I usually don’t like to address things like this on here but after what happened this past Friday I feel I have to. As a blogger, your work is your intellectual property and there are several ways to protect that. A Creative Commons license, a legal page stating what can and cannot be done with your work…both of which I have. Now, this site has been around for almost 3 years in one incarnation or another and I have always had people aggregate my content through the feed. That’s fine….I don’t take issue with that at all. In fact I have a CC License stating that it’s okay to do that as long as you don’t change my articles and you link back/give credit.
So last Friday, I found out that a site called Beauty Product Network had stolen a month’s worth of content from this site. When I say stole, I mean it was aggregated, manipulated to meet their own agenda and republished on their site. They specifically took out things like photos of me from my press photo shoot and my video interview with Phillippe Chansel of MAC because it was me or branded with my name. I was sitting there stunned thinking, how hard could it be to write and produce your own content? Apparently it’s too hard for some people because they think it’s okay to just copy and paste from someone else.
I wrote a scathing letter to their website host including the 25 plus articles they stole, the links to my originals and the site was shut down within 6 hours. When it came back up all of my content was gone, game over – right? Wrong….as of this writing today, two of my latest still appear on their site. The worst thing is, they are running ads on the site. So in a nutshell, there is a site….where they have nothing but content from me and two other blogs AND there is a big “© All Rights Reserved. Beauty Product Network” at the bottom of the page. So not only are they running a site that contains no original content, but they are claiming copyright AND running ads to profit.
So I’m supposed to let someone profit off something that I took the time to put together?? Hell Naw…so now, I’m mad….I can’t help it but I am taking this very personally. TheMakeupGirl is like my baby and I don’t like it when people mistreat my children. I work really hard on the content for this site and when someone thinks they can just run up and take it – that to me signifies a lazy, uneducated, uninspired loathsome person.
So Beauty Product Network, I hope that the feed you are aggregating pulls this article and it shows up on your site if it doesn’t then I will know that you are coming to my site and copying and pasting which in itself is lame. So to remedy that, I have blocked your IP address, and disabled right clicking. I have now also notified Google of the copyright infringement since I see that you are running AdSense. It is against Google’s terms and conditions for you to knowingly aggregate content as a “splog” so I am certain you will be hearing from them shortly. Know that what you are doing is wrong and unethical and that I am totally gunning for you now.
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