Licence geeks may have noticed the following information in the right-hand column of this blog:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.<!–
–>
The terms of the licence are simple. I will allow people to reuse and republish my posts as long as they provide attribution to the original posts, are not reproduced for commercial purposes, and the person making the reproduction shares any modifications from the original content with a licence containing the same terms and conditions.
Thanks to the magic of the link-back function in Blogger, I have discovered that there is an outfit copying my messages through the Atom feed and placing them in pages filled with Google Ads. The pages have content from other blogs from all over the place, which makes me believe that this is almost certainly a Google Ad link farm. The domain is bgtoyou.com, with the www replaced by random numbers preceded by a g. Examples of this are yesterday’s post, as well as:
https://www.technollama.co.uk/The-Independent-Republic-of-Sealand/
https://www.technollama.co.uk/Is-Second-Life-Open-Source/
https://www.technollama.co.uk/Should-Saddams-video-be-regulated/
https://www.technollama.co.uk/Spanish-cafe-loses-case-on-free-music/
Using the excellent Network Tools utility I found that the domain is owned by a person in Thailand. I emailed the registered owner to complain, but unsurprisingly I have not received an answer. I then used a traceroute to find who is hosting the content, and found that it is being served from hostgator.com in the United States. I then emailed the site’s support to explain the situation, and I have been prompted to file a DMCA complain to remove the material.
Why enforce the licence terms? I write this blog without expecting to get money in return, and the thought of somebody profiting from them makes me very angry indeed. This is also a great chance to text Creative Commons in real life.
Stay tuned for the next instalment.
7 Comments
John H · January 25, 2007 at 3:56 am
Interesting. I'll have to look out for that with my own blog, which has a share-alike, copyleft licence for commercial use (non-commercial use only requires attribution – I explain the reasons behind this ludicrous over-implementation here…).I've noticed similar "mirror blogs" from time to time, and if any of them are carrying advertising without copylefting their content then I'll probably take similar action to yours.
Jordan · January 25, 2007 at 7:19 am
Not that DMCA complaints are complex, but your friendly next door US attorney would love to help…
Jordan · January 25, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Not that DMCA complaints are complex, but your friendly next door US attorney would love to help…
La Gringa · February 10, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Interestingly, I found this article on a different spam site while looking for my own stolen material. I thought you would want to know.hot-4-e.travel-onblog.com/ Hot-Enforcing-Creative-Commons/They have at least one other site where you may find more of your articles:hot-0-e.travel-onblogThese sites (no telling how many there are!) use Google Ads, so I reported the violation of my copyright to Google. I also emailed the domain owner. The guy is busy, though. It's only been a couple of hours and he's already lifted another one of my articles! That makes three. I found a site two days ago with 22 of my articles. It's maddening!
Andres Guadamuz · February 11, 2007 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the heads-up Gringa!I think these sites subscribe to your atom feed and lift the articles that way.
Mike Linksvayer · February 13, 2007 at 3:30 pm
You should add rel="nofollow" to the splog links.Right now you're doing them a big favor.
Andres Guadamuz · February 14, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Thanks Mike, will do!