Eugene Driscoll is a journalist and horror movie-buff turned blogger that runs the Hollywood Chainsaw Blogger site. He made a very common mistake in that he let his domain name, which forwarded on to his blog, expire.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, many webmasters lose their domains. While some are purchased by other webmasters wanting to set up a new site, it is seemingly more common for them to be purchased by domain speculators who turn them into garbage domains with lots of advertising hoping to profit from residual traffic and/or resell it at a higher price.

However, Driscoll’s case was a bit unique. The purchaser of the domain, a Russian using a host in Germany, wasn’t content on merely getting the domain itself and also copied all of Discoll’s site, including all the content and the template, and set up a mirrored version of the blog at the domain.

At first glance, the two sites appeared to be the one and the same but the new domain version had made slight alterations to the layout, such as removing the blogroll and changing the content in the sidebars, mostly to remove unwanted links. The site had also inserted advertising not present in Driscoll’s site, turning it into a for-profit venture.

Though Driscoll’s story has a happy ending, I was able to secure closure of the site via my new DMCA takedown service (though the EDEC was used in this case), it serves as a warning to bloggers and webmasters everywhere, be careful to not let your domains expire as they can be used against you.

The Importance of Domains

Many new blogging services like Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress.com make it easy to integrate a domain into your site even though they really aren’t necessary. Many of these bloggers buy domains for their sites for convenience but get most of their traffic directly to their their username from other users of the service.

This may make it tempting to let those domains lapse when renewal time comes as the lack of traffic and use can make them a bad deal. However, where it might not have a great deal of value to you, it could be very valuable to someone else.

Not only do domains have residual traffic, but they also have residual links. The links that went to the domain don’t disappear and that means both the people who click them and the search engines that see them will continue to visit them. This gives the domain weight.

When most spammers get a hold of such previously used domains, they just upload garbage content and ads in hopes of riding that residual traffic. However, as Driscoll’s case shows, some are getting much more aggressive and are swiping the domain for the purpose of creating a duplicate site.

This is considerably more dangerous than regular spam blogging as the domain was previously associated with the site, is a TLD and has inbound links. This means that search engines, very likely, will give it higher ranking than the source, trusting it over the original.

Though this case is fairly unusual in my experience, most cases of expired domains being bought involve garbage content or wholly different sites, it is easy to see how this problem could grow to be more common.

But even if it doesn’t the fact at least a few spammers are trying it is a clear sign that webmasters need to be extra careful with their domains, even if they aren’t actively relying on them.

Avoiding Trouble

The obvious solution to this problem is to keep up on your domains but this can be difficult even for very careful webmasters. Contact information often gets old, especially when one owns many domains, and reminders to renew often don’t make it to their destination.

The best thing you can do is use one registrar for all of your domain purchases, if possible, and be sure to whitelist your registerar’s domain in your spam filters. This makes it so that you only have one set of contact information to maintain and you know all correspondence from them will not be sent to your spam folder.

If you have to let a domain expire and have some time to plan for it, point the domain away from your sites before it goes belly up and try to get those linking to it to change to the new URL. This will make the domain a less appealing target for spammers. However, if you have enough time to do that, you would likely be better off selling the domain yourself, and setting the terms of the sale while reaping some profit.

But even with every precaution taken, this is a very difficult mistake to avoid and one that many, many bloggers make (including myself at least twice). What’s changed is that, where once it was a fairly minor mistake, especially if the domain wasn’t in active use, now spammers are using it as an opportunity to try and completely replace the original site, using their own domain.

That should give most webmasters at least a brief pause to think and perhaps work on a new domain strategy.

Bottom Line

Sadly, there is no easy way around this one, we will all just have to be more careful with our domains moving forward. This case indicates that at least some spammers are getting more aggressive about buying expired domains and building them into replacement sites for the original.

If you use your domain as your primary URL, you probably don’t need me or anyone else telling you how important it is to hold on to it. However, if you use it as a secondary URL, such as many people on blogging network sites, the danger is less clear.

In the end, if you purchase a domain and connect it with your site, you need to protect it and make a commitment to it. In the wrong hands it could be a very powerful and dangerous tool to replace you and eradicate the position you’ve worked so hard for.

The days in which one can let domains come and go without consequence may very well be coming to an end.

So be careful with your domains and, if you do let one expire, watch it carefully to see what is done with it so you can respond if needed.

Special Thanks: This story was retold with the permission of Driscoll, thank you for letting me share the case to help warn others.

It is Friday again and that means that it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

It is a very special week for the Copyright 2.0 Show as spend the hour on just one news story, the Global Grind controversy originally reported on by Patrick O’Keefe, the esteemed co-host of the show. We also debuted a new chatroom, which can be found here and had a very long, involved discussion with those who dropped by for the show.

