I hate John Comokaz

BTW, the URL for the Skyline Auction is http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/1071

Even Comokaz sounds fake (kamakaze?).

Robert, I wondered if you had gotten my email on the Telegraph thing, but I’m glad you hung back and watched a bit.

If the explanation is legit, it’s still incredibly problematic for a newspaper from a content management standpoint.

So Elliot wrote a piece of software designed to duplicate a blog via RSS, and even has functions to swap adsense ID’s and amazon associates ID’s from the orginal blog and replace them with the hihackers. So he creates software that creates splogs that all link back to him. 9rules folks are constantly getting hijacked by that software, and it always points at Elliot, great for promotional purposes. In many ways Elliot has created a virus, one that is spread via social engineering and that software he wrote should be treated as such.

karl

Beautiful!

What other ways can bloggers stop this crap? I just wrote about this new method for making money off of other folks’ content, it’s ridiculous!

http://www.douglaskarr.com/2006/08/26/i-hate-bloggards/

Seems like we should be able to sue them or report them to the advertising companies they are subscribed to.

Doug

Actually, the find/replace function is a rather dumb regex replace and was created for stripping out ads in the first place. Some RSS searches, for example, will add all kinds of junk into their feeds, which is not relevant to content.

Do a little Google searching and you’ll find that there are lots of software packages and plugins made to d exactly this kind of thing. Many of them even blatantly say they’re designed to scrape content from other people’s RSS feeds so the user of the software can make money with AdSense. This one is just the tip of the iceburg.

If you don’t want you content so easily redistributed maybe you should limit your RSS feed to summaries instaed of pushing 100% of you content.

I really don’t get crying about what other people do with it when you are the one giving it away!

Michael: just because you can copy things easily doesn’t mean it’s legal, or right, to do.

We have copyright laws for a reason.

Elliott,

What is the purpose of the adsense ID, Amazon ID auto replacement feature for then? Why is there an option to replace the original author?

It seems like an unscrupulous program written for unscrupulous purposes and therefore you, the author deserves some accountability.

Karl

I wouldn’t blame Scoble that much, Elliot’s homepage links to a number of really spammy looking things:

http://vioxx.elliottback.com/ (that’s the worst)
http://msn-icons.elliottback.com/main.php
http://credit-card-information.elliottback.com/
http://celebrity-photos.elliottback.com/
http://universities.elliottback.com/

He seems to be trying to automate the creation of a ton of content pages, take advantage of WP’s natural search engine advantage, and then use the trust from his domain (from the software he writes) to cash in via the really obnoxious adsense everywhere. Google seems to have indexed almost a million pages on his site. Probably not the type of content that Google wants their ads next to, though.

Also if he didn’t have such a big ego and so aggressively link to himself in all his software he wouldn’t have such a big problem in the first place. Seems like a smart kid otherwise.

Ironically, I’m getting ripped off on this blog (http://www.accelzone.com/) by a customized version of my plugin…

Robert your missing the point. You chose to put 100% of your content into RSS. You chose to package it into a format that was designed for machine parsing and redistribution. If you don’t want 100% of your content redistributed maybe you should limit yourself to summaries.

It may nto be the right thing to do but in this case I think it’s a perfectly legal fair use. You implied consent by distributing it in this fashion.

By the way…

I only read your content from bloglines I almost never click through to your site. This isn’t quite the same situation you’re describing here but it’s close. I’m not trying to make money off your content but obvisously Bloglines is even if I don’t unserstand thier business model.

>>>It may not be the right thing to do but in this case I think it’s a perfectly legal fair use. You implied consent by distributing it in this fashion.

That’s completely wrong. And yes, I’m a lawyer.

Better to remain silent than to remove all doubt, etc. etc.

Considering that Robert wrote this:

1) Put all your content into RSS like me and let the world do with your content what it likes.

In this post!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/16.html#a9213

He not only implied consent by publishing in RSS he clearly stated what we could do with his conent! I seriously doubt that Robert has a copyright leg to satand on in court!

An no I’m not a lawer!

Michael: funny thing about courts. You can’t just sign over your rights this way. And, this is NOT ACCEPTED PRACTICE!!! Taking my content and putting your own name on it is CLEARLY NOT WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT HERE.

