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Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas
Who is Elliott? 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.”
It’s good that your host cares about spamming. There’s so many of them out there that won’t do a damn thing if someone’s repeatedly spamming your blog or site. I guess it’s still quite difficult to track someone down, especially if they have multiple paypal accounts or stolen credit card numbers. It’s especially weird if people spam your site for no apparent reason i.e not for financial gain. Strange, strange people.
It’s been awhile since I’ve had to send out DMCA copyright infringement letters, but since adding google authorship, I’m getting more notifications of people copyrighting my work. Imitation may be a form of flattery, but it’s causing more work for me…