It’s amazing. Every few years I get an alert from a reader that they read one of my posts on a site that didn’t give me attribution. I usually thank them for pointing it out to me, contact the site owner and have the piece taken down.
But never have I had a site just blatantly republish ALL my posts, including my photos.
What other people don’t seem to understand is that YML is my baby. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole wide world. I created it in 2008 and I still enjoy clicking “Publish” on a new post. While I do love venting and building a community, this site is also a business. It is how I make my money and support my family.
So I woke up this morning to a bunch of my dear, dear readers alerting me to the fact that ItsParenting.com has scraped my site and is running what is basically an RSS feed of my, and other bloggers, posts. It’s lame and it has to stop.
So I’ve reached out to them and asked them to stop scraping my site. We’ll see how well they listen if this post ends up on their site as well.
I just read one of the posts that you wrote that was on their site, I see that at the end it states, Read full article at The Young Mommy Life with a link to your blog. Was that always there or did they do that in response to your letter to them?
I also see that at the bottom it states, “It’s Parenting is dedicated to serving up all of the breaking parenting news from around the world. We not only cover the latest parenting news but also family, motherhood, fatherhood, baby, toddler, kids and teenager news. We update our feeds every 5 minutes pulling all of the latest parenting news from all of the top family and parenting sources across the web.”
I think for this reason, it’s not copyright infringement, but they are violating best practices for aggregators.
They can’t republish my entire posts without permission. Hell, they’ve published everything I’ve written here for at least the past two months. Copyright infringement or not, it will stop.
It should definitely stop. Aggregators are supposed to only use a title and synopsis or blurb and then link to your site. Without that, there’s no incentive to go to the real bloggers site at all. They’re basically being an internet vampire. I wonder if the other bloggers know they’re content is being taken and used?
Yes, I’ve found my content on other sites but it’s never been this blatant! They buried the “Full article on…” so far down and under a gazillion ads. And yes, the other bloggers are being notified. There’s a whole convo on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40Itsparenting&src=typd&mode=realtime
Why don’t you protect your RSS feeds instead?
I mean, take a look at ArsTechnical. As far as I understand they would be happy for somebody to syndicate their content because it is filled with links back to the site.
Good tactic.
Oh man, I hope EVERY site they’re hooking into posts something like this. Their current homepage is the best thing I’ve ever seen thanks to you. Genius tactic.
Thank you for writing this — especially so it shows up on their own site. They published an article I wrote for SheKnows.com in its entirety, also with a buried “see full article at” line. It’s infuriating and hopefully they’ve messed with a big enough site that action will be taken.
Ha, the article is there: http://itsparenting.com/itsparenting-com-is-stealing-bloggers-content-without-permission/
hahahahaha. I was alerted to this by AJ, and think you’re quite clever. I hope it gets a lot of traffic on THEIR site so that a lot of readers recognize that they’re stealing. I hope you get new readers (such as myself) from all this.
Bwahahaha: http://itsparenting.com/itsparenting-com-is-stealing-bloggers-content-without-permission/
Assholes. :/
So many people behind real, “legitimate” websites that seem to have no understanding of how the Internet works.
Looks like their site is down. I hope it stays that way.
It sucks when sites can’t come up with their own original content and steal the work of others. Hopefully, other bloggers who find their work on that website will make noise too because they’ll probably continue this unethical practice if they feel like they can keep getting away with it.
gotta love a douchebag… if I ever saw my stuff on a site like that I’d be havin people knockin on their doors with summons papers. Hope they brought their check books!!
but at least the site is down. the FB/etc. not so much.