Case Study: RSS Scraping
February 1, 2007 by
Adam
Filed under
Entrepreneurship
About 5 months ago I was approached by representatives from TheMoneyBlogs - a service offering to market your blog to their apparently huge reader base. They said they were looking for entrepreneurship blogs and so I told them that I would be interested in their service and asked for an email back detailing what exactly they did.
A few days after, I received an email saying that an account had been created for me and the link to my site (which was then hosted on a .blogspot.com account) had been added to my profile page. I took no further action as I thought a profile had simply been created.
A month or so after this time I remember doing a routine Google Search for the phrase “Blogtrepreneur“. I found that TheMoneyBlogs was (and still is) ranking very highly for the phrase (whilst I was at the top of rankings course!). I clicked on the site to find out and to my horror found my RSS feed being published on the site.
I was immediately outraged and emailed through their contact page asking to find out what had happened and why my RSS Feed was being scraped off my main site and being optimized on this site. What made me angry even more was when I found out that they were even ranking above me for some certain phrases from my site!
To this day, even though 3-5 emails have been sent, I have yet to receive a reply.
First off, I myself would like to be the person to blame for this but I just don’t see how this is my fault. The representatives created my account for me and I had no chance to read the Terms and Conditions which might have stated the use of my RSS Feed.
Secondly, I can’t even remember receiving a username or password and thus cannot access my account and delete my listings from the site. Also the customer service is absolutely dire. Any respectable website would make it a policy to return customer emails as a priority as customers are the life of any business. Even a short wait would have been acceptable but simply no response is just not good enough.
Thirdly, the link that they do have in the sidebar to Blogtrepreneur is outdated and is to my .blogspot.com address and thus is of no use to me or to my site.
So, I am left with a dilemna. Do I allow this site to continue to rip off my RSS feed without permission or do I try and tackle this problem through persistence and continuing emailing? The latter of course will be the only option as Im not prepared to let all my hard work give someone else the benefits of traffic and income. As a plea for help, if anyone can lead me in any directions to remove my site from TheMoneyBlogs then any help would be much appreciated.
Down with the scrapers!
UPDATE: Cesar at FleetheCube has a similar problem - so any help for both of us would be much appreciated!
It doesn’t look like they got your last couple posts so maybe they stopped?
Here’s what graywolf recently advised me to do “I’d use the scrapers to my advantage making sure I linked back to myself in the first 200 words of every post as often as possible without it looking stoopid (linking back the full absolute URL).”
I also include a link copyright link in my feed now with a link back to my site and a link back to my site in the feed itself also.
hey adnan,
you raised my curiosity and i had to go over to their site and scan through their terms and conditions. i haven’t seen anything about them reserving the right to publish your feeds. on the contrary they have a point that says:
“4a) CONTENT OWNERSHIP. Unless stated otherwise for specific services, User will retain copyright ownership and all related rights for information he or she publishes through TRADINGMARKETS.COM’s Blog Service.”
what i’m guessing is that by you accepting to have an account with them they took it that you gave them your consent to publish all of your content.
don’t give up. read, in detail, their terms and see if there’s anything there that gives them the right to do what they did. even get a screen shot, so they can’t change it and claim things are differently.
lesson: 1. be skeptical of everyone offering to help you for free. there’s no such thing. there’s always a gain in everything.
2. research everything before you agree to anything.
too time consuming? what would you prefer: to spend some time on trying to find out as much as possible about them or to have do deal with it now.
good luck
Hey Mark - hmmm I doubt they’ve stopped because the same thing has happened over and over again. If they have though that would be excellent.
That’s a good idea from graywolf. A question: do you manually have to add the copyright text for every post you make? Is there some code that you could send me so I could add something similar to my template?
@ Cosmin - thanks for scanning the T&C for me and for pointing that out. But the main point here is that they set up my account for me and therefore I didn’t have a chance to read the terms and conditions. I’m also pretty sceptical, but in this case thought it might be different. You’re right though, nothing in life is for free (unfortunately!).
I just wish they would answer my mail so that further action could be taken!
Thanks for your input guys.
