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Hello all,

I realize this is somewhat offtopic, but since it involves my Ruby/Rails
related blog, I thought I ask it here, maybe somebody can enlighten me.

I came across these links:

http://www.webdotdev.com/nvd/server-...-cookbook.html
http://www.webdotdev.com/nvd/server-...uby/rails.html
http://www.webdotdev.com/nvd/server-...episode-1.html

Those are *my* articles - here are the originals from my site:

http://www.rubyrailways.com/book-review-ruby-cookbook/
http://www.rubyrailways.com/data-ext...g-in-rubyrails
http://www.rubyrailways.com/data-ext...ails-episode1/

At the top of the webdotdev.com pages, there is a photo of the 'author'
with an 'About the Author' link. Hint: it's neither my photo, nor is it
about me. It also states: "Written by Phil Harrison". resp "Written by
Satish Talim".

I hope this is just some kind of a joke, or an early attempt to play
April fools or something. Of course I am happy if someone picks up my
articles, but not that happy if he states he wrote them...

Could please someone (e.g. Satish, if you are reading this) explain this
to me? Maybe I just misunderstood something and this is some cool new
web4.0 trend which everybody knows except me - if it's so, please tell
me about it, I'd be eager to hear your opinion on this matter.

Thanks,
Peter

__
http://www.rubyrailways.com :: Ruby and Web2.0 blog
http://scrubyt.org :: Ruby web scraping framework
http://rubykitchensink.ca/ :: The indexed archive of all things Ruby.

On Mar 28, 2007, at 7:59 AM, Peter Szinek wrote:

> At the top of the webdotdev.com pages, there is a photo of the
> 'author' with an 'About the Author' link. Hint: it's neither my
> photo, nor is it about me. It also states: "Written by Phil
> Harrison". resp "Written by Satish Talim".
>
> I hope this is just some kind of a joke, or an early attempt to play
> April fools or something. Of course I am happy if someone picks up
> my articles, but not that happy if he states he wrote them...
>
> Could please someone (e.g. Satish, if you are reading this) explain
> this to me? Maybe I just misunderstood something and this is some
> cool new web4.0 trend which everybody knows except me - if it's so,
> please tell me about it, I'd be eager to hear your opinion on this
> matter.

It's not a cool new trend -- people have been plagiarizing other
peoples' writing for a long time.

I would like to believe that it's just a mistake, but it's much more
likely IMO that it is exactly what it appears to be -- someone has
set up a site to "republish" articles under the site's banner, in
violation of your copyright. Don't know what, if any, legal recourse
you have.

It seems like webdotdev scrapes blogs and republishes.

It also seem like they got the correlation between blog and blogger mixed up.

Notice the links to the original under every article.


What they're doing is wrong twice: once for publishing copyrighted
stuff without permission and once again for mixing up the code that
puts a name and a picture on the top.

I took a random article from the main page,
http://www.webdotdev.com/nvd/client-...box-model.html

> My point being that Satish Talim probably shouldn't be blamed (he's a
> nice guy, too, and left a comment on the post that's referring to him
> as author - the original on your own site, I mean). The site should.

Ah, thanks, this was what I wanted to hear. Of course it was clear to me
that the site is doing something wrong - however I was shocked to see
Satish as the 'author' of my article - I also think he is a nice guy so
I could not believe my eyes when I saw 'his' article. Fortunately I did
not have to...

Cheers,
Peter

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SonOfLilit wrote:
> It seems like webdotdev scrapes blogs and republishes.
>=20
> [snip]
>
> What they're doing is wrong twice: once for publishing copyrighted
> stuff without permission and once again for mixing up the code that
> puts a name and a picture on the top.
>=20

I get somewhat reminded of [http://jwz.livejournal.com/126859.html], or
rather the prompts leading to this. (Yes, this is faintly tangential.)

I wonder if they really are scraping (which would indeed be copyright
breach) rather than grabbing what's, well, up for grabs and advertised
as such.

(There's little question that putting someone else's mugshot and name on
even technically cleanly syndicated content is at least stupid, and not
cleanly attributing the true source is at least rude.) [1]

David Vallner

[1] Me being as clueless about the intricacies of internet-age copyright
issues as I am, I'll keep to vague wording.



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Obviously from OP's reaction, his stuff wasn't up for grabs.


Aur

On 3/28/07, David Vallner <> wrote:
> SonOfLilit wrote:
> > It seems like webdotdev scrapes blogs and republishes.
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > What they're doing is wrong twice: once for publishing copyrighted
> > stuff without permission and once again for mixing up the code that
> > puts a name and a picture on the top.
> >
>
> I get somewhat reminded of [http://jwz.livejournal.com/126859.html], or
> rather the prompts leading to this. (Yes, this is faintly tangential.)
>
> I wonder if they really are scraping (which would indeed be copyright
> breach) rather than grabbing what's, well, up for grabs and advertised
> as such.
>
> (There's little question that putting someone else's mugshot and name on
> even technically cleanly syndicated content is at least stupid, and not
> cleanly attributing the true source is at least rude.) [1]
>
> David Vallner
>
> [1] Me being as clueless about the intricacies of internet-age copyright
> issues as I am, I'll keep to vague wording.
>
>
>
>