I few weeks ago, I wrote an article that briefly reviewed a few Balham restaurants. This morning I found that entire article reposted on another site.
Now, I don’t mind people reposting my articles. I license all of this blog under a Creative Commons licence that allows them to do just that. But I do insist (or, rather, the licence insists) on attribution. I don’t want people passing off my work as their own.
I’ve left a comment over there asking for a link back to my original article, but I doubt it will be posted. Does anyone have any further advice? And what do people gain from doing this? There don’t even seem to be Google ads on the site so it can’t be a financial thing, can it?
p.s. Google news is a wonderful thing. The link to the plagarised post just fell into my RSS feed reader.
Update: Whoa! The people at WordPress (where the blog is hosted) are pretty efficient. Within an hour or so of me mailing them about the problem, the blog had been suspended for violation of their terms of service.
The stolen article is slightly modified: odd words have become hyperlinks to seemingly unrelated sites.Also, the links to the curry houses you were reviewing have been removed. Which suggests this isn’t an individual trying to pass off your review as his own.Could the blog’s existence merely be an attempt to manipulate PageRank of linked sites? (In which case are you unwittingly helping out by linking to it from your respected blog?)It could be created by a bot which creates content by lifting articles from elsewhere; do the other articles in the blog (also with odd links) similarly appear elsewhere?
the offending blog seems to have been removed now.