Randy Charles Morin of FriendBlab steals content (including, possibly, yours)

[starlady]

So there's a site called FriendBlab that is using people's RSS feeds and FOAF files to scrape and replicate their journals on their site - this isn't illegal, but it's certainly unethical, and quite a few people on my DW list have been affected.

I heard about this from ladyjax on Twitter, and she has a post with more info, Beware FriendBlab. She has the contact info for the FriendBlab "copyright agent," one Randy Charles Morin - I suspect your best bet for getting your journal taken down off the site is going to be contacting its upstream ISP, but starting with him will create a good documentation trail. I've heard anecdotally on Twitter that the ISP is already responding to people's emails - this thread on ladyjax' post has the ISP (GoDaddy, ironically) contact info and a sample email.

raanve has a post with more information, including the links to the Dreamwidth account settings page where you can change your RSS feed settings to make this kind of scraping a little less productive. I've changed my RSS settings to "brief summary," since I don't actually want to punish people who are using the RSS feeds for legitimate purposes (unlike the U.S. Sixth Circuit, but that's another story). For a disturbing but familiar look into what FriendBlab is doing, she also unearthed this page, complete with egotistical ranting about how the "intellectual arrogance" of the people who invented FOAF in 2000 (i.e. Brad FitzPatrick) is holding back people like Morin from profit evolving the internet.

It might not also be a bad idea to license your journal under a Creative Commons NC (non-commercial, which means that anyone scraping your content is in violation of your license terms if they serve ads alongside or otherwise attempt to profit from it) or other kind of license, for an extra layer of demonstration that this kind of scraping is being done without your permission or consent. Then go to this page at BoingBoing and read about Big Content's latest attempts to kill the public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons along with them.

Comments

[wild_irises]

GoDaddy is going to (or already has) taken it down thanks to DMCA complaints.

[starlady]

Oh, excellent. It's nice when the process works.

[recessional]

Oh good. I saw myself on there, but I am so far beyond too tired to deal with this crap right now.

[jesse_the_k]

jennet, who handled DCMA orders at LJ and has an MLS, has this lovely detailed post about takedown, scraping & copyright issues. The process is null if one misses a teeny detail, it doesn't make a whole lotta sense, and things may be taken down immediately and then go back up in 10 days.

[epershand]

A clarification re: CC Non-Commercial. The definition of "commercial" v. "noncommercial" is still relatively ambiguous, and a lot of people have run into unexpected results when they've used noncommercial licenses. For instance, a lot of the mainstream media considers including a CC NC photo within an article to be non-commercial use as long as it isn't in an ad.

There's a long discussion at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial, but I tend to tread with caution around NC licenses. Hopefully they'll clarify this in the not-too-distant future.

[starlady]

*nods* Yeah, I have textbooks that have Flickr photos under NC licenses. Still, my thought is that these issues aren't necessarily enough to make me not use a CC license. Creative Commons 4.0, anyone?