If you do enough work in dealing with plagiarists, it is bound to happen. A plagiarist, scraper or other ne’er-do-well, not wanting to deal with your accusations, will simply block your IP from visiting their site in hopes that you’ll think the site is down and go away.
It’s an amateurish move that is usually [...]

For the next segment in our “DMCA Seven” feature, we will take a look at the DMCA policy on seven of the largest social networking sites including Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and more.
In each case we will evaluate their policy, look for weaknesses and, as necessary, recommend steps for improvement.
However, as you can see [...]

Note: New information about iPlagiarismCheck has come to light since the posting of this article, please see this update before signing up for this service.
As the academic plagiarism market has become more saturated, many of the academic plagiarism checking services have been seeking new markets to grow their business. They’ve found a receptive audience [...]

Previously on this site, I reviewed the DMCA policies of the top 5 social news sites. I found, as might be expected, that the policies on the five different sites varied wildly both in terms of how they were implemented and how robust they were.
Differences between the sites became clear as sites with more money, [...]

I often get asked by reporters and bloggers alike exactly how bad scraping is on the Web. I discuss my past experiments on the topic and how, depending on your keywords, suspicious traffic starts showing up with the first post.
However, as I was searching for information on IE7 security flaws for another site I’m [...]

I would like to take an aside and delve into a related topic that has been on my mind for the past few months: Comment spam.
Though it doesn’t have much to do with content theft, I have several reasons for wanting to cover this. First many of the RSS scrapers and spam bloggers also use [...]

I’ve always felt that there is something to be said for solving a problem face to face. It seems, to me, that it is always best to resolve disagreements directly, when possible, and not involve outside parties.
The cease and desist letter is the obvious way to handle plagiarism and content theft matters face to [...]

Previously, I reported about how plagiarized content can create unique challeges on social news sites such as Digg and Reddit.
The article detailed a case involving the site Celebrity Hack, a celebrity gossip blog. The site had one of its articles, entitled “37 Famously Stupid Celebrity Quotes” submitted to Digg only to be buried for unknown [...]

What do the following sites have in common: Flickr, Technorati, Icerocket, Google Blog Search and Youtube
Answer: They all provide feeds to distribute content they do not own.
While this has gone to great lengths to improve usability of these sites and has helped simplify thousands of people’s lives, it’s also created a headache for many content [...]

I recently submitted a DMCA notice to a major U.S. Web host. I won’t name the host, but I will say they are well-known for hosting major sites. Nonetheless, I had never dealt with them before personally and was taking notes on how the encounter went.
After sending the notice I received a reply back stating [...]