Over the past 96 hours Plagiarism Today, as well as likely other sites, has been the subject of a massive spam attack across a variety of formats and domains.
The attack, which appears to have begun sometime on Friday, has been persistent for the past four days. However, at this juncture, it appears that my defenses [...]

Anyone who is a regular reader to this site knows that, in order to get Adsense removed from a scraper or plagiarist’s page, you are required to file a DMCA notice.
Adsense has its own DMCA policy and follows it very strictly. Though results can be obtained through that means, few bloggers actually use it.
Not only [...]

Yesterday I received an email Ben Maurer, one of the engineers for reCAPTCHA.
In addition to responding to a comment on a post from last week, he alerted me to a copyright case involving Tickmaster (TM) and RMG Technologies. According to the complaint and subsequent injunction (embedded below), RMG produced an application that allowed users [...]

On the surface, workFRIENDLY is something of a novelty site.
The idea is pretty simple, you punch in a URL that you want to visit and workFRIENDLY pulls up the site in a format that resembles a Microsoft Word document (see Blog Herald on workFRIENDLY). The idea is that, if you use the site to [...]

It appears that Google’s push to handle duplicate content may be having an unintended side effect.
Even though a recent report by Attributor indicates that the search engine has done a terrible job separating originals from copies, the spammers don’t seem to be taking any chances.
Spam bloggers are no longer content on scraping entries [...]

Many authors and experts, both established and new, use article marketing in order to promote themselves and their sites.
The idea itself is pretty simple. You write a series of relatively short articles, put them out there for anyone to use and, when other sites republish them they’ll include both your name and a link back [...]

Yesterday, the makers of the controversial Pay Per Post service launched a new tool designed to make blog reading faster, RSS Brief.
The idea is that the service takes long posts, like what you might expect here on Plagiarism Today, and condenses them down into a few short sentences.
Though the service sounds convenient and [...]

In a recent post on TechCrunch, Duncan Riley sparked a controversy by saying that the blogs created by Google Reader’s linkblog feature “already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators.”
That statement resulted in a flurry of comments with individuals falling on both sides of the debate. The debate then quickly [...]

Feed autodiscovery is one of the most powerful tools available for encouraging feed usage and subscription. Theoretically at least, by giving browsers and feed readers an easy way to identify the feed and users an intuitive way to subscribe to it, more people will take advantage of it.
However, when a reader of this site had [...]

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 [...]