A Popular New Content Thief
April 5th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Over the past decade, I’ve spent more than 12,000 hours creating and working on this web site.
Anyone who has done that much work on anything is going to be a little sensitive about someone else stealing their work and making money from it.
For many years, greedy unscrupulous people have “scraped” content off of sites like this, and blatantly displayed it on their own web sites — at least one guy in China then added his own copyright notice to articles that I had written, claiming that he had written them.
All so that he could attract visitors to his web site. To view his Google ads. To make money.
One of the ways that unscrupulous sites perform their content theft is to create their own web site that displays someone else’s web site within a “frame.”
The original author of the original web site has to pay for the web traffic that the thief uses every time they load the stolen web pages into their own “frame.” The users who visit the thief’s site don’t see the URL of the original author’s web site — they see the URL of the thief’s web site and “frame.” Then the thief collects money by displaying paid advertisements in “the frame.”
It’s kind of llike stealing a famous painting, putting it in a new frame, signing your name on it, claiming that you painted it yourself — and then making money by displaying it.
Everyone knows that content theft has always been a despicable thing to do.
And it’s a violation of the original author’s copyrights.
And content theft is still a despicable thing to do — whether you steal other people’s content yourself, or you let your thousands of registered users do your “scraping” for you.
Even if the newest content thief is the popular social news site, Digg.
Please take the Diggbar Feedback Survey and tell Digg to stop stealing other web sites’ content.
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Tags:
Consumer Info, Cybercrime, Ethics, Internet, Law, Personal, Rights, Web Development