I know several people have become a bit miffed at the moron who has been scraping RSS feeds and posting the content on his site. I loved that he put up this disclaimer on his website:
This site has been redesigned to use a better blogging system. Previous posts are no longer available. This site uses RSS feeds. RSS feeds are provided by blog’s owners themselves so their information is syndicated for use on other blogs and websites. All feeds used on this site are from www.syndic8.com. They are all poker blog feeds. Many poker blogs report news items found on other blogs and news sites. This site is no different. Take a look at the blog empire created by www.weblogsinc.com. They link to all their blogs which include cancer, diabetes, technology, video games, etc. This blog does the same. Local law enforcement and attornies have been contacted regarding the threats, and harrassment by guinnessandpoker.blogspot.com and harrassment, false statements and inciting harrassment by www.kebzweb.com. Emails from both parties have been blocked since May 5, 2005 and are not being received.
Uh, I do hope you contact an attorney because I’m sure he would love to charge your $150 an hour to explain the concept of fair usage and copyright laws. Yes, many weblogs report news that was taken from other sites but here are the differences, my legal-knowledge handicapped friend:
1. Most blogs attribute the source.
2. Most blogs only quote the other source. They don’t tend to copy the entire source post.
3. Most blogs don’t attempt to mislead readers into thinking they are the originator of the content.
Now, with this stuff out of the way, the wicked tech bastard in me relates the following tricks I’ve seen used other people use (of course, I don’t personally advocate any of the following. I simply offer this information for educational purposes. Some of the following could be construed as illegal so check first!):
1. As Chris Halverson pointed out you can add text to your RSS feeds so when this lazy idiot scrapes your posts it identifies the author.
2. You can take the idea one step further though. Chances are he’s got some script doing the updating. Figure out the IP address of the offending script and write a little .htaccess URL Rewrite recipie that directs him to a different feed which could say something like “THIS GUY IS RIPPING OFF CONTENT ORIGINALLY PRODUCED AT HTTP://WWW.XXXXXXXX.COM.” I did that to some guys who were too stupid to even download and host the images when they stole my Online Poker is Rigged post. I just ID’d the referrer and wrote a little code that served up an alternative image which said “THIS IMAGE BEING STOLEN FROM RINI.ORG.” Surprisingly both people I did this to pulled the content within 48 hours 🙂
3. You could report him to his affiliate sponsors. Most don’t want to be associated with these kinds of people so if you contact Pacific Poker they may cancel his affiliate deal which would remove his motivation for even having the site up. Of course, he could find a new affiliate deal but you just keep contacting them all until he runs out of affiliate sponsors or figures out that there have to be easier ways to make $20 a month.
4. GoogleBomb! Googlebombing is the act of engaging in search enginge optimization in an effort to associate his site with keywords he would not like it associated with. For instance, if several poker bloggers created a link to Poker Scams and linked to his site Google would pick that up eventually and link to him whenever anyone typed in the search “poker scam”.
5. Check out this site for possible other ideas that I don’t wish to get into the murky areas of the law with by suggesting.
[UPDATE:] Chris pointed out that this guy might be getting the feeds from Syndic8.com which is cool too. Just put an image tag in all of your feeds. His site will show as the referrer and you can easily use the same URL Rewrite advice above to replace the image based on the referrer field to . . . ahem, post your commentary on his ethics.
[UPDATE:] Here’s an appropriate quote to go along with this topic:
If I plagiarize, it’s only because I like someone else’s idea better than mine and I want credit for it. –(Anna Chin-Williams)