Yo ho ho and a bottle of scum: Kicking the Poo out of Pirates
Today, Byron and I had the unfortunate experience of coming across a big ugly pirate ship on the Web. Online Travel Help has been using RSS republication software to pirate the content from our Boeing-sponsored site inFlightHQ.
There are legitimate uses for the software they’re using - like creating a blog that aggregates many different sources into one comprehensive overview of a particular topic on the Web. But by singling out our blog for republication, and then adding their own advertising, they’re making money off of other people’s hard work. That’s just not kosher.
So, what did we do at InflightHQ? We called them out. And since their blog is just a copy of ours, our callout will eventually propagate over to their site as well and make them look like idiots. This is one way to deal with being reblogged. It’s kind of like engaging your detractors - but even more fun. Because with these miscreants, you don’t have to be nice or pull your punches. You can just lay the smackdown.
Take that, detractor!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for describing what we found the other day when we discovered that another site had published our blog without acknowledgment or any links back to our site. At first we were kinda proud that someone thought enough our blog to publish it but when we saw that they had, in essence stolen it, we were disgusted.
You gave us a way to expose them and be recognized for our work.
We want others to republish our blogs, but to do so accurately and to credit us for our original writings.
Hi Bill,
Sorry to hear that your blog was pirated. Calling them out is really good. No matter what they do in response, it makes them look bad and reasserts your claim over your own copy.
-Teresa
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