DISQUS

There was the time a lawyer stole my content, and I found out he was running at least 50 other splogs under his law firm. After doing more research I realized he had several bad marks on his record, and was even banned from practicing for several years because of one. I never sent a complaint to the state's bar, but I did get his splogs and domains removed.

Then there was the time HostGator (my own host!) told me they wouldn't removed a splog because it was "content aggregation" and is legal. It took a bitching e-mail asking for the CEO to get it dealt with.

Then there was the other time Google Adsense told me a splog contained "no infringing material" in a response e-mail. I took a look at it and my stolen articles were right on the top of the friggin page! How they missed it remains a mystery to this day.

Then there was another time when a host (I think Blue Host) basically gave me the middle finger and said FU for sending a DMCA Notice. The lame custom support guy told me "That blog's owner is one of our best customers and we won't pass this notice along!" For the fun of it I told him I contacted a lawyer and would be suing both the host and the site's owner, and literally 2 hours later the guy's account was completely deleted. It was a little lie - but it worked :)


Take your pick :P


None of these are too bad - and usually all it took was a slightly "encouraging" e-mail to get the issues dealt with. I'm sure there's some real horror stories out there - especially with Google.

I'm a bit surprised you didn't make this one about John Chow. Oh well. Nice blog :)

I totally agree - for a constantly changing site like a blog registering it would make little sense (who sues over a stolen blog post anyway?). It's much better for non changing content like a static site, computer program, etc.

Episode 50 already? Jeeze, I'm still down on Episode 43 trying to catch up with all the episodes I missed from December to Feb.

I've noticed sploggers follow some sort of plan. Back when everyone and their dog had an SEO blog there were many more SEO splogs than before, and now that the whole SEO market is cooling down a bit I've been seeing less and less of those splogs (at least compared to the total # of splogs). Same with mesothelioma, vacation packages, gambling, etc. It seems like the hot markets that affiliate marketers and make-money bloggers are in the sploggers soon join. I wouldn't be surprised if they have programs that follow google trends and technorati.

But even though I think they follow trends, they are also pretty random. Sometimes it seems like they use a random market picker to pick what their next splog will be about.

Touché guys, Touché

I'm all for protecting intellectual property, but I do think there needs to be a line drawn between the real world and the virtual world. Games are games, life is life. If someone is trying to make a living in the real world from selling items in a virtual world, they need to get a life. Seriously. That isn't being creative in how you market items, it is being pathetic. Just have fun, it's a video game, not real life.

And as far as theft causing a decline in membership, I doubt that. I think the second life users are realizing how dumb it is to obsess over a video game and are moving on. It had a good run, but it's time for it to go. The same thing will eventually happen with every other MMO.

Oh yeah, I was just writing up a post for tomorrow about Google blog search and spam and went to grab the link for a comment above and noticed you got a bug. The comment links goto the root url for Plagiarism Today, not the current post. For example: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/#comment-94266

Gotta admit though, its a good and (probably) legal scam. Unethical, but pretty creative.

Advertise and hope someone who is ignorant to the real registration prices takes their $300+ service (without telling them it actually costs much less), give them a $30 copyright, and take the rest as profit. I could see many small business owners falling for it.

With that said, I'll be writing up a post about it on Friday. I think I've gotten one of those e-mails before... UCR sounds a bit familiar.

Wouldn't surprise me if it does nothing. I know many small (and even large) software companies delete many bug reports if it can't be easily fixed, wouldn't surprise me if google did that with most spam reports.

I've seen the page, didn't realize it had that on it though. Thanks Jonathan, I guess their spam form does work for blog search as well.

I looked around a bit also, might start sending out e-mails and asking about this.

Thanks, I'll look for an answer as well... maybe I'll try e-mailing some of those SEO guys to see if they know.

Conspiracy Theory:

Google secretly has several spammers who works for the Google Blog Search department and wanted to keep spam sites in there!

End Conspiracy Theory

Actually now that I think about it does Google have any way to report spam blogs that pop up on blog search? I know you can file reports for regular search, but I'm unsure of blog search.

I agree 100%.

Unfortunately there's no real solution to the problem besides wiping out every spammer on the planet (time to create a deep-earth spammer-detecting bomb) But that won't happen any time soon.

The best way I can think of for a search service to succeed is to check every single blog before it is accepted into the service, and use some nice algorithms to automatically detect spammy blogs (based off of whois data, whether or not the content is copied, etc). It would be hard, but possible.

Yeah... we can thank those darn SEOers for causing that little problem... Good to know I'm not the only one noticing it. Thanks.

I've noticed more EDU domains hosting splogs and other questionable spam pages as well, is this something you've seen more of?

Good idea, it's better you buy it than some lame spammer.

By the way, good job on the new layout. Blog looks great :)

Ah OK, good to know it gets transferred on.

Actually I don't think it was a merger. Host Gator simply leased (a lot) more servers from The Planet's data centers, but they are still separate companies.

I think The Planet shows up as the provider because they technically own the servers, but the problem is Host Gator is my ISP, not The Planet, so if someone sent a DMCA to them instead of HG it wouldn't technically be valid, since The Planet and I have nothing to do with one another.

So it depends how you read between the lines, The Planet owns the servers so they could be considered the host, but Host Gator is the one managing and reselling the server resources.

As least as far as I know it wasn't an official merger. I never got an e-mail about a merger... and that seems like something you'd directly tell your customers. Could be wrong though.

I've done the report error form a few times, but it still seems like they can't properly detect my host. It is HostGator, but it reports as theplanet. Oh well.

Hmm, maybe if the RIAA/MPAA win their campaign against torrents and scare users from using bittorrent we will have to start suing the pants off of all those sploggers for $150,000 per infringement and scare them so much they won't want to mess with bloggers anymore ;)

Just kidding of course.

Not sure if you read digg or not - but that "ISP gave data to NBC" story is being marked inaccurate like crazy. It seems like what happened is NBC hired a company to track some of the files and snatched IPs that attempt to download them - then report it to NBC who send the notice to the ISP. It doesn't seem like the ISP shared anything with NBC though.

Some sort of weekly roundup would give me something to link to - so yeah go for it :P

Oh yeah, and did you hear about wikimedia going creative commons? http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/br...

So far Akismet has held up nicely for me - only 5 or so made it through and went straight to moderation. Been getting average of 300-500 per day for a few days now, a bit scary considering the previous average (for all time) was only 70