The Internet if full of them. They lurk around forums, blogs, websites and they are voracious readers. But why does that make them bad? They’re reading to see if your content is good enough to steal. Wouldn’t you know it, a reader of one of my websites that offers free, real, practical money making ideas sent me this email :

Dear Andrew,

I love your site. It’s given me so many ideas to make money. I would like to ask if you’d mind me compiling your ideas into an ebook. I intend to sell it on eBay.

Thanks so much…

Trisha (not her real name)

Now, how was I supposed to re-act to that? You spend hours every week for years creating content that you hope will help your readers, and along comes someone who thinks that just because it’s the Internet, they have every right to “claim” your content as their own work!

I politely informed her that I wouldn’t mind her linking to my website, but reproducing my content offline without my express written permission would constitute an infringement of copyright. I wonder if she understood that.

In any case, when you think about it, we ALL “scrape” content in one way or another. However, I believe that most honest publishers would at least quote the author’s name and include a live link back to the source of the article or content.

I don’t know if this polite content scraper will actually scrape my content, but at least I had the opportunity to “educate” her on the repercussions. The fact that she planned to make it available for sale in ebook form would make it double hard to track since there are millions of ebooks floating around in cyberspace. I can only hope for the best, but in case you feel you might be a victim of content scrapers, CopyScape is a website that helps you fight plagiarism.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Share this blog post with a friend:

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Netscape
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • StumbleUpon
  • Linkter
  • SphereIt