Dick Move - iwyre.net

I'm pretty easy going about my writing and my code. I've granted people permission to republish blog posts in whole on several occasions. In fact, I can't recall ever having said no to somebody who's asked to republish a blog posting. On top of that, all the code I publish (unless it wasn't written by me) is published under a license that allows unlimited re-use without attribution.

Of course, I can't be quite so cavalier with Beginning iPhone Development because I'm neither the rights holder nor the sole author. But when it comes to stuff I publish on my blog, I'm generally happy to have it re-used and shared. When people ask to republish my writing, all I want in return is an attribution and a link back to my blog. For code, I don't even ask for that.

So, I must admit that it made me a little cranky today when I was notified about a site that's been just blatantly taking every single one of my blog postings and republishing them in their entirety without attribution. I believe it's probably being done automatically via a script because they don't even bother to change the internal links in the article.

But the byline on my articles reads "by admin". That's the part that really annoys me. They've listed an author for the articles I've written, and the author they've listed is not me.

This iwyre "portal" is no such thing. A portal aggregates material and shows you just enough to let you know whether you want to follow the link to the source material. what iwyre is doing is simple theft; it's stealing content in its entirety and not even bothering to give attribution to the author. And they're not stealing just from me. I noticed articles from KRAPPS and from other tutorial sites there, also done without attribution.

I have attempted to contact the site to get this resolved. I like doing things in a civil manner and try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Not everybody understands what is okay and what's not when it comes to content available the Internet. It could have been a misunderstanding. It could have been a mistake.

But, the administrative contact for that site is a bogus e-mail; in fact, several e-mails I've found for the people involved in this site are bogus, which leads me to believe this is an intentional scam, done with full knowledge that it's wrong and that it's a completely dick move. It's done with full knowledge that it's plagiarism, and they've taken steps to insulate themselves from takedown notices.

I suppose I could pursue this further. I have enough information about the guy who runs the site that I could get through to him if I really wanted to, but now that I'm pretty sure it's not an honest mistake, I expect any contact would be adversarial in nature. I suppose I could also report the site to Google and Amazon; I suspect that this blatant plagiarism violates the terms of service of both of their ad-revenue services, but I just don't know that it's worth the effort.

I know how much AdSense revenue I get from running my content on my blog, and it's not very much. After almost a year, the ads have generated almost as much as a junior iPhone developer would make in an hour. So, I should probably just let it lay and forget about it. I should just accept this as a natural part of internet life.

But it irks me.