InvestorBlogger has been full-feed for quite some time, but last week I was astonished to find that someone was republishing the entire content. That evening I wrote both the blogger, the domain company to find out what was going on, and Google Search which was starting to show up duplicate content for my own work. This was my brief but courteous letter…

Dear Admin,

I recently found that you are republishing my content on your blog in its entirety. Since you have neither requested permission nor even contacted me about this, I must ask that you stop reproducing my content in its entirety IMMEDIATELY. You must also remove the content that is present on your blog, as this constitutes a breach of copyright. MY copyright.

You may produce 50 word summaries, if you wish. I have no problem with that, but you CANNOT reproduce my blog’s content in the way you are doing. I have already gathered evidence of this, and will press this case further if required to do so.

Yours,
Kenneth Dickson

Well, Markus wrote back and advised me:

I’m sorry I bought this address with hosting and never realised there was a blog on it. I’m truly sorry for any problems I may have caused you. It will be permanently removed. (spelling corrected).

The problem is now resolved due to the good graces of the blogger who inadvertently owned the blog after purchasing the domain from someone else. However, I also advised the hosting company through its ‘abuse@maiahost.com’ address, which turned out to be not working (very impressive, MaiaHost) and also through its support page. Less helpfully, their support suggested:

Dear Kenneth,

Can you please issue DMCA notice to us and the other website. With this we
can try to suspend him and make him clean it up.

Venetsian,
Maiahost Support

A DMCA, for what it’s worth, is a bit like opening an egg with a hammer… I thought it would be effective, but I would have preferred a quiet word with the customer first option. At least, I know what a DMCA is, and how to request one. I hope I never need it.

Feed Choices?

I’m now reconsidering my RSS feeds, and wondering whether I should let blogs (yes, blogs…!) reproduce my full feed posts including advertisements and et al., as long as the URLs are all untouched and in place. I already have a copyright notice in place… How do you handle your feeds? Have you ever been splogged?