Content theft: its plain scary!
by Duncan
September 14, 2005
Just saw a link to a tool on Problogger in a comment from Joshua Minton: Copyscape, that allows you to punch in your blog address and returns the results of pages that are copying your blog. You only get the top 10 results and to get more you pay, but even the Top 10 was scary enough for me to actually feel phyiscally sick when I realised how far it went. The scrapper sites that totally screw up the stories though did provide a chuckle, particularly when most of the post consisted of my blogroll :-)
saw the link to copyscape as well, Duncan … on first impressions it looks good, does a nice job.
Scary though what you might find … just how corrupt people can get
Copyscape has its place, but really, it can’t do anything that can’t be done with Google Alerts. It’s even limited to the same database. There’s no point in paying for the full product.
As far as automated plagiarism goes, have you considered adding a footer to your RSS feed? I’ve got information on a WordPress plugin that does it for you here:
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=96
It seems to stop the scrappers.
Jonathan, thaks for the extra info. I’m researching this whole topic for a post I’m doing shortly.
Will check out your site and might contact you for some comments. Cheers.