It was a great show and we hope to see you there every Wednesday at 6 PM ET for the live recording!

In this show we covered:

• The Background of the Global Grind Case
• What Has Been Done About It
• How Global Grind Has Responded
• What Affected Webmasters Can Do
• What’s Next for the Case
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

photo credit: lovelihood

For spam bloggers, or sploggers as they are often known, copyright is one of the most daunting challenges. It only takes one or two copyright complaints to bring down a spam blog network by alerting the host, destroying a significant amount of work. Likewise, a few complaints to advertisers can strip a splogger of a large percentage of their income.

Because of this, splogs have been working on finding ways to feign legitimacy. This helps them both stay online longer as hosts are more reluctant to take them down, helps them better establish a rapport with the search engines, their end goal in most cases, and appeal more to human visitors.

They’ve used many tactics to meet this goal including truncating content use to comply with fair use, spinning content so that it is unrecognizable and even skipping on borrowing content at all and simply using automatic content generation.

However, several readers have drawn my attention to a new kind of spam site, one that, according to their site, gets its readers to submit RSS feeds for inclusion and instead tries to hide behind a veil of user-generated content. This idea of crowd-sourcing spam is a relatively new one to me, one that actually closely mirrors YouTube’s “wild west” early days, but is almost certainly going to upset many bloggers who have had their content used without permission.

The Example

Note: All links to the site have been nofollowed. Please visit those links carefully and note that you do so at your own risk. The links are included purely for demonstration purposes.

TheBlogHub is, by all appearances, a very large and prolific spam blog network. It republishes the full RSS feeds from roughly 50,000 sites without truncation and while hotlinking the original source images.

This includes many of the Web’s most popular blogs including TechCrunch (which appears to be out of date), Mashable and Engadget (Also out of date).

However, according to the site, all the RSS feeds are submitted by users of the service. The exact nature of this service is unclear beyond the site’s mission statement of “to provide quick and easy access to relevant blogs and articles for our guests and members, whilst promoting the respective blogs and their authors.”

But the site does very little to actually promote authors. Not only is the full content used, but the site’s robots.txt file encourages search engines to read the content, thus making it a direct competitor with the original articles and there is no link back to the individual posts, just a small link back to the home page at the top of a site’s content.

The site also accepts comments on its service, which has the potential to further fragment the audience and conversation for the blogs involved.

To make matters even worse, though the site does offer a means to request removal of content, you are required to give some form of verification that it is your content. However, to add a feed into the service there appears to be no such need. The site does, however, offer a means to file a DMCA-like notice buried in their terms of service but the email address bounces mail as undeliverable.

Hosted on Web24, the site appears to be based out of Australia and has ties to an Australian company, other sites of which are advertised heavily on the site.

In short, despite the fact that this site proudly proclaims not to be a spam blog network, it at the very least bears all the signs of being as such. If its goal is to truly be a legitimate service, is has many steps that it should take to be more cooperative with the original authors.

Note: An attempt to email the creators of the site via both the listed email address and the address listed to receive DMCA complaints were returned as undeliverable.

Why This is a Problem

If these sites are truly crowdsourcing the locating and addition of RSS feeds, which is up for debate, it can create challenges for content creators whose works are being reused without permission.

First, in some cases, the sites may qualify for safe harbor. If the content is actually provided by the direction of users and they can show they did not profit directly from the infringement, they may be able to claim safe harbor. However, this is heavily muddled by the Grokster ruling which holds companies can be held liable for “inducing” copyright infringement. However, this only applies to the U.S. and the issue becomes further muddled when other nations become involved.

Second, hosts will be much less likely to take down such sites if they seem legitimate. Instead, they will more likely pass on any infringement notices to the owners of the site, allowing them the chance to remove it and continue on with the other content.

Finally, content creators will be more inclined to treat these sites as legitimate and contact the owners directly, if possible, to resolve these matters. Even if the site is intentionally or tacitly encouraging infringement and benefiting from it, copyright holders will treat them as if they were other legitimate hosts.

The problem with all of this, however, is that it seems unlikely to me that users would, willingly, crowdsource a spam blog network. Contributing RSS feeds to a service for “centralization” seems like an unlikely service to attract thousands of visitors. Instead, it seems to me much more likely that these sites merely attempt to give the appearance of legitimacy by feigning as if the content is submitted from 3rd parties.

Bottom Line

Still, I have no way of knowing with any certainty what is going on in this particular case. But whether they are actually receiving the feeds from users who are agreeing to their terms of service or simply pretending, the result is the same, scraped content from many thousands of sites, the majority of which almost certainly never gave permission.

A spam blog is a spam blog. Whether it is created intentionally, through recklessness or even simple mistake, the outcome is the same.

