Copyright Infringement
I’ve been writing up blog entries for years. This is the first blog I’ve ever had that people have been reading. I’ve also noticed a lot of robots reading this blog. I can tell they are robots, because they leave spam comments. I have ten times as many spam comments as real ones. Maybe this is not a bad ratio. Still, it interests me that I am seeing links to my articles appearing on various sites that have my work listed with a fictitious author name. The last one was really comical. It had obviously been through a bad translation. I know how robots write.
I’m pretty certain the robots will pick up on this article too. Copyright infringement was originally called piracy. I can see if somebody wants to leave a link to something I wrote that was interesting to them. That’s totally cool. Still, having somebody else’s name put on something I write is a bit disturbing. Even if it is spambots doing the theft, some person is behind this.
It may take me a while to look into this phenomena. I’m sure there must be some information somewhere about bot piracy. I just read about a games anti-piracy bot in the UK Register. Information from the search engines tells me this is a spam problem, but doesn’t give me any information on copyright violation. I checked out the one really wonky comment that got caught, and the website it was submitted from had already been closed down by the host.
I’m wondering now if the authority that this blog seems to have on Technorati is just an artifact from all the spam links that have been posted on my various articles. It’s nice to have readers, but I wonder how many of the page views I get come from actual humans. Maybe I should write articles for spam robots. I could maybe hook up something interactive like a chat bot application in the html of an entry so the bots can talk to each other. I am almost considering setting my spider loose on some of these spam URLs and see if it finds out who the heck these people are. The spider seems to be good at finding emails.
It has been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I would say that imitation is the sincerest form of laziness. If these sites are going to troll blogs and gank content out of other people’s writing, why don’t they just write a bot that will compose decent text on its own? Are people too dumb to write a writer bot? It’s just persons looking to steal traffic for their own sites. They even copied text off my blog entry yesterday about blog spam. I thought this was a bit hilarious. I know it will only take the spambots a couple minutes to find this post. I just wonder who they will say wrote this.
