 |
| "Boreas" by John William Waterhouse (1903) |
Yesterday I
discovered that a website has appropriated a huge amount of content
from this blog, ie, entire blogposts, one after the other, and has not
only failed to cite the author (me) but has also claimed copyright over
content on their website which is in fact stolen from this blog! I don't want
to promote traffic by posting a link to it but please know that the people
behind this website, if you should come across it, are charlatans.
While it is theoretically flattering (though not in fact) that they would think content written by me is worth appropriating as their own, what they are doing feels like a most hurtful violation. It is small consolation to discover that they have ripped off many other blogs as well. Small also to see that their most popular post was written by me.
Postscript (2018): there are only two websites that validly reproduce my work, they are romanpagan.blogspot.com and romanpagan.wordpress.com. If you ever see my content on another website please do not hesitate to contact me by leaving a comment at the end of one of my blogposts.
I'm sorry to hear this happened to you. If you decide you might want to link to the website in question, check out http://www.donotlink.com/dnl/faq. It's a method of linking without giving Google juice. Are you going to follow up and request they remove or credit the content?
ReplyDeleteThanks for that - that is great to know about the donotlink thing. I have asked the website to remove the huge amount of content they appropriated but that is yet to happen. If nothing happens in the next couple of days I will move on to contacting their hosting service. As there are so many instances of plagiarism on their website (http://www.donotlink.com/1sec.eu) it will be easy to prove their wrongdoing, not least because they only started up this year and yet their website is full of posts from 2014 and earlier.
DeleteAll this is highly annoying also considering the great amount of time and efforts often spent to write well documented posts. It could be however of some interest to know the name of this website (I understand the problem of the indirect publicity - I've seen the donotlink website) to verify the eventual presences of other blogs involved in similar cases of plagiarism like yours...
DeleteIt is 1sec.eu. If you go to donotlink.com/1sec.eu then you will come to the page without improving its profile on search engines (note that using the donotlink thing seems to make it take a bit longer for the page to load). However the website has been down for the past day or two, after the owner informed me she will remove my posts.
DeleteIt had never before occurred to me that someone could be bothered to appropriate the content in this blog – I considered that blogs were too personal for that, but apparently this is not so!
Like I said in the CDR group: You've made the big time!
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, this is a problem with the internet. Especially the Pagan blogosphere. Although from my understanding on the blog in question was that it wasn't specifically a polytheistic/Pagan blog?
This happened to Warboar when she found someone who was in the same sphere as her research (someone directly appropriating her very academic sources and presenting them as their own). It's pretty awful to see this happen. I hope it works out.
Thanks for your encouraging words. Yeah, the website is meant to be about history I think. Looking forward to seeing it without my content!
Delete