I do not know to what extent these guys would care, but you could try using robots.txt to block their content aggregator (assuming that’s where they are getting it from, of course).
Outside of that, I doubt there’s anything much we can do about sites like those.
1) Assign your posts a copyright tag and an appropriate creative commons license – or some other license. Free for non-commercial use, for example.
2) Use content fingerprinting to track it. http://www.maxpower.ca/wordpress-plugin-digital-fingerprint-detecting-content-theft/2006/09/25/
3) Report it to them as copyright infringement and demand that they respect your rights. Depending on legislation, what they do might be legal or not as long as they are not making money. But because they are making money with your content, and copyright is world wide acknowledged and protected, you have a valid reason to ask them to remove your content from their blog.
4) Escalate
5) They won’t like you after that
A few things to consider:
– Do you report you posts to tracking services (blogger etc)?
– Do you offer your posts as rss/atom feeds?
– Have you tried Bad Behaviour?
– Have you installed that robots.txt suggested earlier?
– You might also consider running a subscribers-only blog using private pages and the Disclose secret plugin.
– Deny hotlinking in .htaccess
Thanks for the replies – honestly, I don’t have that many readers yet, and I haven’t put anything – even copyright – in place. 😉
I would love someone else to look after all the nasty leechers, but alas, there is no knight.
I have other things to do, as long as my reputation doesn’t get affected by things like this. I suppose we just keep an eye on things, ping-backs, etc?
thanks again,
Cathy