As such, the spam blogs need to be dealt with accordingly. Though contacting the owner might be best in cases where it seems to be a simple mistake, such as with an RSS reader that was accidentally exposed to the broader Web, in other cases it is most likely best to go with the hosts or advertisers if possible.

Though I typically encourage people to try and sort disagreements over copyright face-to-face. However, with spammers it is usually a waste of time. As with the case in this site, two letters seeking comment bounced back, including one to the email address supposedly set up to receive notices of copyright infringement.

If your feed is republished on the above site, for example, and you want it removed. You would likely be better off reaching out to their host, especially since all of their contact addresses no longer work.

Article Updated: See Below.

Fav.or.it, a content aggregation service, had earned a great deal of controversy among many bloggers. The site would collect content from various RSS feeds, at least in some cases including the full content, and display it on their site as well as offer visitors the chance to comment and discuss the news, away from the original site. This caused some to accuse Fav.or.it of using splogging as a business model and earned it several mentions on this site, including this one.

However, earlier this week, Fav.or.it went down. The initial message said that the site had been taken down for “maintenance”. However, after a few days, the message was changed to read the following:

“Recently we decided that we would not continue with the fav.or.it service on our site. For more details about this please take a look on our blog. As a result we are replacing the site with our company site!”

In short, the Fav.or.it service is no more. It is down never to return, and the site is being replaced by a home page for the company, also called Fav.or.it, which also runs products such as Tweetmeme, which I was unaware of until the site changed, and TweetTabs (Note: The link to TweetTabs on the Fav.or.it site currently is broken).

The sudden closure of the site seemed odd and I emailed Fav.or.it to ask what had happened. However, I am yet to receive a response.

(Note: I have a suspicion as to why the site might have gone down but do not wish to say anything more until I get confirmation.)

Fav.or.it Moves On

Though the closure of its flagship service may seem like a major blow, it could be a very good thing for the company in the long run. They have already moved on to other, more-popular and less copyright-questionable products the best-known of which is Tweetmeme, which is used on this site.

This may help Fav.or.it focus their time and resources on those projects, rather than a small, legally-dubious and much less popular content aggregator.

In the end, I don’t harbor any real ill feelings toward the company as they seem to have created new products that manage to be both useful and raise far fewer copyright issues. Abandoning Fav.or.it as a service was a good move for both themselves and Webmasters everywhere.

As such, I have no qualms about keeping the Tweetmeme feature on this site and don’t think others should either.

I just hope that this serves as a learning experience for Fav.or.it as a company and they are able to build and grow from this controversy.

Update: 08/10/09

Fav.or.it, the company, has posted a short blog entry about the closure of the site that talks about the various reasons for its closure including a shift in the commenting marketplace that made it difficult for them to compete, a lack of updates to the service and a series of implementation mistakes that caused it to lag behind other competitors, including Lazyfeed.

The post did address the content reuse issues and said the following:

The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

In short, Fav.or.it, the company, acknowledges they made mistakes with the way they used content within the system and seem to have learned from them with Tweetmeme. However, they did stop short of issuing a full apology. Though I don’t think that will satisfy the most disgusted at Fav.or.it, there still seemsto be much rejoicing that the site is done for, both due to its poor reuse of content, but that it also increases the focus on Tweetmeme. .

Lijit is a popular and well-respected search application for bloggers. Many sites, including this one, use it because it not only drastically improves upon the default WordPress search, but also because it allows searchers to pull content from sites within the blogger’s network, including social network sites and other blogs.

However, a new service of Lijit has been causing some controversy. It’s new content networks service has already been accused of being similar to scraper and spam blogs.

So I decided to take a look and see for myself. However, what I found very worrisome and gave me a great deal of reason to caution bloggers to pause and think before they made the jump to join or create a network on Lijit.

The Big Idea

The idea behind the content networks service is one that should be familiar to bloggers and Webmasters. In these networks, a group of bloggers in a similar subject come together and pool their content into a single site (or as Lijit calls it, “publication”) and, in exchange, content providers get their sites linked in the blogroll of the hub site and have the articles linked back to their source.

In short, content networks are not “networks” so much as “aggregators”. These sites act as a hub for all of the content on the member blogs, in some cases republishing the full content from the RSS feeds.

The theory is that, if member sites link to this hub, visitors will explore the network site, find new content to follow and this will increase readership for all of the blogs involved. It is very similar, in that regard, to other networks and traffic-generating schemes that have been tried over the years, usually without success.

However, the question remains, is this service a spam blog and should bloggers consider signing up?

The Spam Question

Determining whether or not these content networks push the boundaries of spam blogs or scraper blogs is pretty difficult as the definition itself itself is hard to nail down. What we can do is look at how the sites operate, the good and the bad, and make a determination. For this purpose, we will be looking at the network blog for their new Security Blog Network.

