CYBERPIRACY: Having Your Blog Stolen By CyberThieves
 Internet pirate? This image is on the contact form of ItsTopeka.com, which stole hundreds of posts from this blog and presented them as its own. It might be Barclay Mead, who is the site owner and administrator. |
Regular readers of this blog will note that there have been no postings for several weeks. That’s because we discovered that our entire blog—going back several months—had been stolen by two different websites, which have been presenting it as their own content. We mean every word, every photo, every caption, just as we have written it. There is a tiny note at the bottom to “see the original post,” but what they have presented IS the original post. There is nothing else to see. And, while this does not mitigate their stealing our content, they don’t even mention THE NIBBLE, as in, “See the original post on TheNibble.com.” Theft is an aggravation to deal with—time consuming, costly and emotionally draining. As those of you who have been stolen from know, first you feel violated. Material goods can be replaced; but if your work has been stolen from you and presented by others as their own, you feel doubly violated. And if the others are making money selling your work (by using it as content on pages where they sell ads), and your stolen, duplicated content now causes search engines to down-rank your website (because duplicate content is not valued in the rankings like original content)…well, why extend your already-long workday by several hours to continue to create such content? |
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| Since neither of the alleged perpetrators responded to our cease-and-desist request, we decided our choice was to continue to work for them for free and penalize ourselves, or stop publishing. About Taking Content From The Internet. It would be nice to think that we could all have our work done for us for free—and apparently, Barclay Mead, owner of ItsTopeka.com in Kansas, and Aviram Yosef of Jerusalem, Israel, owner of LoseOverweight.com, feel that anything online is free for the taking (or, that they can avoid paying because no one will spend the money to come after them for it). While it is easy to take content from another website without permission, and many people do, that does not make it legal. While we have not heard from him, Mr. Mead may have gotten advice from counsel, because he seems to have taken down the three months of daily material he pirated from our website. Or, perhaps he’s just waiting for us to start supplying him with fresh content.While our attorney prepares to deal with these cyberpirates, we are sticking a toe back into the water to create some posts. We’re sorry that you have been penalized for the ill doings of others. We’ll see what happens this time around. |
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