Friday, June 7, 2013

What's What ... A Reminder

Because not everyone is responsible enough to remember that anything posted on this blog - or any other, for that matter - is the intellectual property of the person who wrote it,  I am posting this reminder. In other words, if it appears on my blog, I wrote it and I have control over it. No photo or text may be copied and placed on any other blog or website, including Find A Grave and Genealogy.com. That is the reason for the copyright notice in the upper left corner of each post.

Several months ago, a person from Turkey started copying each and every one of my blog posts and was putting them on his blog. Whether through stupidity or neglect, he didn't bother to erase my copyright notice. It wasn't long before it came to my attention. I began reporting his posts to Google, who owns Blogger, which sponsors this site. It took many reports, but Google took notice and shut him down. The Thief from Turkey had 14 blogs, 13 of which were active, and every post on every blog was stolen from another blog. All 14 of his blogs were erased from the web as if they had never been written. Victory - right? Not necessarily. Blogger has a way that I can track how many hits my blog receives every day as well as in which country each person lives and if and what search words they use. There are a couple of other things the stat report tells me, but I'll keep those to myself for now. To make a long story short, someone from Turkey is back checking on my blog at least once a day. Is it the Thief from Turkey - probably. This is where I need your help. If you find any of my posts on a site other than Western Kentucky Genealogy Blog, please let me know. What he is doing is illegal and I hate for my hard work to be scooped up and used to benefit someone else. This person is not doing this because it is fun; he is doing it because he is making money off my blog. He puts ads on his blogs and every time there is a hit, he makes money. This makes me very angry.

Sadly, there will always be people who haven't the will or grace to do their own work and prefer to take what others have done. If you see the Gone Fishing sign on my blog again, you will know that I am dealing with the Thief from Turkey.

Published 7 June 2013, Western Kentucky Genealogy Blog,  http://wkygenealogy.blogspot.com/

1 comment:

Janet said...

Brenda,

Could/would you set your blog to private so that you could approve all reader/subscribers? A lady whose personal blog I follow sets her blog to private when she's applying for jobs. Her blog is still mentioned out on the web, but if you click on the link and aren't a subscriber, you get notification that you have to email her to be added.