The first thing that most will notice is that the network site is scraping the whole content of the RSS feeds, including any footers, such as Feed Flares, that are added. Though other network sites, such as the Cycling Bloggers Network, use truncated feeds it is clear that the service is both capable of and often does use the full content.

The good news is that, once you look past the full content reuse, it is clear that the site does follow many of the content reuse best practices. On the site in question, clicking the headline of any given story will take you to the original story and the “Comments” link also goes to the original page as well. I was unable to find a “permalink” that did not reference back to the original source. Furthermore, all of the links to the original content are “dofollow” links, ensuring that the search engines will pick up the original sites.

On the flip side, images are hotlinked from the original source and the entire site can, and is, easily indexed by the search engines. Currently, the robots.txt file does not ban any search engines from any on the site (though only tag pages seem to be indexed right now as the permalinks point to the original content).

Though it is clear that these network sites could do more to minimize the negative impact they could have on the bloggers that join them, it is also clear that they are not trying to outright rip off the content of hapless Webmasters who sign up.

The end result is that, while I don’t think Lijit is doing something that is outright spammy, I also can’t advise anyone to consider joining one of these networks. Between duplicate content issues, network imbalance and oversaturation of content, it seems likely that many will find more drawbacks than benefits.

Conclusions

I recognize that many will disagree with me when I say that Lijit’s content networks aren’t outright spam. As the Mashable article pointed out, the appearance, presence of unwanted RSS content (such as Feed Flares) and bold advertising blocks seem to further that notion.

Indeed, if I found that one of these sites were scraping my content I would likely assume it was a spam blog and react accordingly. These sites look like spam blogs, scrape content like a spam blogs and will likely rank better than most spam blogs due to the large number of legitimate sites linking to them.

To some, they might not be spam, they are something worse.

However, it is important to remember that these networks are purely opt-in. Sites have to register and agree to let their content be used in this manner. If a blogger doesn’t want their material to appear on one of these sites, all they have to do is not register.

If bloggers want to allow their content to be used by a site that shares many features with a spam blog and provides what would seem to be little hope of an equitable return, this becoming more true the larger the original blog grows, then it is not my place to say no.

Though I would feel better if Lijit would add extra protections to ensure that search engines are not confused, such as mandating partial feeds or blocking the search engines from indexing the site, the end decision is the blogger’s.

Personally, I find that these sites border a little too closely to spam blog behavior for me to seriously consider joining. Unlike other content networks, such as BlogBurst, which add editorial value and a human element to the reuse, Lijit’s service is more about straight scraping and republishing.

However, the service, at this time, doesn’t sour me enough on the Lijit name and product to drop their search tool. I don’t think that Lijit is “evil” or “bad”, but that their new service, while well-intended, has some potentially ugly side effects.

Like many bloggers, yesterday I received a letter from Feedblitz advertising their new Private Label Custom Domain Service. Also, like many bloggers, I deleted that email without as much as a second look.

However, a recent article on Mashable made me do a search for it and take a closer look. The article accused the service of assisting spammers, saying that:

“The general idea seems to be splogging as a service – that is they are offering as a service (a paid service, to be exact) the ability to register a subdomain of FeedBlitz in which you can syndicate your existing content to a customizable page, or pretty much the same thing you can do on any number of free webhosting solutions, but for $9.99 a month.”

The good news is that, after looking at the service and researching what it does, I can safely say that there are several problems with that statement, including that the service is actually $9.99 per year, not per month, and there is not all that much to worry about from this service, at least at this time.

However, the bad news is that, after looking deeper into Feedblitz itself, I’ve found that not only is it spamming the search engines, but has been doing so for a very long time and has thousands of junk results in Google already.

It is very important that you be aware of what Feedblitz is doing and how you can protect yourself from it.

Universally Hated

Feedblitz’s new “domain” service has been almost universally panned across the Web. Most commenters heavily criticize the sales tactic of the service, in which they reserve one more domains for you and encourage you to “protect your brand” by paying for the full service.

Says the email:

“We reserved these domains for you to help get you started. If you do nothing your reservations will simply expire and someone else will be able to use them instead of you. Or you can just activate the ones you want online before anyone else grabs them.”

This has lead many to accuse the site of “extortion” by reserving their customer’s name and then demanding payment before turning it over to the mob to do with as they please.

The other criticism is that, while the service is called “Private Label Domains” it is actually a subdomain off of Feedblitz, not an actual domain. Should you decide to purchase this service, your address will be yourname.feedblitz.com, not yourname.com.

However, it was the accusation of spam blogging that caught my eye the most. With the two articles above both mentioning the ability to syndicate your content to an outside domain, I decided to research that feature.