I don’t manually do it, it’s done with code, however I don’t use wordpress at 45n5 so i can’t help you out with it.
i got that from the very beginning. however, just like with laws, the fact that you don’t personally read them, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to follow them.
don’t get me wrong. i’m all for you. if something like that happened to me, i’d probably be whooping some behinds right now. however, i do want to point out that this should be a lesson for all of us: read tos before we sign our life away, no matter how good and tasty the candy looks. strangers are not to be trusted and all the rest of blah blah blah. wish you the best and let us know how things work out.
Oh OK I see what you’re getting at Cosmin (and soz for not picking up on that before!).
Yeah Im with you - reading the TOS of everything is vital but unfortunately many of us (including me) simply click accept because its too time consuming to read through loads of statements.
There’s still no response and no action taken so things aren’t looking great - but thanks for the support
you’re not the only one who doesn’t read tos. i never do it either. with one exception: when i smell something fishy. and when someone’s offering me something for free it smells fishy from hundreds of miles away (i guess we’ve established that already
)
i’ve been fortunate so far to learn from others’ mistakes (and not online, but friends of mine who’ve been burned by “real world” scams). in situations like this i remember a word of wisdom i used to be told when i was younger: NEVER SIGN ANYTHING WITHOUT READING IT FIRST.
but i guess i’m digressing.
at least i hope you won’t let it happen again.
p.s. you mind if i write a post about your experience?
Yeah I don’t mind at all if you write a post. At least other could learn from it then. In fact I might write a post too!
Unfortunately this wasnt the first time I’ve been burned. The first experience resulted in a $2500 loss! But this time doesn’t count
let me know what you think:
http://www.cosminptr.com/2007/02/03/if-its-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is/
Hi Adnan,
well if they don’t comply with your requests you can always go the DMCA Route…
Write them once more, informing them that you are going to send a DMCA notice to their provider/ registrar (best the provider first, if they aren’t self hosting).
Set a time limit for them to comply and if nothing has happened inform their provider, registrar…
You can find out, who the registrar and provider are by doing a Whois search for example at networksolutions.com:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
Oh and maybe email them at the e-mail address that is mentioned in the whois data, too.
This works best with US firms (which it is) as the DMCA has no value in other parts of the world, BUT most countries have similar laws.
Should you have to give some proof, that the content is yours you could always use the waybackmachine (should work)
All that said: I’m no lawyer and this comes from a post on either problogger or copyblogger, I think. But I may be wrong about the source. Anyway if you want to be 100% sure that you’ should take this route contact a lawyer first…
Hope this helps
Frank
Hey Cosmin - that post was excellent so thanks a lot for that!
Thanks for dropping by FrankB. I actually never thought to do a whois. I used whois.net and it told me that the email in charge was: conradk@tradingmarkets.com. There are 2 others so hopefully I should finally be able to catch the culprits and get my blog removed!
I don’t know what a DCMA is but I’ll be sure to find out. Hopefully it won’t have to go that far though!
Thanks a lot - the above info really helps and I’ll be sure to make a post when the situation is resolved. Cheers mate.
Adnan
Hi Guys-
This is JP from TradingMarkets. I guess both FleetheCube and Blogtrepeneur were sending emails to Brice, the old blog admin. He’s been gone for about 4 months, and those emails must have just slipped through. I just deleted both blogs.
Simply put, we’re not stealing content. We have an agreement, and we don’t put up anybody who doesn’t sign the agreement. I’m sorry about the mistake, in that you wanted to be off the blogs, and we were not there to help you. The blogs will be down within hours. Have a good day!
JP
have you tired calling them? it looks like a U.S. phone number (Los Angeles, CA). it shouldn’t be that expensive to give them a call.
(213) 955-5858
thanx for the comment,
cosmin
JP - thanks a lot for taking the time to drop by and to explain the situation. I didn’t know about the fact that Brice had left - maybe you need to change the contact email address on your site.
To be honest - I didn’t sign the agreement, my account was created for me. Therefore I didn’t know that my RSS feed would be scraped. However I’m glad that we can finally resolve the situation and hope that all posts from this site will be removed.
cosmin - no probs for the comment and thanks for the extra research, but it seems like it won’t be necessary now :).
Thanks for everyone’s perseverance in tackling the problem, it was much appreciated!
happy ending
Hi Adnan,
great to see that the issue has been resolved without further issues
For future probs, this is what the DMCA is about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
Cheers
Frank