My. Blog. Has. Been. Stolen.

So has Eunny Jang‘s. So has Stephanie Pearl-McPhee‘s. And Kim‘s. And Amy‘s. And Grumperina‘s. And Donna‘s. And Tara‘s. And Jessica‘s. I could go on, but I just can’t go on.

I. Am. So. Angry.


IF YOU ARE READING THIS POST ANYWHERE BUT TOOMANYHOOKS.MYCROCHETBLOG.COM YOU ARE READING STOLEN CONTENT!

My first thought – aside from, ‘wow, check out the company I’m in’ (seriously, apparently I’m popular enough to get robbed just like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) – was something along the lines of a slowly smouldering fury. In case you don’t know what I’m going on about, let me explain. There is a site out there called ‘bitacle’ that steals blog content wholesale (writing, pictures, the whole shebang), surrounds it with ads, and then sits back and collects the admoney. They don’t even have to update, because they use blog feeds. They’re about to steal this post from me as soon as I publish it. I’m more than a little sickened.

They’re making money off of pictures of my babies.

As for my blog-friends (or, some of them, stalk-ees) I mentioned, many of them don’t seem to know. I just heard about this today – I will be notifying as many people as I can. Worried that your blog may have been stolen? (Apparently they’ve stolen more than 14,000 blogs, with the number growing every day.) Go here. I got results searching for pieces of urls (toomanyhooks got me to mine).

Also, check out StopBitacle.org.
Here is someone’s plan for action.
Also, they apparently hotlink all of the images. See here for Plain Jane Mom’s anti-hotlinking tutorial.
Still confused? Here is an excellent post by Lorelle on WordPress.

Today’s post was supposed to be a half-whimsical, half-serious one about Eunny‘s disappearance (it’s been a month), but if she found out about this, I could see why she might stop posting. Fuming. Seriously, just fuming.

Oh, and congrats, Bezzie – you’ve been immortalized in yarn. The pattern didn’t mention you, but you know there’s not a girl at the coffeeshop that didn’t see that and squeal, “Bezzie!”

11 comments

  1. Dad says:

    Their site says “Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors.” I wonder that they can republish without permission… It looks like it is done using RSS. (Maybe you can just cut the RSS from your end?

  2. Princsstrish says:

    Yep, mine was stolen too! Although they don’t allowe commenting anymore and when click the name of the post it takes you right to the original blog. They also list where the link came from under the blog post title.

    I’m gonna complain anyways, they had 97 of my posts!!

  3. Emily says:

    . . . OMG. Mine too 👿 Okay, author’s feelings on plagarism . . . them having all but my two most recent posts . . . *bears teeth* Now, how to demolish the plagarists . . .

  4. bezzie says:

    I’m a doof and can’t figure out how to search for mine either.

    Wasn’t that housefrau hat a riot? Someday the pink curlers will be in fashion again! (wait, I don’t think they ever were!)

  5. Julie says:

    I did a little research, there’s a WordPress plugin that (supposedly) stops the RSS feed to bitacle. I added it to my blog, can you do that here too?

  6. Regina says:

    😈 They stole mine tooooo! 31 feeds! SO WRONG! Ok, now to figure out how to nip it…and QUICK! Thanks for the heads up, even though it makes me sick! 😡

  7. Regina says:

    Blogger has atom and rss feeds (site feeds), this is what Bitacle uses to scan the blogs and know when they are updated. Since the ads have been cut and the pages states articles copyrighted by their respective authors, along with a link to the actual blog…the only thing they may be gulity of is swiping w/o permission.

    Syndication means that when you publish your blog, Blogger automatically generates a machine-readable representation of your blog that can be picked up and displayed on other web sites and information aggregation tools.

    Special pieces of software called Newsreaders (or Aggregators) can scan these feeds, automatically letting you know when the sites have updated. Examples are FeedDemon (Windows), Bloglines (web-based), and NetNewsWire and Shrook (Mac OS X). More are listed at AtomEnabled.org.

    One reason to syndicate your site is to gain a wider audience by attracting aggregator users.

  8. Jax says:

    Hm, I wandered off to bitacle after reading this (got here from a link from crochet me at the end of a pattern on finger puppets, great pattern btw :) ) and am a bit confused. They don’t appear to have hotlinked my images, there’s links back to my site and there aren’t any ads. Did I miss something?

  9. Guro says:

    Hi, and thanks for the comment on my blog. And I’m sorry about your blog being stolen! Not nice!

    Can’t wait to read your Eunny disappearance post…

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