Fortunately, I did not find much of interest.

What It Actually Does

If you visit either the sample account promoted by Feedblitz or the test page they created for me (http://plagiarismtoday.feedblitz.com – I do not wish to link it since it will be down in a day or two) you’ll see that there is no syndicated content on the site.

Though Feedblitz says that the site can display “An online preview for a publication with a link to subscribe” it appears that it will not do so by default and I could find no subdomains that actually did it.

Instead, the main focus of the site is to allow users to subscribe to your feed via email, IM or Twitter. In this regard, it is meant to be both an extension of Feedblitz’s existing services and of the user’s Web site. Not a standalone spam blog.

Furthermore, as their FAQ points out, the fact they charge ten dollars per year will likely eliminate much of the true spammer threat.

All in all, the service seems to be mostly guilty of being almost completely useless, providing a service that is free with most hosting accounts, and poorly marketed.

However, as I was researching this issue, I discovered something about Feedblitz that was much worse than even the nightmares many had about the private label domain service. Namely, that they have been unwittingly creating spam blogs for quite some time.

30,000 Spam Entries in Google

If you do a site search for Feedblitz in Google, you’ll find that they have a very high number of results, especially for a site with very few unique pages.

When you look closer at the results, you find quickly that the bulk of them come from URLs that contain the string “?previewfeed=”. These point to previews of feeds that Feedblitz helps syndicate, such as this one.

The problem is that Feedblitz displays the full content of the feed they parse on these “preview” pages, including hotlinking the images. Then, to make matters worse, the pages are permanent, not temporary previews designed to show potential subscribers what it will look like and they are not blocked from the search engines via Meta tags or robots.txt. In fact, as of this writing, feedblitz.com has no robots.txt file at all and there is no attempt whatsoever to discourage search engines from indexing these duplicate pages.

The result is that a good portion of Feedblitz’s feeds, though almost certainly not all, have found up in Google. With Feedblitz pulling a PageRank of seven, the domain is clearly very trusted in the search engines and is at least capable of outranking the original content, as is the case with the results to the left.

What makes this matter worse is that many of the Webmasters who have their feeds parsed by Feedblitz have not registered for the site nor given permission for their content to be republished in any way. It is possible that your site could be syndicated over the service, and scraped for a preview, without your knowledge or permission. This issue only relates to bloggers who registered for their newsletter service.

To put it mildly, this use of blogger content is irresponsible and it is important for bloggers to know that, if they have syndicated their feed through Feedblitz at any point, that their site could be duplicated on the service and present in the search engines.

Likely Unintentional

I want to make it clear that I do not think Feedblitz is doing this on purpose. The search results that this content will likely rank for does little to help them with their business. I don’t think Feedblitz is trying to be a spammer any more than Workfriendly was.

Feedblitz’s mistake is that they did not take proper precautions when using other people’s content and, as a result, are spamming out thousands of links filled with duplicate content.

One line of code either in the template or in the robots.txt file would fix this overnight, but they haven’t done so, likely because they didn’t think to.

Hopefully, this article will draw enough attention to the issue that they fix the oversight and stop accidentally spamming the search engines.

What You Can Do

If you find that your content is in Feedblitz and is being ranked without your permission, I would take the following steps (See Update):

2. Delete Your Account (if applicable): Disable Feedblitz’s services if they are not heavily used on your site. Consider alternatives such as FeedBurners email service, which works without creating duplicate content.
3. Contact Feedblitz: If you can not delete your account, don’t have one or doing so fails to remove your content, contact Feedblitz directly and ask them to remove your work or otherwise remedy this issue.
4. Contact Me: Should that fail, I have the information for filing a DMCA notice with their host. However, that would be an absolute last resort in this case. Only if Feedblitz proves uncooperative would I even consider placing this option on the table.

The reason for my hesitation is that, as I mentioned above, it seems likely that this was a mistake. I seriously doubt that the preview URLs were intended to be viewed publicly. Instead, I think this is a bug in their system and that the URLs were intended to be a part of the subscription process, nothing more.

Though this is very worrisome, it is worth taking a moment to let Feedblitz correct the problem itself.

Conclusions

So is Feedblitz spamming the search engines? Yes, just not in the way many people think they are.

Though their new service is a poorly-conceived and even worse in its marketing, it does not appear to be a natural spam tool. Given the number of sites and services that have been inundated with spam, Feedblitz’s domain service seems to be the least of our worries.

That being said, the site still has shown great irresponsibility when it comes to how it displays and uses blogger content and has unwittingly made a spam blogger of itself.

Hopefully they will fix these issues soon and get back to what they were supposed to be doing from the beginning, helping bloggers build their subscriber base by making it easy for non-RSS uses to receive updates in an RSS-based world.

