News at 11: Gadget Blog Plagiarized by Fiends
It's part and parcel of the business. Blogs, with their rapid updates and low operating costs, are an ad-friendly format. Therefore, original content is quickly cloned by plagiarists, often using automated screen-scraping software, to keep their AdSense ping machines ticking over. There were several exact analogs of Wired's Gadget Lab, where I wrote until last week, for example. And when Schwungschwungstabswachtmeister Joel Johnson announced that Brownlee and I were to be editors here at BBG, we promptly found ourselves to also be the freshly hired editors of several other, curiously similar websites.
Normally, it's more of an amusement than anything else, a measure of success. Sometimes, however, the copycats present a more persistent problem, and Techware Labs today reports that it is sick and tired of one copycat in particular, identified as Grand Island Computers.
You might say Grand Island Who? And you would be right, they are no one, with no alexa, no links, and a guy named Shawn Sinner (I can't make up that Part) running it all. He owns a store, with no products, and a blog, with no readers. We still feel that our intellectual property has been stolen and would like the content removed.
They're also ripping off TechWorld and Engadget, according to Techware EIC Jason Jacobs. Now, while high-trafficked sites might briefly reassign a neuron or two to appreciating such mindless flattery as a perl script may deliver, the copy-pasters are indiscriminate bastards. Volunteer-driven outlets suffer from the double-whammy of being more vulnerable to plagiarism and less able to do anything about it.
What can you do to help them? Not a lot, really, short of mob lunacy. But the shared schadenfreude of seeing people caught out, if nothing else, has a delicious aftertaste.
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I had this happen to a blog / review site I use to run and it just sucked. Created a nice database with products and ratings and otherwise, and some jackass came through, copied them indiscriminately and changed my name.
The worst part was he picked a nickname pretty similar to mine, adopted it for several years in the industry and sold his site to a 'legitimate' company (who was just as sleazy but had industry cred).
Screw what Cory says about intellectual property being a fiction of our imagination -- you created it, it is yours. No one has the right to take something that you created and scrape away at it and keep only the portions they find valuable and then resell it (or even give it away) without your permission. I fully understand the reality of the situation...if I owned a candy store, I can expect people to be pocketing what I sold and walking out without paying (and I'd probably overlook a lot of it), but we don't tell folks that just because they are selling easily pocketable goods, well, it is an imaginary ownership because the world belongs to the popular culture anyways.
Having said that, I do support the idea of things like the GPL, CC, public domain and otherwise -- but it should be up to the author if these are their wishes or not. Doesn't sound like the authors here really wanted this to happen.
Anyhoo....
google cache has the now-removed contact page:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:cJzlTqH5lt4J:grandislandcomputers.com/+http://grandislandcomputers.com/contactus.php&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
if anyone feels like giving good ol' shawn a quick call, his phone number is 308.370.9165 :)
argh, are my comments not going through?
I noticed this about two weeks ago when Makezine and Engadget linked to my blog. Suddenly I got pingbacks from 25 articles that all were very similar. I followed them and found that there are many blogs out there that are simply ripping off Engadget and a few that are ripping off Make. They have zero original content and seem to be completely automated. I have no idea how they get enough clicks to make any money, but I guess you don't have to make much if you are fully automated.
Random John: I would guess that the MO is to intercept search results for particular terms: a lot of people won't refer to an article once they have read it - I know I don't, particularly if it's fallen off the front page of a blog - and will google for a phrase that relates to the item. If someone could intercept those search terms by copying the articles they could potentially earn some ad revenue from those articles. This what half of the Stumbleupon network consists of.
yeah, i'm shawn, of grand island computers, i "plagerized" it by hand, and it wasn't me ripping off someone, it was me saying how stupid they were and how lame the article was, wasn't for high traffic adsense, or anything like that.
inface if anyone actually went to the site and read the 'article' they'd see i changed most of it to make it more of a parody, as the original was so horrible i didn't want that affiliated with my site.
as for me having no alexa, it was just opened. thanks though