Comments on: PhotographerMentors.com Steals Blog Content From Leading Bloggers

By: St Louis Wedding Photographer

St Louis Wedding Photographer — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:37:29 +0000

That guy definitely should have approached the content owners before republishing. Why don’t people ever steal the stuff that I want them to and spread that around? Seriously, there’s plenty of content that people wouldn’t mind having posted on other people’s sites.

By: DiamondVVV1

DiamondVVV1 — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:13:51 +0000

I am very interested in reading your article and your fight, since I recently found all my blog contents, photos and articles, stolen and placed on another site. Repeated emails to the site owner and ISP went unanswered. Not only myself was affected by this theft of work, but photographers from around the world. I’m not sure I can paste a link to the offending site here, but I would have thought it would be a simple process to have this site banned. Not so. My next option is to turn to Google Adsense and hope they can ban the site. It’s disgusting behavior, and profit driven. If anyone has any advice on what more I can do I would really appreciate it.

By: Scott Strehlow

Scott Strehlow — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:50:00 +0000

I’m struck by the irony that one of the plagiarized articles was about “fair use” and the Obama poster.

By: wedding photographers perth

wedding photographers perth — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:21:09 +0000

Unfortunately a lot of people make such sites composed completely of other peoples content. They have no real drive to be successful, they try to take every shortcut they can. Hopefully one day there will be some effective duplicate content filter on the internet.

By: Syl Arena

Syl Arena — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:40:38 +0000

Joe McNally chimed in here - scroll down 5 paragraphs below the photo to find his thoughts on PhotographerMentors.com.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:20:31 +0000

Thanks for doing this.
I still think that some folks believe that the information on the internet is free to use in anyway they see fit.

By: Luis Cruz

Luis Cruz — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:35:23 +0000

I subscribe to Google Alerts too – that’s how I found several links from this site in my feeds a few days ago. A quick look at the titles and excerpts told me that I was being ripped off by the site. I clicked through to check out and try to document the damage, but the site was already down.

Thank you for taking action against these plagiarists. Thank you too for such a detailed discussion on the steps you took to take the site down.

By: Billy Halsey

Billy Halsey — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:20:26 +0000

I think most bloggers, even small-time folks like myself, have had content stolen by splogs to make money on someone else’s content. It’s just a matter of finding it, since Google’s (and presumably other search engines’) ranking heuristics penalize these types of sites, so sometimes just searching for it won’t work. Bravo for taking one down, and especially for showing the world what the DMCA should really be used for.

By: David Hobby

David Hobby — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:08:16 +0000

As one of the offended parties, I would like to note that this happens to me *at least* once a week in some form or another. I have developed a TOS, which you can see on Strobist.com. But I also try to take into account that there are some people who truly do not understand the rules and so I try to take a lighthearted approach on first contact — which I did with Steve, the publisher of this blog.

This almost always works, FWIW. But is does take a significant amount of my time and is totally uncompensated.

To some extent, I am becoming agnostic to the issue and am in some ways torn between the traditional copyright stance and the very interesting argument by the highly trafficked blog, Tech Dirt, seen here:

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090116/0348223430.shtml

As such, the fact that I do internally link within the posts to relevant archive material on my site in many ways mitigates the negatives of stolen content. This is not to say that I condone it. It is only that in the real world you have to find a way of dealing with it that does not take all of your time and mitigate the damages if possible.

That said, I have also had content stolen by larger, corporate sites — unattributed, no less — and can and do go after them to the full extent possible.

David Hobby
Strobist.com

By: Per, BKWine

Per, BKWine — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:45:52 +0000

This was immensely useful, in particular the details about what you have actually done. I am a photographer (with a sometimes ripped blog) but also a wine writer with frequently ripped blogs. This has been very annoying.

Google Alerts has been increadibly helpful (depressing) to find these occurrences.

Now I know what to do about it.

Thanks.