Update (08/06/08 – 2:30 PM):

I have received some feedback from Feedblitz and I wanted to share everything that they’ve said.

First, according to the email, the preview feature is ONLY for sites that have signed up for their newsletter services. It is not for RSS feeds that were just subscribed. That is very good news.

Second, they have updated their site to add a “noindex” feature to their newsletter preview pages. If you want to use it, visit your “Newsletter Settings”, move to the second screen, tick the “NOINDEX” box and save your setting.

My thanks goes to Feedblitz for their swift response on this issue! I now agree, spam bloggers they are not and I was right in thinking that this was purely accidental.

The Blog, simply entitled “Stolen Content” educates WordPress.com users about scrapers that have been pulling content from WordPress-based site, provides information for filing a DMCA notice with them and even provides a link to the stock letters section of Plagiarism Today.

The site, which has been online since March, has been growing steadily and is now being updated almost every day. Each posts provides the location of the scraper in a non-linked format, the IP address of the site, the WHOIS information for the domain, the host information and the email address to report a copyright infringement.

This makes it dead simple for anyone interested in reporting the site for infringement to do so, providing all of the tools they need in one place to hit back.

A Community Effort

Perhaps the best part about the Stolen Content site is that it is a community effort. The site solicits help from users via its tips form and use those tips routinely on the site.

This provides a great way for a blogger on WordPress to report an infringing site and get some practical help about what to do with it in quick manner. Furthermore, by making the information public, the likelihood that the host will receive multiple DMCA notices is increased, making it more likely that the site will be removed entirely from the service.

Perhaps best of all though, by targeting scrapers that are going after WordPress.com sites, the contributors are alerting other users to infringements that they might not have known about about previously.

Conclusions

If you’re a WordPress.com user, you should subscribe to this site. Not only could it alert you to infringements of your content and help you put a stop to it, but it gives you a chance to give back to the community by adding your own tips to improve the site.

However, it is important to note that the goal of this site is not to stop all scrapers or spam bloggers that abuse content on the domain, but to help shut down and frustrate some of the larger ones. There will always be more scrapers than one site can stop.

On that note though, if there is anything that I can do to help or if any WordPress user needs assistance with a tough case, please feel free to write or to post to the Performancing Legal Issues Forum. I am happy to help.

Step six specifically instructs you to “sign the paper” and step seven only provides two means of sending it in. The first is via postal mail, the second is via fax.

The problem with these steps is that the vast majority of hosts accept, and even encourage, DMCA notices via email. Email is by far faster and easier to send for such complaints and, according to the ESIGN Act, should be able to deliver a perfectly acceptable electronic signature.

However, Google’s limited contact information and requirement of a physical signature seems to turn a digital matter into one that needs pen and paper to resolve. This has caused many to give up on sending notices to Google and just tolerate any misuse that takes place on Google’s servers, including Blogger.

Fortunately, there is a way around this and a means to successfully email your DMCA notices to Google. All one has to do is be a little bit creative.

Step 1: Scan Your Signature

The first step is to get your handwritten signature into your computer some way. This is because Google, even when accepting notices via email, still requires a handwritten signature most of the time.

There are several ways you can get your signature into an image file. First, you can simply sign a sheet of paper and scan it. Second, you can use a program such as Paint and draw your signature (best done with a stylus). Finally, you can take a picture of your signature with a good digital cam.

The end goal is to get your signature in clear black lettering on a white background.

Step 2: Get your DMCA Notice Ready

Next, obtain a copy of a good DMCA notice. If you wish, you can use the stock letters available on this site.

Once you have your notice, paste it into a word Processor that is capable of both importing images and exporting to PDF. You can use Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or many other applications for this purpose.

Then simply fill in the needed information as if you were just emailing it out and make sure that all of your information is accurate.

Step 3: Import Your Signature

Once you have the notice in your word processor, scroll down to where the signature goes and import your handwritten signature as an image file into the document.

Take a moment to make sure that it looks right and is ready for export.

Step 4: Export File to PDF

Export the file to a PDF using the best tools available. Though most word processors can do this export directly, if you need to print the file to a PDF you can use a free PDF creator.

Most of the details about the quality of the PDF are unimportant, just make sure that the PDF is clear enough to be read and small enough to be emailed.

Step 5: Email the PDF

Though Google does not advertise their email address on their site, they did file a designation with the U.S. Copyright Office that provides an email for submitting DMCA notices.

You can send the PDF to that email address. Simply include it as an attachment and paste the text of the notice into the email.

There is no word if that email address will work after the designated agent returns to the office.

Conclusions

For most Web hosts, sending a DMCA notice is simply a matter of having a good stock letter, dropping it into an email, filling out the necessary information and then sending it on. It is only Google, to my knowledge, that requires this kind of effort.

