Becca Jane St Clair

Personal Blog

Pissed Off!

Yesterday, I was looking at my blog statistics, and this website popped up as being a referring website. I always like to check my referrers just to see what they are, and if it’s another blog that’s linked to me, I like to read a few posts and consider adding a link back.

Well. Not this website. Apparently, they not only were hot linking my image of banoffee pie I made several weeks back, they also copied word-for-word my entire post* about making banoffee pie…and the website appears to have no contact information listed, and they’ve conveniently disabled the ability to leave comments on posts. Right clicking on other images and clicking “view image” showed me all sorts of images that had been pulled from other websites, blogs, even livejournal. This leads me to believe that the entire food.tasteonline.info website just copy/pastes in other people’s blog posts….especially after they copied a post from the Guardian and the bottom of the post says:

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

I managed to disable the hotlinking of the image. That was pretty simple and involved editing the .htaccess file (you can google for instructions if you’ve had this problem, too, or even add a WordPress plug-in. Just search the plug-ins for “disable hotlink”). The images (So far) still copy over to the RSS feed and the Facebook feed, but will not show up on any other website.

But what can I do about the copied words? Nothing, really. It would be possible to track down the website owners, but often that doesn’t even give you the proper information. For example, if you check who “owns” my domain, it will list Dreamhost, my hosting company because they protect their client’s identities.

I had another problem recently where a camping website had pulled my post about what you need to drive on the continent. On their site, they claimed it was “edited from” and at least included the link back to my article. The edit was pretty bad though. They changed random words and it wound up not making sense, but again, not much I could really do about it, other than leaving a comment on the article and asking them to remove it.

But since the people that run the sites seem to copy in every last word of a post, so from now on the bottom of every post of mine is going to include a copyright notice similar to the one I use under the photos.

I also looked into disabling right clicking, but then that would also disable the “open in new tab” option if someone wanted to click on a link. I suppose I could also start watermarking all the photos I put on the blog, but that would take ages to do, as all of the “batch watermark” programs I tried in the past were horrible.

*I looked at the banoffee pie recipe again. It appears to be lifted straight off the LJ cooking community, and not my actual blog.

Hmm. I’m going to test posting an image here just to make sure it posts over to the RSS and Facebook feed.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users can comment directly on Facebook.]


The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, or the RSS feed(s), please notify me.

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5 comments

5 Comments so far

  1. miss m March 18th, 2011 14:19

    I didn’t see the image on the LJ feed. 🙁

    And if you can figure out who their webhost is, you can send a DCMA letter and the webhost will remove it.

    Sample: http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/

    I’ve gone it before and had things of mine removed by the webhost without dealing with the website owner.

  2. Rebecca March 18th, 2011 14:34

    It was working…I specifically added LJ to the allow list.

    Crap.

    It’s really going to throw a wrench in things if people reading it on the LJ feed can’t see my pics! 🙁

  3. Rebecca March 18th, 2011 14:36

    Could you try it now?

  4. miss m March 19th, 2011 14:36

    Sorry, didn’t get your reply. For some reason, I don’t get notifications of replies. I just replied to your gmail.

  5. Rebecca March 20th, 2011 22:22

    That’s okay. And kind of odd. Not sure why you didn’t!

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