Rude Surprise: “Everyone’s” blog duplicated at ClipClip.org
Sphinn abounds with rumors that Google is updating backlinks. So, naturally I visited WebmasterTools. I had a rude surprise:
Lots of links to my blog because someone is copying articles in their entirety.
And guess what? If you read my blog, they are probably copying yours: You might want to check out the “All Things Marketing group at ClipClip.org. Click “Show Clip”; the duplicate content isn’t just your feeds. They copied the front page on some day back in September, including in many cases sidebars, ads, images, footers, and pretty much everything. In most cases, you can see your content displayed using your theme!
Page one reveals they are copying 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blogs, Niche Marketing - Andy Beard, No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow community @ BUMPzee!, More Than Scratch The Surface, Blog Strokes (but only a little bit) , Make Money Blog, and article from The Cayman Host. (But don’t feel left out Maurice; they copied your whole blog on a later page!)
You may also want to check your backlinks. I estimate that I have “on bajillion” backlinks from clip-clip.org, nearly all duplicating my content in ways that clearly do not fall under the fair use provisions of copyright.
My question to everyone
To whom do I send the DMAC for this sort of thing? Other than knowing that there is a process for issuing take down notices, I’m rather clueless about the process.
Any tips would be welcome.
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15 Responses to “Rude Surprise: “Everyone’s” blog duplicated at ClipClip.org”
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Hi Lucia
Clip Clip is a social bookmarking site. The group you mention belongs to me!
ClipClip just enables you to make a clip of what you are bookmarking and save it either publicly or privately. I use it like any other bookmarking service - or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. I bookmarked the sites I visit often as a way of exposing them to a wider audience.
Is this causing problems for people? If it is I’ll delete the bookmarks.
Maurice
Hi Maurice,
I’d just like to see a smaller fraction clipped. Say the first paragraph? Two paragraphs? Text with commentary>
Having the entire post up there, complete with images, sidebars and no comment by the person clipping can cause a huge duplicate content issue. It’s going to kill our page ranks. (Heck even my google ads are included in some of the clips!)
Usually bookmarking services let you bookmark, provide a bit of content and provide links. They don’t reproduce entire blog pages.
Oh– I should have added, the reason I blogged is that I looked around and found it difficult to find some sort of “contact” page for clipclip.org. So, there isn’t an easy way to contact and explain problems. (Or I didn’t see one!)
Yeah, it’s my fault, I’ve clipped far bigger areas than I should have and I thought that it was just like a screenshot - I see now that it isn’t so I’ll clean things up tonight.
Apologies to anyone adversely affected, obviously it wasn’t done intentionally, I was just promoting my fellow bloggers.
Thanks Lucia for the heads up. Bit embarrassing really!
Hi Lucia,
OK, I’ve had a clean sweep of clips and removed everything from the system. If I continue to use the service I shall be a lot more careful about how much I include in the clips in future.
It wasn’t a service I used extensively, but I thought the clips were just a screen capture! I should have realized that they were a lot more than that. If you visit the link quoted in the original post you will see that all blogs have been deleted from my bookmarks, so, that resolves any potential dupe content issues that they could have caused. As I had “clipped” a number of my own entries, I’m glad you posted and gave me a wake up call.
I liked the idea when I first discovered it, but, on reflection, when users do clip things they can easily fall into this trap, just as I did, without any bad intentions or even realizing the problems it might cause the sites they like enough to share.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
@Maurice– sorry to embarrass you! I think the real problem is the way clipclip is set up. If they are going to permit clipping, they should at least have some sort of “maximum” size clipped. Otherwise, they’ll have loads of people stepping way over copyright violation and also causing duplicate content issues at google.
The way clipclip.org is set up, when you clipped, the created about 20-30 individual urls with duplicate content. There seemed to be two for every tag! It was a truly amazing amount of duplicate content!
@Lucia,
No need to apologize - it is embarrassing sure, but I’m big enough and ugly enough to admit the mistake
I’m glad you posted about it. Better to get these things sorted once they are highlighted. Lessons learned and all that!
Maurice
Lucia,
I would take a look at http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/copyright-03.asp. He’s got a great bit of information. At my day job, I handle DMCA notifications on a regular basis. So I can offer further help should you have any questions. In fact I’ll have a post up on the DMCA on my blog by the end of the weekend.
Thanks Eaglehawk!
I think this particular issue is dealt with — but I know something similar is likely to happen again.
Unfortunately, it’s often easy to code things that permit (or encourage) unwarranted amounts of copying, and the people coding just don’t understand the limits of what’s allowed.
@Lucia,
I agree this one has been resolved, but with as popular as your blog is, it is only a matter of time before someone not as honest as Maurice copies your post without permission/giving proper credit.
I know what you mean about how easy it is to not limit your coding to forget to put limits on coding, I’ve destroyed a 5000 row database before, because I didn’t limit my sql query.
I run across full posts copied with a link, or copied except for the last few lines, from another blog in my niche. I’ve notified the blog author, who seems unconcerned/overwhelmed.
On ClipClip.org, their “parade” example is an item from Amazon.com. Now Amazon exists for people to buy things, and the more spread, and the easier the click through, the better. So they would not be concerned about DMCA. The same might be the case for Chamber of Commerce statements about a holiday destination site/sight.
BUT they have a knitting group, with a number of knitting patterns in full, with pictures, from knitting blogs, though not yours. And of course the “Big Bucks Blogger” and clips from kindred blogs are copyrighted.
It’s probably covered by Eaglehawk’s post, but I can refer those interested to posts on the Bloggers Forum at AbsoluteWrite.com/forums for about July 8th, where I had searched on “copyright desist.”
The standard steps are to send a “cease and desist” letter to the owner of the web site, giving a time limit, and once the time limit passes without the removal of the objectionable content, one can and should send the history of the problem to the Hosting Company. For every hosting company around the world (of any size) their TOS provides for closing down any site that violates copyright–international copyright law.
@S Peterson…. well, now I’m going to have to check if any of my knitting patterns are copied! If the sockulators are up there, I’m going to be angry! (Although, I think I stuffed javascript redirects in those and if they try to calculate they end up at my site!)
Sigh. . .
Do you mean to say my content is copied illegally and accessible to everyone?
Oh my god! thats bad, Do you know how can i report it?
btw, your article on wordpress to blogger was great for a newbie to wordpress. appreciate it!
Do you know, how i can work with my wordpress code? i don’t just mean the themes, i want to get into the CMS. Possible?
@bharadwaj: Thanks. Yes, clipclip.org basically provides a service that makes it easy to copy stuff illegally, and in fact, without knowing quite how much they are copying. So, the person who copied (Maurice) didn’t intend to copy as much as he did.
Eaglehawk above has a link to his article describing how to deal with this sort of issue and so does S. Peterson.
@barath, If you’ve installed your WP code, there are two ways to “get into” the code itself. One is to just copy one of the subroutines and just start hacking code. The other is to write plugins. The second is safer. I may at some point talk about doing that a bit.