However, Google receives such a large number of DMCA notices that it is important to be prepared to work with them. Not only do they host Blogger, which remains one of the most common hosts for spam blogs, but they host Google Groups and other services that could host infringing content.

They are also one of the top advertising networks with Adsense and their policy for reporting infringers using Adsense closely mirrors the one for Blogger. This technique should also work for that.

Most importantly though, they are also the number one search engine in the world and the search DMCA policy also closely mirrors the other two, complete with physical signature requirement and fax/snail mail only filing. This technique should work with it as well.

Until new systems come online to help us report spam and copyright infringement to Google, this is the best technique to file a DMCA notice via email.

It is a bit complicated and convoluted, but it is certainly preferable to the delays of postal mail and the hassle of a fax.

This, in turn, inspired me to do my own keyword analysis to gauge if and how public interest in topics relevant to this site have changed over the years.

What I found was surprising and seemed to run counter to what I was seeing with my own traffic but was interesting nonetheless.

Plagiarism

Perhaps the most obvious keyword and definitely the most common one that leads visitors to this site, this keyword has seen surprisingly little change over the past few years.

Over all, the graph for it is flat with a few “ticks” upward when news stories, such as the Obama controversy and the Kaavya Viswanathan scandal, broke. There are also season downward ticks at the end of every year, likely due to the holidays.

In general, it appears that the overall interest in plagiarism, both academically and artistically, has remained consistent and unchanged.

Content Theft

Probably the most unusual graph, content theft as a search term spiked in mid-2005, around the time this site was founded, and then leveled off, only to become a regular search term again in recent months.

It is unclear to me what has caused these specific spikes but the latest one seems to be holding and showing some sustainable interest in the topic. Something that could indicate greater public interest in the issue and in the term itself.

Copyright

Copyright, on the other hand, has seen a marked decrease over the past few years, at least as a search term.

While this seems counter-intuitive, considering that stories about copyright, especially as it pertains to the RIAA/MPAA, seem to dominate social news sites, please are clearly not search for copyright information as much as they used to.

This is reflected even more strongly in the related graph for the RIAA and the DMCA, where the downward slope is even more pronounced and, in the case of the RIAA, seems to almost disappear completely.

Though it doesn’t appear that people have lost interest in copyright issues, it is clear that they are not searching for them as much as they once were.

Duplicate Content

One of the greater concerns people have about plagiarism is the issue of duplicate content. As we can see on the graph above, the term rocketed onto the chart in early 2007, stabilized and seems to be slowly marching upward.

Duplicate content, of course, covers more than just plagiarism and scraping, but a wide variety of SEO concerns. However, it is clear that this is a topic being talked about more and more. It is unclear in what capacity this term is being searched for.

Plagiarism Detection Tools

Looking at the chart for Copyscape (shown above) shows a steady increase in the number of searches over the past year and a half. This seems to mesh with my own experience, which has shown a great increase in content protection over the past 18 months.

Other Plagiarism detection tools, such as Bitscan and Attributor, did not have enough information for Google Trends to draw any conclusions. Academic plagiarism detection tools, such as Turnitin, have shown a steady increase with seasonal dips as school lets out.

Long Tail Keywords

Unfortunately, a lot of the keywords most specific to this site such as “spam blogs”, “splogs”, “RSS scraping”, etc. did not have enough data to produce results. Many of these terms are fairly new, created since I started Plagiarism Today, and are not widely used.

It will be interesting to see in a year or two if these keywords start to register then.

Caveats

In doing this “study” I realize that Google Trends is both limited and a largely invalid source of data. Not only is the data proprietary, meaning it can not be vetted, but the information is relative and contains little hard data.

Also, many of the keywords looked at are not keywords that are searched for by typical searchers and instead would only be searched for by bloggers. Others, however, were likely searched by both. This means that we may not have an accurate picture of how just content creators feel about these issues.

The goal of this check was just to get a quick idea of what was going on and what the potential attitudes were.

Conclusions

When I personally look at these charts, I draw three conclusions.

First, I see that there is a sharp decrease in the interest of searchers in the legal aspects of copyright. This could be due to greater understanding about copyright, and thus less need to search about it, or just that that users have just moved on from the early copyright controversies of the late nineties.

Second, there is a clear, if slow, increase in interest in tracking one’s own content and the non-legal penalties that come from infringing or being infringed. This could be a sign that creators are not thinking about these issues in the light of a legal paradigm, but rather, in a more practical framework.

Finally, it is clear that the interest in plagiarism, both academically and artistically, remains fairly steady and that it remains an issue of interest even after the scandals fade from the headlines.