Michael: no, you’re not a lawyer. It’s pretty obvious. You can’t even keep Apples Apples and Oranges Oranges. Copyright law is pretty damn specific. And, this case is TOTALLY DIFFERENT than a news aggregator using my stuff the way the community has accepted. In Bloglines or other RSS aggregators my name is still on my stuff. This site doesn’t give me credit for my own work, which is TOTAL THEFT. Thanks for playing this game.

I clearly see them giving attribution! Notice the tag line at the bottom where it says:

Original post by Robert Scoble and software by Elliott Back

You also clearly have given permission to re-use your content in this post

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/16.html#a9213

As you said we can do anything with it. If you didn’t want us to have that right you would only publish descriptions or revert back to HTML.

You had it all right in that post, what’s changed your position since?

What changed? He is spamming everyone I link to with trackback spam. He’s also stealing other people’s content (I’ve gotten several emails).

I have known about this guy for months and didn’t say anything when it was just about me, but now that he’s involved other people it’s over the line.

“In Bloglines or other RSS aggregators my name is still on my stuff. This site doesn’t give me credit for my own work, which is TOTAL THEFT. Thanks for playing this game.”

Just a technicality and I am certainly not defending the site in question but they do say this under each of your posts: “Original post by Robert Scoble” with a hyperlink back to your site.

As someone else pointed out, you’ve previously apparently previously posted on the topic o f full RSS feeds. Now that you perceive the “Scoble brand” as having value, your viewpoint about RSS openness seems to have changed. Big change from the earlier days…

This thread kind of reminds me of a friend that was all about open access to source code until he wrote something that actually was valuable. It isnt the law that I am referring to…it is the perceived reaction in different value environments. He thought it ok (despite the law) when the value of his code was low but had much the same sort of reaction when something representing his own value was at stake.

Like you say in your own post, “why complain now?”

Booger

If all he were doing was copying my content I wouldn’t care but he’s trackback spamming everyone I link to. That’s over the line. Also, if I were the only one that’d be cool but he’s doing this to lots of other bloggers who DID NOT agree to have their content redistributed this way. It also breaks a LOT of community conventions (most other bloggers won’t accept this behavior).

Time for this guy to stop doing this.

Robert

I actually agree with you and, again, am certainly not defending this behavior.

Unfortunately, most community norms and behaviors change when the size of the community reaches some level of critical mass – look at USENET or email as specific glaring examples.

Commercializing anything seems to bring out uncontrolled 2nd and third order effects. Write books about wild profits on eBay and the effect may be that the sellers begin to outnumber the buyers. At least there, there are some set of rules, not just norms. Write books about blogging and mix in freely acccesible content with a bit of profit potential via adsense, the result will likely be that you’ll get broader pushing of once respected community norms.

Good or bad, sometimes communities (and apparently WordPress plugins) can grow beyond original intentions.

Booger

Bloglines doesn’t trackback spam. Bloglines doesn’t attempt to replace my UI with another one. Bloglines doesn’t use my content as a link farm to link to specific sites.

This site is over the line. It’s not even close to Bloglines. Bloglines is accepted by the commuity (and adds value to each feed). This site adds no value, and is pissing off lots of people who are emailing me saying “WTF?” is going on with trackback spam.

If he turned off the trackback spam I wouldn’t really care about him, but there are other people who hate what he’s doing with their content.

Also, bloglines is a site that’s an obvious aggregator. This site is NOT an aggregator. It’s just theft without any additional value.

Gotta love Internet Utopia, such a fresh clean smell…

Splogs and content theft blogs are all over, more spammy fake blogs than real, it seems like sometimes…(wish someone would do a hard numbers study) and all indexed in Google and artformed at MSN Spaces. And once-alive-but-now-dead blogs, live on forever, turned into comment spam banks ahoy.

Robert, Robert, Robert…WTF? cmon man, you know how to do a whois search, I’d also hope you’d be doing more now than just apologizing to Elliot, I’d be sending him at least flowers and chocolates as well

As for advice, Matt hits it in the comments: DMCA his service provider, and if they ignore it (they appear to be a reseller) do an IP check and DMCA the hosts upline, eventually you’ll get the site taken down.

As for this need to vent about this stuff, it does nothing than leave you open to further attack (or in this case legal action for defamation), you’re better off taking action behind the scenes, not in the public domain. If you need some advice drop either me or Jeremy an email, happy to help.