Scraper Websites Remain An Internet Scourge

Last Saturday morning I logged onto my main email account and discovered a highly unusual number of messages, particularly for a weekend morning. A quick survey of what had come in were notifications from my two main automotive blogs – The Auto Writer and Auto Trends – that comments were awaiting my approval.

It didn’t take me long to realize that these comments were pingbacks from articles I had written for the two blogs, information that was scraped from both these sites with links intact to other articles. Moreover, each photograph I included was also snagged, meaning that the pictures were hot-linked to my website, a further drain on my resources.

Admittedly, I have let some scrapers slide, figuring it wasn’t worth the hassle of hunting down and finding them in order to register a complaint. However, this time I was furious and decided enough was enough.

Hunting Down Website Scrapers

To find a website scraper, I’ll plug in the URL for that website to Domain Tools at www.domaintools.com to see what comes up. Sometimes personal information is blocked as the owner hides behind a domain proxy. Other times, a person’s name isn’t listed, but a contact email is given. If you’re lucky, you may even find the person’s name, phone number, email address, etc. In this situation, all I had available to me was the person’s email address, but that was enough for me to fire off the following email:

It has come to my attention that the owner of scrapersite.com is taking articles from sites that I own and posting these articles to his site. Since the email address yourname@yourmail.com is listed as the contact for the site, you are being contacted.

Please remove at once every article you have taken from http://www.autotrends.org (Auto Trends) and http://www.thearticlewriter.com/autowriter (The Auto Writer). What you have done is illegal and violates international copyright law.

(I then listed examples of articles that had been culled from my sites and concluded my email with the following statement):

You do not have my permission to use my personal material, therefore I expect you to remove the articles in question at once.

I concluded my message with my name and repeated the URLs to my two automotive sites.

I Get A Response

I wasn’t expecting a response, figuring that if this person cared that he scraped articles from my site he’d remove the information and that would be that. Or, if he had no plans to take down my information, then he wouldn’t respond.

I was wrong on both counts.

Turns out I got a reply within the hour of sending off my notice which was as follows:

Hello, this site is only collecting RSS Feed. You know? Mybloglog, Zimbio, Yahoo, blogcatalog do same, they collecting RSS feed. Also, this site give you linkback, not claimed as my article, so its not illegal. But, since u mind, I will remove your feed as soon possible.

Yes I mind! So much so I replied:

It is illegal. You posted each one of my articles on your site in full. The other sites that you mentioned include a snippet, not the entire work. Just because you can read my works with an RSS reader doesn’t mean you can use it on your own site.

Please read up on what constitutes copyright and what constitutes fair use:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

In addition your country, Pakistan, is a signatory to the Berne Convention which protects people like me from getting their intellectual property taken without their knowledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works

If you remove all of the material (taken) from my two sites I will let this matter go. If not, I’ll be forced to contact the Berne Convention office in Karachi to file a complaint.

I doubt that there is a Berne office in Karachi or anywhere else for that matter. But, I wanted to put a little teeth in my reply to encourage him to follow through. He sent a follow up reply doubting that I would make good on my threats, reiterating that he posted “automatic content” which gave him, in his eyes, the right to republish. I decided to let him have the last word.

Wrapping It Up

In the end my articles were removed so I no longer have an issue with this person. I am glad that I followed through and that he took the proper action. My time was taken up with having to do something I really didn’t want to do, but I needed to protect my intellectual property even if someone else doesn’t understand what that means.

Article scraping remains an internet scourge, but with some diligence on our part we can limit its effect one scraper at a time.