Copyright notices aren’t tacky, and they don’t stop anything. They merely serve to remind the person reading and using the content that there is a copyright on the content, but it doesn’t define what the copyright entails. Everything published on the web is copyrighted. The level of permission for use changes depending upon the desires of the copyright owner. Ask first. Though few do.

How were these scrapers stopped? They were asked. If they did not respond, they were sent DMCA notices, search engines were notified as were advertisers. They stopped. See What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content for more specifics.

Sploggers do more harm than good from EVERY angle. They clutter the web, they waste people’s time, the links they give back suck with the inclusion of TrustRank in Google PageRank, and they make money from our work, often when we cannot make money directly from our own work, such as my blog on WordPress.com. It is in our best interest to stop scrapers and sploggers everywhere, whether they copy us or someone else.

Thanks for caring about this issue. More people need to.

I didn’t realize just how bad these splogs were until content from one of my sites stopped being indexed, but the splogs that displayed my content *were* indexed. I was fuming! I think I was penalized because of this, too. Maybe Google penalized for duplicate content? I don’t know. Either way, I contacted their advertisers. :D

Andrew Anderson, I don’t think she’s overreacting. And, why should she have to wait for Akismet to finally catch up? By the way, I’m still receiving the same type of comments, so she would have been waiting a long time, wouldn’t she?

The sploggers may not take away her readers, but the point (to me, anyway) is that they are making money off of her work.

As for your copyright manifesto, don’t you think you’re being a little bit 1980?
Evertything is derivative work. And everything is already copied if only by search engines, our routers and web browsers. If you’ve been blogging for 14 years, I assume you’ve had a few moments of inspiration in which you’ve seen where this cloud of discussion is heading.

I say lighten up, friend. You’re value here is your influence on others, your social currency etc. No spammer or “plagiarist” can take away the network of friends and readers you have built.

If you’re really convinced that you own your piece of the conversation, then password-protect your site. You wouldn’t want anyone crawling it and making money off of excerpting it. Actually, why not make your site all image-based so the words can’t be copied or detected at all by bots? I’m just trying to make a point. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Google profits from copying your content. WordPress does. Technorati does. And you benefit from them. So the blogger bots are annoying, so what? They’ll fade out.

Some of these folks are building up page rank on a domain so that they can sell it.

What I can’t figure out is what the reason for this is. Most of the splogs don’t even seem to have any advertisement on them, yet it is become more and more of a problem.

LOL! I almost sent your comment to the spam bin. :)

Receive reports? Why not get your company to hook up with Automattic Akismet to get their help in targeting those who use their web hosting facilities. I’m sure they could figure out how to work together to shut these types of sites down.

Just kidding. When you said “these twits” above, I snorted, as I suddenly had a Monty Python-style vision of the boys on the Internet, setting up blogs. [Remember the skit where they had The Twit Races? Stupid twit, he ran himself over.]

If it weren’t annoying, however, it’d all be so hilarous. And why should these twits care? They’re only in it for the money. Scruples hardly matter.

It seems that you not only provide the answer to nearly every question a new blogger might have, you provide them in real time.

Synchronicity is a funny thing.

Thanks, Lorelle

Marking as spam sufficient? What else do you want to do? Drive a truck over their heads? Yes, that’s enough.

cerebralmum: Thanks for the kind words, but don’t always check my site for the answers. :D Trust your instincts and check the link if you doubt the veracity of the comment. And kill all spammers and sploggers – ah, their comments specifically.

Wayne: Yes, gadgetgadget is a new notorious splog. These keep coming in faster than we can blow them out of the water. Stomp them all as spam.

Jamie: There are a lot of myths about comment spam and comment spam prevention techniques out there, and what people don’t seem to get is that there are brilliant minds behind this time-wasting crap. They are coming up with ways to get comment spam and trackback spam onto your blog that boggle the brain. Targeted comment spam has been around for a while, but the human spammers are the hardest ones to detect without a visit to the site they reference. And even then….

I’m glad that you are all on my side. I say NO TO SPLOGS ON MY BLOGS.

So is marking them as spam suffice?