Blog Pirate

[Pepper Smith]

On June 1, Mysterious People posted an interview with me, and just today I found the same interview on a blog titled Suspense Authors, dated 2 days later. The post is pretty much nonsense, since it appears to have been translated into a foreign language and then back into English, but there are a lot of other posts from other blogs on the same site as well. If you've got a blog dealing with crime fiction, you might want to check to see if you've been pirated. Or if you know someone whose content has been stolen, you might want to let them know. Since this is possibly hosted overseas somewhere, it may take some doing to get content taken down or the site shut down, but if enough people complain, who knows?

[Jack Getze]

As far as I can tell, this goes on all the time, with everything. Stories I've written for one blog get picked up and run all over. There are whole sites and services geared toward searching the internet and picking up various content, re-posting it. But Pepper, I have to ask: Why would you want to take down a "pirated" interview? Good publicity for you.

[Pepper Smith]

LOL! If you'd tried to read the thing, you'd know why I didn't mind it being taken down. It makes utterly no sense.

This type of thing, though, is an issue that some bloggers choose to fight, since their content, their copyrighted posts, are being stolen. Just depends on your outlook, I guess.

[D.R. MacMaster]

With so many people filling blogs with mindless blather, how low do you have to go, to be forced to poach material from other blogs?

I used to play a game on my blog where I'd take a famous movie line or speech, run through one of those translators and back again, then offer a prize to whoever guessed right. Too few readers could crack it, even when the line was something like: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse," so I gave it up.

[I. J. Parker]

I also think this is going on all the time. Mostly it's good publicity and means you're interesting enough for someone else to post your words. Still, my most embarrassing moment happened when Crime Spot picked up a post of mine from this site. I should have known it could happen and guarded my tongue better -- or at least deleted names and titles.

[Kris Neri]

This is seriously strange. Could this be someone's idea of a joke? If a foreign-speaker wanted to copy an English blog, wouldn't he assume it was already in standard English and just copy and paste?

Blogs do get copied and passed on. I wrote one from my bookseller perspective on author no-nos for RedRoom.com and apparently, it went everywhere. I heard from dozens of people who saw it this place or that, or read it on some list. I have no idea whether it was copied exactly, or if people changed it, and it would have required too much time to try to trace them all. We should all do Google searches periodically, though, to see what's credited to us out there.

[Pepper Smith]

Sometimes if a blog entry catches enough of my interest, I'll post a link to it, but I don't copy blog entries myself.

There are folks who do these pirate blogs because of the revenues they generate through the sidebar ads. They post other people's content so they won't have to come up with their own and sit back to collect the money from the ads. That's one reason some bloggers object to having their content posted at other sites, because someone's making money of their work.

[Donna Carrick]

Very interesting -- explains a few anomolies I'd noticed out there in Cyberspace -- Well, I hope they'll at least tell me if I win any foreign writing awards! ha ha ;=)

[D.R. MacMaster]

My own blog gets a few regular readers from France everyday, mostly because a French blogger regularly posts links to me, and although he's sometimes quoted me, translated into French, he's never copied an entire post, and he's never denied anyone credit. He just sends his readers my way.

[Chip Cook]

China, again! And I quote: "No objcction. I beard chiece’s a big patty tonsgot Sourds. The too doesn’s. Its Let’s go out." They are not very good pirates.

[Julie Lomoe]

Fascinating topic. I hadn't even begun to worry about this, but I agree with those who feel it's good free publicity. I'll have to Google myself and check out if and where it's happening. But I'm less concerned about piracy of my actual posts than piracy of my ideas.

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