Stolen blog posts

March 11, 2009 7:08 PM

Is anyone familiar with photomaniacal.com? They are taking posts from my friend's blog and seemingly posting them as their own, with no credit and no permission. We cannot find contact information. What can we do?
posted by foxinthesnow to technology (5 comments total)

Whois photomaniacal.com?
posted by dersins at 7:21 PM on March 11

[few comments removed - we don't post whois results here, thanks.]
posted by jessamyn at 8:00 PM on March 11

The site runs AdSense on the Economy Blog and Celebrity Blog subsites. (Although for a site that steals content they seem to be doing a really shitty job of monetizing it--there are hardly any ads--so what's the point?) Anyway, in the corner of the AdSense ads there is a link that says "Ads by Google". Click on it select the appropriate boxes and you will get to a form where you can report a copyright violation to Google. Google will then (hopefully) follow up and kick the site out of AdSense and you can get a warm fuzzy feeling out of eliminating their revenue stream.
posted by phoenixy at 8:26 PM on March 11

If you want to swing a bigger stick and try to get the swiped content blocked from Google's search results, this page tells you how to send a DMCA notice to Google.
posted by musicinmybrain at 10:10 PM on March 11

Go here and see if you can those stolen postings to your advantage.

Quoted from the article:

"So how do you deal with such content scrapers?

Well, you can either take the legal route or try something simple - just add a link to your original article somewhere in the RSS feed. When search engine see this link, they’ll instantly know the real source and therefore splogs, who blindly republish your stuff, will indirectly work towards improving your own search rankings."

Not sure if this would work for you but its worth a shot...
posted by infinitefloatingbrains at 9:08 AM on March 12