Thursday, September 14, 2006

Stealing- and I am not talking about the blinds

I was kind of amused the other day to find out someone was stealing my posts from this blog and posting them on their own site. I was amused because I couldn't believe someone would take any content of mine. Anyone who reads this knows I am not a writer. I just like to relate stories or thoughts to friends. Instead of sending emails explaining some games to friends, I created a poker blog so I wouldn't bore other people over at my other blog, While Drinking, I...

So I was amused at first. But then I viewed the other blog and thought about it. They had a number of posts on their site, in full. Thus, anyone who would read my entries there, would not need to click through to my site. They are trying to get hits for their advertisers. My advertisers would be screwed. That I didn't care for. So I sent them an email asking them to stop stealing my posts.

The answer I received was rather incredulous. They said they would stop, but they then blamed me for having the settings on my blog wrong. WTF? They claimed because of the syndication feed setup, they were allowed to post it. Wrong! You did not seek my permission to do so. Thus, you cannot just take whatever you want and repost it. Everything on the internet is not free for you to take and do what you want with it. Do you really think you can take an article off of say ESPN's site or CNN and put it up in its entirety without them telling you to stop?

They also tried to make it sound like they were doing me a favor by increasing my traffic- which it wasn't. As I already said, you have the posts up in full. Why would anyone need to click through?

It came down to the advertising to me. I don't blog to make money. But if someone would like to pay me to run an ad, I will do so. I owe it to my advertisers to make sure they are getting the views from this site, not someone who they haven't paid.

It also was about people trying to make money by using other people's work (or in this case, monkey typing). If you let one person get away with it, others will try to as well.

Thanks to Chilly for pointing them out to me.

Played the Poker Savvy freeroll last night. Doubled up early for a lead and donked it all away. Only 21 people were in. I finished 14. I just don't take the freerolls seriously for some reason.

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