Blogging and Copyright

As authors, publishers or anyone trying to establish a platform on the Internet it is recommended that you periodically Google yourself to see what results you get. After all, this is how most other people will be trying to find you. I did this search on myself this morning and was pleased to see that nearly all the listings for the first 7 pages I looked at referred to me - blog posts, my presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Youtube videos, Slideshare, etc. But as I looked closer at a couple of entries I became somewhat perplexed. The websites listed did not sound familiar to me even though my name and a blog post I had written on my personal blog appeared in the title of these two websites.

When I clicked through on the links, I saw that my whole blog post had been placed on these two websites with no credit or link provided back to me. I did a search about what to do when someone steals your work on the Internet and found this wonderful article How to Complain and Report Spam Blogger Blogs. The post has a lot of great tips, and after I read it I could readily see that the two blogs who stole my posts were indeed spam blogs (aka splogs).

Neither one of the blogs has any advertising on it, or I could report the abuse to Google Adsense. For now I have filed complaints about both of the blogs with Blogger since they are in violation of the Terms of Service. I am not sure how effective that will be, but it is a first step. In the meantime I will continue to look for other things that I can do to these two thieves. My advice to you is Google yourself - you might be very surprised at what you find!