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Scandal Shack Dot Com – Thievery and Copyright Violation!

A lot of my fellow bloggers are having their content scraped and posted on scandal shack dot com – They’re flat-out stealing; they put your words (or photos!) onto their ugly ass ad-laden website without any links to the blogger who wrote it or anything. The only way that you can tell is when someone uses a WordPress plugin that adds copyright protection words/links to their RSS feed (like AAG does).

It’s being done by scraping the content from your RSS feed – they’re pulling from a lot of sites so it’s not being done by hand (quite obviously, or this lovely post by AAG wouldn’t be showing up as a post on SS.com, hehe). I’m posting this warning for you to go check out the site and make sure your content isn’t being scraped. Mina tangled with them directly to no avail, so there’s info in her post on how to report the copyright violations directly to the site’s host. Hopefully with enough complaints the site will go away altogether.

But that only fixes that exact site. And who knows, the guy might do it again. In fact, it’s not the first or last time we’ll ever see our content illegally scraped. I personally use a plugin for WordPress called “No More Frames” which does something to prevent the scripts the scraper is using from pulling your content. My content is, so far, not on the site. It is either because this plugin does actually work OR my feed isn’t worth scraping :)

I guess we’ll find out soon enough, if this post shows up on his site.

This is a lot worse than what a certain vibrator company once did with copyright violation and sex toy reviews, because at least they acted professionally and took things down from their site. This guy is just using it as content filler to fill up the gaps (albeit small) between the garish ads.

 

ETA: The host of the site is on Twitter, perhaps we can employ that method after aggrieved parties have formally sent in their copyright violation email? it’s @Hostgator.

ETA2: I asked, “How many reports of copyright violation does it take for you guys to shut down his site altogether?” @HGSupport, who had been responding to the @Hostgator complaints from bloggers, was asking for support ticket numbers. I personally don’t have one, but others have reported it. Their response to “how many”? –  “Just one, which has not been received at this point. Again, if we can get the ticket it will be handled as quickly as possible.” Which makes no sense, because Mina said in her post that HG removed the posts that she reported as scraped. So they DID have one report. Sadie also sent a complaint on Friday. Are they just blowing smoke, or are they slow?

6 Responses

  1. aag says:

    His host is HostGator. You can report a copyright violation with this form:

    http://www.hostgator.com/dmca.php

    My hope is that if HostGator has to deal with his nonsense enough times they’ll get tired of it and take him down.

  2. Jake Holden says:

    Anyone who wants to link to the site directly (which is probably not a good idea) make sure to stick a rel=”nofollow” into the tag so that search engines are wont stumble upon the website via your links.

  3. Hubman says:

    Wow, that is a god-awful site. Thanks for the plug-in suggestion, I’m going to add that to my blog, just to be on the safe side (not that anyone would steal my content…)

  4. Petal says:

    This is a horrible, horrible site! And they have ripped my blog off rather badly. I have followed AAG’s advise and reported a copyright violation with HostGater and with fingers crossed, I am hoping that will work in getting either my stuff removed or them taken down.

  5. You should always contact the host if you find copyright violations. They take DMCA notices and their ToS very seriously because ultimately they are as liable since they are the ones actually hosting the content that’s in question. The sites themselves generally will get shut down with enough complaints (and for some hosting companies it only takes one). Just remember that while a site can be shut down from Host Gator, the site owner can move elsewhere. And then you would have to submit a DMCA to that hosting company. I know you can also report a domain name to the PDR for various types of abuse and I would say this would qualify for being reported.

    EE

    ~ Some hosts do, some don’t. When I had my troubles oh when was that….well over a year ago, I contacted in vain the host, the registrar, everybody. I can’t recall WHO it all was but not one of them would respond to me or do anything about it.

  6. Violet says:

    Im one of those people who had to go there just to see the karnage, I don’t think Ive seen such a visually annoying website since the late 90’s!!

    I am almost greatful Im not scandalous enough to have had my content scraped, but I did notice that they have numerous Wanton Wednesday posts – enough for their to be a wanton wednesday tag. Sadly I dont recognise who’s blog the photos belong to, but hopefully the owner’s will find them and be able to have them removed.