Would you do a little Christmas lagniappe for me, please?
Go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the theft shown at this URL:
http:// www.ebliss.us/2008/12/posting-bookmarks-online
You’ll need to remove the space after http:// that I inserted to avoid giving the jerk proprietor a gratuitous link.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the “ebliss” homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URL of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put that into the box to report the specific offense. Remember to remove that extra space after the double slash.
It’s one thing, I suppose, for the damned scrapers to knock off a single paragraph and then post a link, though I don’t like it that they use even a few of my words for the purpose of making money off my work. But when someone takes an entire post and sticks it online under a slew of ads…no. That will not do. Especially when, as in this case, he presents it as his own work. And, as in this case, his site is swimming in ads.
Lately I’ve been hiding my byline in white type after the first graf of posts I think will be scraped, and then deeper in the post placing another byline with a link to a FaM or Copyeditor’s Desk post with instructions on how to report the theft to Google’s advertising department. This may (with luck, I gather) cause Google to yank its ads from the word-thief’s site, effectively putting it out of business. The schmuck who ripped off today’s post didn’t even bother to delete those, probably because he has a machine committing his thefts.
Gee. Imagine how nice it would be to have a robot that you could send out to burglarize houses, knock over jewelry stores, and lift Porterhouse steaks off the Safeway’s butcher counters….