I inserted this every few pictures.

—Ellen

Bill

Okay everyone – take a look at what I did on the offending site. It’s a little time intensive, but after Jack Cook made the suggestion…I just couldn’t resist.

So see, when you talked about DRM and people stealing your stuff, and then trying to claim it for their own (talk about theft!), it reminded me that the eReader folks had gotten a bit of a clue. That’s all.

See? I’m not as ramdom as you thought.

@Ellen – I sent something to Ewdi (my programmer guru) about doing a hot-linking block on the server end. Hopefully he will come up with something where any hot-link will return a picture like you said. I like the way your Steve thinks.

I did write to Elliot through the comment form on his site, and also left a comment (which has not been and probably won’t be approved) on the my lifted post about the theft, asking him to remove my review and the pictures…but I bet I’ll never hear back from him.

Your story about the newspaper plagiarism…sheesh. (shakes head)

@Civisi – yeah, he did credit me. Wasn’t that nice? I guess it is a lot easier to start a blog by copying people’s original work (never mind hot-linking the pics) and crediting them than it is to bust your butt and come up with original content.

You said, “Civisi, its stealing no matter which way you put it. He stole the review and the pictures, and to make things worse he is sapping Judie’s bandwidth to do it!”

I agree fully, and I didn’t mean for it to sound otherwise; hence the quotes around stealing as it pertained to the pictures. He put the words on his site, but left the pictures at their original source. He didn’t “take the pictures” and put them on “his servers.” So in a literal sense, he’s not “stealing” the pictures. I still think it’s wrong, and I did point out that he is using GearDiary’s bandwidth for his gain, which I consider equivalent to theft.

But hey, at least he put where this information came from.

Then if he fails to do so, I’d do a step other than what’s recommended in the article. Contact his ISP and ask them to discontinue his hosting due to copyright infringement.

My husband also had a wicked recommendation… change the urls he’s hotlinking to, to be either ads for which you receive advertiser credit, or simply a graphic directing the user back to come to http://www.geardiary.com.

FYI, I had a really funny (but ultimately more serious) incident with something like this years ago, where a writer for a major metropolitan newspaper simply lifted content wholesale from one of my sites and used it in an article. One of my readers spotted it, and alerted me and the newspaper. That one resulted in a formal apology from the newspaper.

—Ellen

I don’t know how you bloggers track that sort of thing… comments left to articles at least tells me you have an audience, and one that is participating at your site.

Judy, you do a great job and I’m enjoying your website very much. Keep your head up!

When you see a story on another site that you think is relevant to your own, you link to it, and post one picture on your site, NOT THE WHOLE REVIEW AND EVERY PICTURE.

The source for those pictures is http://www.geardiary.com/wp-content/photos/*.jpg

I’d start with that.

And for the thieves who don’t know (or care) what ALL RIGHTS RESERVED means, I spelled it out a bit more in the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. At least they can’t say they didn’t know. Sheesh.

looks like it has exactly what you may be looking for in terms of info and steps. Also there is another site i came across for my own protection of content:
http://www.digimarc.com/comm/images.asp

Which allows you to track your photos as they are stollen and reposted around the web. Allowing you to find the theves for furthor action.