splogging | Funny about Money

I’d stopped secreting a copyright notice in the body copy of my posts, because the splogging of my site had slowed down enough to make that not worth the trouble. Besides, most of these chuckleheads simply steal the first few words and then insert a link back to my site, which tends to up one’s page rank, stupidly enough.

But here’s a real, unvarnished word thief: http://johnjtarthur.net

This low-life is stealing my articles and publishing them as his own, amid garlands of advertising. It’s now more than just a matter of principle: he’s stealing revenue that I sorely need because of the coming layoff.

Will you please go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the thefts shown at these URLs:

http:// johnjtarthur.net/moments-of-fame/
http:// johnjtarthur.net/fight-a-brewing-over-cobra/
http://johnjtarthur.net/panzanella-use-it-up-italian-comfort-food/
http://johnjtarthur.net/go-figure/
http://johnjtarthur.net/buying-a-car-watch-out-for-rips/
http://johnjtarthur.net/bureaucracy-redux/
http://johnjtarthur.net/carnival-of-personal-finance-vacation-time-edition/

On some of these, he’s contrived to make the pingbacks go to older posts that have nothing to do with the post he stole, so obviously he knows he’s violating my copyright and AdSense policy and is trying to hide it.

When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the johntarther.net homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URLs of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put those into the box to report the specific offense.

If you would like to report the specific FaM pages he has ripped off, they are as follows:

https://funny-about-money.com/2009/05/28/moments-of-fame-56/
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/05/29/fight-a-brewing-over-cobra/
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/05/30/panzanella-use-it-up-italian-comfort-food
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/06/01/go-figure/
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/06/02/buying-a-car-watch-out-for-rips/
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/06/03/bureaucracy-redux/
https://funny-about-money.com/2009/06/01/carnival-of-personal-finance-vacation-time-edition/

Thanks for your help. AdSense may send you a reply saying you have to jump through other hoops, but I’ve been told that Google actually will act on complaints sent through their report-a-violation site without correspondents having to take further action.

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….