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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Rotters who steal website content

One thing that irks me, that really bugs me, gets my goat, makes me "go ape" and get out of my trolley, causes me to blow a gasket, is a blogger who trawls the Web searching for content to steal for use on his own blog — content that he passes off as his own. This is known as "content scraping," and bloggers do it to hijack internet traffic that should have gone to the original post. The blogger does this in the hope of earning a bit of extra revenue from adverts, or perhaps in the hope of impressing his little friends. Steal enough content and the blogger nets a lot of revenue while gaining a following of blissfully unaware readers who marvel at his worldly knowledge and consistently interesting posts.

The cheek of it! I've had reviews and articles of my own stolen in this way, and it's very annoying. In one case, when I wrote to the offending blogger and asked her to remove the Famous Five article she'd lifted wholesale from my site (pictures and all) she got quite angry and removed it, but posted a snotty note in its place saying that I was being a grumpy spoilsport (or words to that effect).

Today I was checking my website visitor stats and found that I'd got a number of hits from a blogger who calls himself Silent Knight. This guy had copy-pasted Prabhu Viswanathan's entire review of The Magic Faraway Tree into his blog, pictures as well. Worse — and in my opinion the ultimate offense — he'd not bothered to copy the images to his own server, he'd just displayed them on his page by linking to those on my own site. That means every viewer to his page is at the expense of MY bandwidth; and when enough people do that, my bandwidth goes through the roof and I end up paying more for it. Very uncool.

I do have plans to put a stop to this though. Anyone who displays an image on his or her site that's directly served from my own web space had better watch out that I don't replace that image with something rude. Perhaps a message that says, "This blogger is a content scraper. You can find the original content at [web address]." That would soon alert people to the truth. Or I could simple rename the images on my server; then they'd stop displaying on the blogger's site and instead cause a broken link.

Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with bloggers, forumites, website owners, etc, taking my Blyton images and copying them onto their own web space (within reason). After all, they're not my original illustrations or book covers, they're just scans — some I did myself and some as provided by Tony Summerfield and various others. When working on other websites I'm utterly guilty of taking images from the internet myself, and editing them for my own purposes, usually so they end up nothing like the original. In a sense it's a matter of what you believe is wrong and right, and how far you can go without crossing the line. I try to borrow images that are "free for public use," but unfortunately people who offer those have often stolen them in the first place!

But in this particular case, what I'm objecting to is the wholesale theft of what is obviously someone else's review, including both text and pictures — and the images are using my personal bandwidth.

Ah, heck, now I'm all fired up and the temptation is too great. I feel a need to inflict some harm on the blogger. As far as I'm concerned, by using my images, he's leaving himself wide open to attack. Below is the link to Silent Knight's page. Because he's fool enough to use my images, I can replace them with anything I want, so I've replaced the fifth one with a "stolen" message and made the last one into a thin strip that's 20,000 pixels high (causing his page to scroll endlessly)...

[Sorry, the blog has now disappeared]

Ooh, I'm so bad! But am I bovvered though? Look at my face. Do I look bovvered? But you know, this blogger has copied the review not once but twice. His other offending page is here:

[Sorry, this blog has also disappeared]

In both cases (and assuming the review has not been removed by the blogger) it's worth seeing what that incredibly tall image does to the length of the home pages. But I'm being conservative here. Your screen might be somewhere between 768 and 900 pixels high, and I've made that image 20,000 pixels high — still, if I wasn't using it as a demonstration I could easily make the image 200,000 pixels high and make the background transparent while I'm at it; I wonder how long it would take the blogger to figure out the problem. The great thing for me is that even an image that high is incredibly small in terms of file size — so no loss for me bandwidth-wise.

One day I might just do a global rename of all my images. But I'm also aware that many, many people don't even realize that what they're doing is "harmful," so I have no desire to get vindictive except in certain cases. Still, it's a useful lesson for unaware people to learn. See, I could easily rename all my images for completely innocent reasons, and the result would be the same — lots of broken links and messed up pages because suddenly the images don't appear to exist any more.

The single nice thing about this particular case is that Prabhu's review is obviously popular enough to be stolen!

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