I accidentally have discovered a company doing exactly what Bitacle did in mid-to-late 2006. It is scraping people’s RSS feeds from their blogs and mirroring the content in its entirety. Then they wrap lots of Google Adsense ads around it. So they are making money off of my work, and the work of others. The site is web.EnjoyChn.com. No link, they don’t deserve one.
From browsing their site, it looks like there are several hundred sites being pillaged this way. If I have time later this week, I may try to contact some of those people.
After the Bitacle debacle last year, I added the “Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter with Bitacle blocker” WordPress plugin to my site. It adds a copyright message to the footer of each post, which is dutifully reproduced on the violating web site. I tweaked the script to also include the IP address and the date/time stamp when my feed was retrieved. That information is also reproduced faithfully on the thief’s web site.
I went through all 41 of my pages, and found that until September 11, 2007 at 16:12:12, the thief was using IP address 58.31.119.82, which is assigned to a Chinese ISP. Since that date, all the requests have come from 69.93.255.82, which resolves to HostGator.com. The infringing web site resolves to 69.93.255.83, also at HostGator.
I have filed a complaint with (1) Google, to get the offender out of the Google index, (2) Google Adsense, to hopefully get them out of the Adsense program; and (3) HostGator, the web host involved in this. We’ll see what happens next.
Useful Resources:
Update: HostGator has notifier the user, and given them 24 hours to take action.