Ripped off by Sarahpalinvalues and Plagiarism Today to the Rescue

I guess there is some sort of twisted rightness about being ripped off by something called Sarahpalinvalues (SPV). Here's the story. Other bloggers, help me out here, please.

Someone got to my blog from this link. If you go there, you'll see this:

Would Your Mother Make a Good VP?

Posted on September 10th, 2008 by Content Keyword RSS

I got asked in a telephone poll yesterday whether I viewed Sarah Palin favorably. How do you answer that? Fortunately, the pollster was pretty loose and accepted my non-responsive answer of, Yeah, I'd like her to stay my governor. You may love your mom and still not think she'd be a good vice president or president. Rating Palin as a Person My first personal interaction with Sarah Palin - an early political talk and question and answer session at the University of Alaska Anchorage being the

Well, that's a post from What Do I Know? But there's nothing on there to tell you. Only if you click on the title will you get sent here. But the first time someone would see this post would be on their main page. Click on the title and you get to a second SPV page. Only then will clicking the title get you to the original source.

OK, fellow bloggers. This is not just about my post. All their posts are used without citation from other blogs. They're simply taking our posts to generate traffic for their ads. Here are a few other blogs that have also been ripped off. I'm listing them in hopes they'll see this and send in DMCA letters (see below.)

No Ordinary Moment and here's the ripped off version.
Corrente and here's the ripped off version.
Eternity Road and here's the ripped off version.
Brothers Judd.com and here's the ripped off version.
The Burnside Writers' Blog and here's the ripped off version.
Morialekafa and here's the ripped off version.
Dandelion Salad and here's the ripped off version.

They do give credit to larger organizations like USA Today and Huffington Post, but not not smaller blogs. Other sites (see Blognetnews for example) carry pieces from other blogs, but the legit ones tell you where they are from and have links to the original on the first page you get to.


OK, so what do we do about it?



Googling, I found this post at tech blog mikeduncan.com where the blogger complains (far more eloquently than I have) that his post has been ripped off and posted at a tech site that takes stuff from other sites and posts it as their own. He at least is mentioned and linked, but as a having a 'similar post." Most important, he has about 80 comments, including this one:

#17 Jonathan Bailey on 03.24.08 at 4:42 pm

I’m sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It’s becoming more and more common I’m afraid, not just in the tech world, but pretty much all lines of blogging it seems.

As someone who has handled over 600 of these types of cases, I can say with some certainty that there is no need to hire an attorney, taking these guys down is a pretty simple matter. In this case, you should be able to send a DMCA notice to their host by using the email address legal at contegix.com.

If you need any help with that, let me know. I’ve got stock letters on my site and I can help draft it if needed. You can also send the notice to the search engines as well if you want to launch that kind of an attack first.

Just let me know if there is anything In can do and I’ll gladly assist!

Baily's link takes you to Plagiarism Today.

Plagiarism today has lots of resources for taking care of this. Basically, write letters to the site itself and to the host and tell them to take down the material. He even has a page with stock letters to send.

But one does have to find out where to send this. Plariarism Today has a page on that too. I'm going to post this for now and will read that page more carefully to see if I can figure out that information. Maybe someone will jump in and help me figure that out.

I'm hoping some of the blogs I've listed will see this and contact me so we can get as many letters in as possible. It's not just about my post. Ideally Sarahpalinvalues will put up the names of ALL of the blogs and webpages they steal from, not just the big ones that will (or have?) notified them. And that the first link goes direct to the original website, not to another page on their own website.


I'll either add further information here or on a new post.