSense ads. Google just sends me an e-mail telling me how to file a DMCA requests with them.
He use 'wp-autoblog' plugin. The plugin converts xml into Wordpress posts. It could be used to run an aggregator site. My question is: if he has a link to the article's web site. Is it still ilegal???
If he is reprinting others work without their permission, it is a copyright violaton. It does not matter one bit if he links back to their site. I find a reference or link to my site quite helpful. It is an admission of the original source.
well digg normally just has a small excerpt which could be considered fair use, but duggmirror when it indexes will violate copyright technically. but copyright in these issues isn't exactly black and white. The long standing definition of copyright required the item in question to be fixed in a durable medium (which the web is not). The DMCA tries to correct some of these wrongs, but I'm not sure how much case precedent there is in issues like this. Another huge issue is what about sites like wikipedia which are based largely on exact copies of copyrighted works, then slowly transformed. How would you prosecute wikipedia for that? They've obviously made it into a huge website, but there is no doubt they used copyrighted works to get where they are. If one of the largest websites in the world can do it, why not anyone?
You cant read the full article in digg. It contains only 2-3 lines of the article and to read the full article it forwards people to the original website where the content was taken from.
Frankly, sometimes I can't belive the way that some of the people here look at things. Describe it as stolen is ok - only if no recors of the writer, and or a link to their site is included with it. If one of my articles or posts in a blog are used on an other blog or site - obviously with my info on it and a link to the site of origin - I am really glad with it. It means more exposure, and links to my sites - thus more traffic and PR in the times to come. What is otherwise the point of writing, and or submitting to article directories?
I agree, on the internet, getting links is king and you shouldn't necessarily care as long as your getting links. But that's not the way the law works. It still can not always be beneficial too. Say wikipedia copied your content you might not be so happy about it, because all they will give you is a nofollow link, and they'll rank above you since they have a higher trust in google.
That isn't the case. Most articles start out as single paragraphs not stolen from anywhere (at least those that live past the first 5 min). Wikipedia aggressively hunts down copyvios. While the number of copyvios on Wikipedia is greater than 0 and therefore too high they do not make up a significant amount of the article database (less than 2%). Evidences? For various reasons copyvios tend to make very poor articles. You would have to ask youtube that one.
Complain here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CP It's quite likely that to core Wikipedians are more annoyed about people adding copyvios to Wikipedia than the people having their content stolen.
Agreed, if your going to report this guy you might as well report everyone selling automated websites in the buy and sell forums... Also if you really don’t like it can’t you block it? I’m sure you can...
You can argue about it all you want, but the fact of the matter is: If wikipedia were a for-profit site they would be liable for millions of dollars in copyright damages. However, it would likely be bad press to sue them (but you've heard there is no such thing as bad press right?). You did make a good example with youtube as they are probably worse than wikipedia as far as outright violations go, but wikipedia can gain a tremendous advantage in search engine rankings easier than youtube. I've never searched for a term and had a youtube video as the first result (I'm sure you could if video was in the query). Honestly I'll never get why wikipedia allows the cataloging of pornstars, if it weren't for categories like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Porn_stars I would think wikipedia truly had altruistic intentions. Anyway I really do hope Jimbo succeeds with his user-editable search engine, as I hope to exploit the hell out of it when it first launches (I mean if he can profit off the public's goodwill, why can't I?).
The copyright laws were written to allow authors to profit from their work. If I have a two minute investment in a blog post, someone reprinting the posting with my name and backlink would not bother me at all. In that case I feel I am getting a reasonable return for my time. If I have 4 hours invested in a high-quality unique article on my website, a backlink from a PR0 site is no where near a reasonable trade for a copy of my article.