Bitacle Back To Rip Your Blog Off

While researching yesterday’s article on content theft reporting, I decided to check on the status of Bitacle.org, a notorious Spanish feed scrapping aggregator fought by many in the blogosphere last fall for violating copyrights with full content feed scrapes.

Bitacle is back.

It has now changed itself into a customizable aggregator like Google Reader, Google Personal Homepage, or similar feed aggregators. However, they still have no right to full feed content from blogs which do not permit such usage. Only excerpts. If they changed their format to only include excerpts, as others who know better have done, then this wouldn’t be an issue.

To find out if you are one of the thousands of bloggers being ripped off by Bitacle.org is not easy:

• Visit Bitacle.org. When confronted with the “wait” warning screen, just wait through it. The Bitacle.org page will appear.
• Click on Aggregates in the AJAX search box.
• Type in your blog’s title or unique words to your blog’s content.
• Click on the post title to access that post in Bitacle.
• If your feeds are set to excerpts/summaries, you should see excerpts. If your feeds are set to full, you will see the full post.
• In the left sidebar, you will see other posts from your blog which Bitacle has scraped.
• At the bottom of the page is the “page count” of the number of web pages Bitacle has scraped from your blog.

It takes some work and you may have to clear your browser’s cache as you look since it seems to work with cookies which keep the first blog’s list of posts in the left sidebar in place while you continue to search. You may find that Bitacle.org hasn’t stopped at your blog’s content. They also scrape your comment feeds.

Bitacle.org adds a Digg and comment form to every post it scrapes. It used to be stuffed with ads, but I can’t seem to find any on my posts. Which could mean that reports to Adsense got results.

If you are having trouble finding your posts, you can find one of mine, the Blog Herald and the Blog Herald Japan.

In Plagiarism Today’s Bitacle: A Plan for Action, tips for what won’t and will work are outlined. What will work includes:

See Also

People who barely age physically despite getting older typically display these 7 habits, according to psychology

• Submission of DMCA notice of copyright violation to Adsense.
• Filing a DMCA notice with Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I still believe that sending an English and Spanish translation email or letter to Bitacle.org and/or their host may get a response, at least on a case-by-case basis. The EU supports copyright laws, to my knowledge.

You can also get more information from stopbitacleorg.wordpress.com.

At the very least, remind Bitacle.org and others that your content isn’t for the taking with a Stop Content Theft Button or Badge.

Bitacle.org heard our battle cry last time. When we fought back, Bitacle changed their copyright notice to “Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors.” Well, my copyright says they have no right to use my full content only excerpts. They are still in violation of my copyright. What about yours?

Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress.