Name and shame those pseudo bloggers

Recently I was confronted with some blog incidents. After 2,5 years of daily blogging, I got alarmed, when I started to use Google Alerts. I checked the links mentioned in the message and I was astonished: there I recognised postings from my blog.

The first time I was confronted with Bruce Magazine (of course I will not link it). I looked at the posting and recognised the text of my posting. This text was copied without a mention of the site. When I looked closely I noticed that links had been applied ad-random. Checking out those links was a big surprise; they led to adult entertainment sites, freely translated: porno sites. I was baffled.



The second time was last week. Google Alert pointed to the Blogger site Traveler (again I will not link it). I checked it out and noticed the name of Buziaulane in the headline. But instead of the text of the English posting, the Buziaulane posting had been translated in German. The translation was not bad. I also saw that the pictures in my posting had been copied. But what surprised me most were the mentions of medicines for sale. Buziaulane can hardly be connected to health and medicines.

























I checked out the copyright policy of Blogger. I remembered that Blogger used to have a button, where readers could indicate that material was offensive. This no longer exists; besides it would not have really worked given the case. So I looked up a legal document on the Blogger site. From that document I understood that under American law I can prove that this posting is my copyright. You just cannot request the site to be closed immediately, because of infringement on the copyright and misuse of content.

I could not believe this was happening. But sometime ago I was talking to the crossmedia blogger Christy Dena as I suspected that I saw a posting of her on the Fantrust.com site. You would think that a full service management consultancy laser-focused on digital entertainment would make sure that they had permission to copy. I guess the consultancy likes to attract traffic in this way.

I think that the blogger aggregators like Bloguniverse.com and Strategicboard.com should start a name and shame section for blog squatting.

Blog Posting Number 912

Tags: copyright infringement, pseudo bloggers, blog squatting