I have no idea who he is, but I kept seeing his name come up on trackback comments of other sites using my blog posts…

[…] post by kim and software by Elliott […]

Call me naive but at first I thought maybe it was a good thing getting free inbound links plus the posts were unaltered so contained my affiliate links.  But since my blonde highlights are starting to grow out, I realized that google may penalize those sites and mine for duplicate content.  So I was on a mission to try to stop Elliott’s software from scraping and stealing my posts.

Google led me to Elliott Back’s site where he claims his plugin was being misused and has taken it offline as it makes him look like the spammer.  He encourages sending out DMCA notices to abusing websites by following these instructions.

I used Shawn K Hall’s Copyright infringement letter, changing the appropriate info and emailed it off to Dreamhost, host of the offending website.  (Hint, you can look up the whois to see the host’s email and you can find the I.P. address of the comments in the wordpress admin.)

Within 24 hours, Dreamhost replied to me that they had taken down the prepetrator.  Now I’m off to send a couple more letters to different “site stealers.”