You're probably wondering what I'm going to be discussing. It's certainly something I had no idea I'd be writing about.
As serendipity [thanks to Feedburner] would have it, I stumbled upon a commercial site, Atmospheric Water Generation, whose home page featured my most recent post on World Toilet Day. That's no big deal - lots of people repost individual WaterWired posts and that's fine as long as they ask my permission,clearly attribute me as the source, and don't link it to some product or service endorsement.
I've been asked several times to 'go commerical' and have declined, simply because I want to maintain a certain degree of objectivity; I don't do this for the money. Could you envision one of my posts about bottled water with a banner ad for Fiji Water? Uh-huh....
Imagine my surprise when I scrolled down and saw that the whole page was nothing but my posts, all the way back to 10 September 2010. Even the 'categories' mirrored my own (with a lot more detail, actually). Right below the title of each post there is, in small print, 'Author: Aquadoc'.
Atmospheric Water Generation, who appears to market dehumidifiers, did not ask my permission to repost my entries, nor did they bother to post a disclaimer that 'Aquadoc' or WaterWired does not endorse their products. The fact that WaterWired is not identified at all would suggest to a casual reader that the posts are created by Atmospheric Water Generation and that 'Aquadoc' works for them.
And if that's not enough, they have the cojones to post a 'Copyright' statement at the very bottom.
As the cognoscenti would say, my content has been 'scraped'.
So this is just to clarify my position: I don't endorse Atmospheric Water Generation products, have no connection to them; nor did I give them permission to repost my entries.
I am curious to see if they repost this item (they did).
Note added at 1:30 PM PST: They have taken down my posts and apologized. Seems their Webmaster did this without authorization, although it's beyond me how this could have gone unnoticed for over two months.
"I'm not an ambulance chaser. I'm usually there before the ambulance. " -- Melvin Belli
Hey, Tim.
Yeah, it's amazing - a machine that produces water from the sky! We called them 'dehumidifiers' when my family got one 50 yars ago to keep the basement dry. Duhhh....
Posted by: Micharl | Sunday, 21 November 2010 at 06:34 AM
"Atmospheric Water Generation" - Wow, that sounds like a terrific idea! I mean, think about it: what if water could be made to just... fall from the sky!!! Wouldn't that be amazing? Perhaps I should invest in their technology.
Or not.
Posted by: Tim | Saturday, 20 November 2010 at 09:30 PM
I have had a run in with a content scraper too. Glad your situation worked out.
Posted by: Robert | Saturday, 20 November 2010 at 05:51 PM
They "scraped" your content, which is not legal. They may not even be reading anything they scrape. One geoblogger now puts a link back to her blog and a copyright statement at the bottom of each post. I think whoever was scraping her stopped because she asked everyone to go compain by commenting. Unfortunately, comments aren't available in this case.
Posted by: Silver Fox | Saturday, 20 November 2010 at 11:56 AM