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Sparkle (1)
One innocent day, I was looking around the "behind the scenes" of my site Bringing Up Bronwyn. If you aren't a blogger, there is a dashboard where you post from and you can add nifty tools and much, much more. Since I use wordpress as a platform, there is a spam blocker called Aksimet. It catches all the yucky comments like the stupid stuff that ends up in your email inbox. Occasionally Akismet will catch real comments by mistake. So I check in there on a semi-regular basis for real comments. I was surprised by what I found.
I came across a trackback. A trackback, or sometimes they are referred to as a ping, happens when someone links to you. So let's say you post a link to this page on your website. I might get a trackback listed showing me you posted a link to my site. Then I'll probably get really excited and come visit your site. Small time bloggers don't get a ton of trackbacks, so they are usually noteworthy. On this day I came across a trackback to a site I had never heard of. I clicked the link and I found the post they were linking to typed out word for word, except the words were thesaurusrized. I just made that word up. Like the words "part two" turned into "partial duo."
I had been blog scraped.
Dunh, dunh, dunh, cue ominous music.
I started looking around. The website had a LOT of content on it. Something like 2000 posts, since February. It became quite clear to me that ever single post had been "scraped." What is blog scraping, you ask? It's copyright infringement. This particular site was scraping breastfeeding-related content. Basically the owner was probably utilizing a bot to scan the Internet daily for any posts or articles related to breastfeeding. It would then run the content through a filter to change the words a little bit, and then post. Luckily in the first paragraph of my stolen content, I had linked back to a related post. That was how I got my trackback. I scanned the page some more, I saw photos of people's babies. One particularly disturbing sight was a post that had a picture of a NICU baby tangled among the wires. My heart broke for the owner of that picture. The skeeviest part of all of this, was when you took out the category in the web address and just went to the home page, it was a political conspiracy website. I did not want to be linked in any way shape or form to a site that talked about taking down a president.
I WAS LIVID. I immediately set out to my favorite resource. The Twitter. No one really knew what to do, just that "it happens." Quite a few people responded that the same thing had happened to them. I asked what they did about it. No one had answer. That wasn't enough for me. I wanted it down. So I started researching. I found out a lot of information, but none of it was in one place. After doing my research I sent a demand letter and my content was taken down.
I then was on a mission to get the website shut down, AND I DID. I contacted as many people as I could via Twitter, email, blog comments, etc. People who had content on the site. I found enough people, sent them instructions on how to get their content removed, and ta da! The site is GONE.
It wasn't as easy as just sending an email to the site owner. The site did not list contact information. Of course not. I had to go to the host directly. Not only that, but I had to use specific language or they were under no obligation to remove it.
So what happens if your content is stolen? If you find yourself in the same predicament? There will be a little bit of research, but I've decided to take the guess work out of it. Each host out there has it's own rules and guidelines, but for the most part it's the same basic premise.
Step 1: Make friends with the site http://who.is. Oh as an aside, if you have a domain, you probably want to
