The DMCA Notice From Hell

Late last week, I discovered that Bitacle had been scraping my content here at Plagiarism Today.

Since Bitacle was not properly linking the feed entries, my searches for my own content failed to produce any results. However, after experimenting with new techniques on Friday, I discovered where Bitacle had been hiding my content.

While there is a definite sense of both outrage and irony in this, the response to this scraping will be both swift and severe.

A Big Baby

Over the years I’ve sent literally hundreds of DMCA notices out, none were anywhere near this big. It weighs in at eighteen pages (with cover sheet) and covers some 250 items and is over 5 times as big as the next largest DMCA notice I’ve sent.

It details everything that Bitacle has scraped from PT since they started doing so. Also, since Google requests evidence of repeat infringement in their Adsense DMCA guide, I’ve included at least half a dozen other links of people that have been infringed by Bitacle.

Though I am unsure how Bitacle was able to fly under my radar for so long (probably aided by the fact that none of the results for my site appear in Google or major blog search engines as of yet), I’m going to do everything that I can to stop it and do it in a way that keeps them from infringing others as well.

I’m going to keep a lid on the rest of the details regarding this notice. I don’t wish to tip my hand to Bitacle and enable them to take measures to guard against it. However, I outlined much of what I’m doing previously.

Once Google responds to me regarding the matter, which will likely be sometime today or tomorrow, I’ll update this post. I’m also planning on uploading a PDF copy of the notice (sans personal info and Bitacle links) so that others can use it.

I don’t know if this will be a death blow to Bitacle or even a major one. I have never submitted a DMCA notice to Adsense before and I simply do not know what the outcome will be. Rest assured though that I will report on it.

I just hope it’s better than those who’ve tried before without DMCA notices.

Finally, I’d like to thank the author of Stop Bitacle.org, their list of links was very useful in finding sites that were both upset about Bitacle’s scraping and had said outright that it was done without permission. It made the case against Bitacle much easier to prove.

Stay tuned as this story is very much in development.

 

Tags: Adsense, Bitacle, Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, DMCA, Google, RSS, Scraping, Splogging, Splogs

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