I think you stole my blog...

Imagine searching for one of your blog post titles (just to see if there's some link love out there for ya) and finding a scrapper site that has stolen not one but ALL your blog posts? It's kinda like seeing your face on a advert for *fill in embarrassing association of your choice here.* I'll say it again, MUFASA! Say it again... Oh sorry, I mean THIEF!

PIC HERE

"Allow me to paint you a picture with my imagination brush." - JD,Scrubs.

This has happened to me, with another blog of course, and I feel dirty!

I have tried the direct approach and commented because surprise, surprise, no contact details are provided. Apparently commenting is not what I should have done cause now I've just helped them step up a little in search. So the next step is to protect my intellectual copyright through the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Thankfully a lovely blogger must have been down this dark road before because she/he has blogged about how to go about this here. Lot's of lovely legal stuff to look into. Yay, I need excitement in my life.

So far the experience has made me think about plagiarism and copyright.

I've always thought plagiarism was for thick people but I've come to realise that lazy people do it it too. To check if your words have been jacked by a stupid/lazy person, you could find some fancy sites to help you or simply copy a paragraph, paste in search and Google it. Easy peasy.

What about referencing research? I do that cause I dig facts over generalisations. Is this this wrong? According to the Fair Use Rule, it depends on the nature of the publication and the amount of copy referenced. As a rule of thumb, reference to scientific studies is all good and for everything else, less is more. Good to know.

And images? If you've been following the talk about the image sharing site Pinterest, you'd know they've opened a bag of sour worms with that one. I found this article insightful. If you're concerned that you images are being used without proper crediting or permission, check out TinEye, a reverse image search site which allows you to upload an image and see where it's featured online. Accuracy is dependent on where those little spiders have crawled so it may miss new sites that haven't be indexed yet. I'm not 100% how it works because I heard search engine spiders can't crawl images but there you are - I tried it with a few pics and it worked.

Hope that was useful or at least made you reminiscence about watching The Lion King as a kid. Happy thoughts. Oh, and if you have any advice for me about getting that nasty scrapper to stop pretending he/she is as talented as me (FYI, I write sooo much more professionally on other sites, here I just keep it real and non-ninja-like) please share your suggestions and scrapper ass-kicking moves. XOXO