All bloggers face problems with splogs that steal or “scrape” blog posts. But what happens when readers (unlike faceless sploggers) post entire copies of your blog post on their own blogs without any attribution whatsoever? Fellow DesiPundit Ideasmith wonders what to do in such a situation.
Today I discovered that another of my posts (and one of my favorites too!) has been picked and posted on his blog. It does say that he read it somewhere, though not where. I’m rather doubtful that such a long post could have been relived from memory without any recollection of its source.
I’m still reluctant to let this become unpleasant.
If you thought only irresponsible bloggers did such things, wait, there is worse to come. Nita finds that Hindustan Times has actually copied a photo that she had taken from one of her posts. HT has used the photo without Nita’s permission, or any attribution.
I have used this photo in this article of mine titled Impact of coaching classes on a nation’s psyche. And I can easily prove that the picture is mine because I had cropped the picture. I have the original picture with me which is much larger…and well the larger picture also means a high resolution one. There is no way they can try to cheat me!!
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IdeaSmith
Jun 1st, 2008 at 8:55 am | #
Lekhni, thanks for linking to this post. An epsidode like this leaves a thoroughly bad taste in the mouth. Of note, the copycat post has not been taken down yet and so I’m taking this up more seriously on my blog.
Incidently HT also picked one of my posts and pics. At least they ran it under their blog section even if they mentioned the URL of the group blog and not mine and not even the link to the entire post. I find Nita’s experience quite appalling, however.
Just because we don’t get paid to write what we do, is our content any less worthy of respect or credit?