Update: had a to-and-fro with Jen at Typepad support who has been very helpful and the copied content has been removed. Actually, the whole site has gone, it just serves up a blank page. So, job done. There’s some follow-up here if you’re interested.
We briefly alluded to copyright theft in a recent Emma and Pete Show and it’s time to show you what we’re referring to. This site (and I won’t link it, so you’ll have to copy and paste into your browser address bar) is mooching content from a bunch of places, including Emma’s gardening blog. Go see, it’s safe for work (last time I checked, anyway):
http://orlaphelan87.typepad.com/
Copy any sentence from any article and bash it into Google (in inverted commas to be certain). I’m confident you’ll find an article elsewhere that was the source. Not only is the content being scraped and pasted in verbatim, there are ads at the bottom of each article, but they link to forum profiles, which presumably contain a link to a subsequent website. Every article is taken from somewhere else on another site.
Emma’s in good company; the BBC, Guardian and some other notable gardening figures are affected. All things considered, it’s just something to deal with. Neither of us are particularly annoyed or put-out by the stealing, it’s just the time and effort of fixing it that’s painful.
It takes seconds for a blogger to copy and paste a 3rd party post into their blog. It can even be done automatically with simple software – RSS has made the whole process deliciously simple and fast: it gives you a content feed without the other website furniture. There is, of course, an understanding that the content will be read by a person on a desktop computer rather than republished and hoarked around the web by a spam blogger.
To get this situation sorted, we need to file a DMCA takedown request. I’ve done this a few times now and it’s excruciatingly slow. A couple of hours to get all the paperwork boxes filled in with evidence, then we just sit back and wait. If all goes well, the site will go and we’re done. If Typepad decide to get picky we could be going back and forth for a looooong time.
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