Personally, this site has seen an explosive growth over the past year, both doubling in traffic and enabling me to leave my day job to work full-time as a consultant. Clearly, things are changing in this area.

I look forward to following these changes closely over the coming years.

Note: All of the graphs in this post are used with permission from Google.

The new service meshes the functionality of its existing service, the ability to check URLs for duplicate content, and that of Google Alerts, the ability to receive automated emails notifying users of potential infringement.

The service also has a new WordPress Plugin to make the process of creating alerts easier for WordPress users and may be a compelling reason for users to give the copy detection service a try.

How it Works

The idea behind Copy Alerts is extremely simple. You provide the site with the URL that you want to track, an email address to send the alerts and the site will monitor the Web for your content, emailing you when it finds duplicates.

If you want to create a large number of alerts, it may be wise to create an account with the, a process that requires only an email address and a password, so that you can manage all of your alerts in one location, rather than going email by email.

When Copy Alerts finds duplicate content for your pages, it sends you an email, one email with all of your alerts, and provides you with a series of links to a “comparison page” that displays the original and the duplicate side by side.

Though the side-by-side display can be cumbersome without a very wide monitor, you can use tabs at the top to switch between the original and the copy if you wish. You also have basic Whois information for the site at your disposal. However, there is currently no information about who is hosting the allegedly infringing site.

Still, at this point, it is trivial to move forward and take action on the site, thus resolving the issue, if one exists.

Over all, the system itself is extremely straightforward, both requiring almost no additional information and offering few options. For example, many users of Google Alerts will notice that there is no setting to determine how often alerts arrive, meaning that, in some cases, the volume of alerts could be overwhelming.

However, Copy Alerts also has another reason WordPress users might want to take a look at the service.

The Plugin

The new Copy Alerts Web site also comes with a WordPress plugin to help users of the blogging software create alerts and track their content.

For users familiar with the installation process of WordPress plugins, the install will be nothing new. You simply extract the zip, upload the folder to your plugins direct and activated it via your WordPress plugin interface.

Once activated, the plugin adds a function to the post edit page entitled “Copy Alerts” that contains a simple link to create a new alert.

Clicking the link opens up the Copy Alerts site in a new tab, letting you know that the alert has been created and that you need to verify your email address by clicking a link sent to you. Once you’ve done that, the alert is created and placed into your account, if you have one.

The whole process takes only a few seconds though I did experience some delay in getting a couple of my confirmation emails, something that likely is on my end and not Copy Alert’s.

First Impressions

Since I have just returned and have only used the system this morning, I can not comment on the accuracy of the system or effectiveness of it. I will post that information in a new review in a week or two.

But even though this is more of an announcement than a review, I’d like to offer at least a few initial observations, starting with the things that I really like.

The Good

• Distinct Free Feature: The Copy Alerts tool really separates Bitscan and, if it is accurate, distinguishes it from its main rival Copyscape in a major way. This feature could be a big motivator in getting people to switch to Bitscan for content theft detection, especially since Copyscape charges for a similar feature.


• Great Simplicity: One of the questions I get at every conference is “How easy is this track?” so I favor any site that makes it as easy as possible. Copy Alerts definitely meets that goal.


• Advertising Free: At this time at least, both the site and the email are completely advertising free and very minimalist. This helps keep it both very simple and very fast.

The Rough Edges

• Alerts Expire: Alerts created expire within 60 days of creation unless you log into your account. Though the reason for this is obvious, to prevent the site from being burdened with unused alerts, it keeps the service from being a “set and forget” tool.


• The Plugin: The WordPress plugin, though nice in theory, has little purpose. You have to remember to click the link for every post, you still have to log into the account to prevent your alerts from expiring and you still have to verify each alert in your email. There is no functionality in the plugin that is not in the site itself.


• Lack of Options: As great as the simplicity is, I worry that the lack of options may hinder the service. The first results I received were for almost all very small matches, including the blog search engine pictured above. There is no way to set alert thresholds or frequency, meaning that you may get a lot of false positives.

All in all, the first impressions are that of a service with mountains of potential, but a few flaws that may hold it back down the road. I will be testing the service out over the next few weeks and will have a more thorough report then.

Conclusions

Currently, all that I want to provide is a quick announcement of the new service offer some initial feedback. I will be doing more thorough reviews later. However, there is little doubt that this service is, potentially, a huge step in the right direction. Though there are some issues that may hold back its potential usefulness, there is little reason not to at least try it.

One of the co-founders of Bitscan, Mark Nelson, posted a comment on the site while I was away inviting PT users to beta test the service and to look at Bitscan’s new paid accounts service that automatically spider and monitors an entire site.

It will be very interesting to see if and how Copy Alerts and the new Bitscan system changes the way content creators monitor their work.