Bitacle’s Excuses

Wow, looks like Bitacle has come forth with their excuses for why they think they can steal other blogs’ content, stick Adsense on it and try to make some money from other people’s work. See comment #4 on this post. Namely, David Martin from Bitacle makes this claim:

There aren’t a norm that forces us to obey the robots.txt. We index and archive the whole content of any XML. We never steal because always we link the original source and the original feed that you provide. When they have seen a spammer that links the original source? I haven’t seen anybody.

Wow, where to begin. Suere, there’s nothing forcing you to obey robots.txt. It’s not like you’re going to go to jail. But how many legitimate, non-black hat web crawlers disobey it? None that I know of.

You don’t steal because you link to the original source? What kind of argument is that? That’s like saying that it’s ok to re-publish The New York Times every day with your own ads as long as you tell people that everything came from The New York Times. Or selling pirated DVDs on the street corner as long as you tell people where they can buy the real DVDs. In what delusional fantasy world does telling people that you took the content from someone else mean that you’re allowed to take the content? Do you know absolutely nothing about copyright?

And for the record, there are tons of splogs that link back to the original site. Bitacle isn’t the first, and it’s not a valid argument that they’re any less of a splog.

His explanation of why they republish entire posts:

The reason it’s that we don’t be only a blog search engine we are a “archive blog search engine” that it’s different concept.

Can somebody translate that for me? I think just the fact that he doesn’t put even the slightest bit of effort into making sense while trying to come up with excuses is a good sign that they aren’t to be trusted. And how is calling yourself an “archive blog search engine” any kind of excuse for stealing other peoples’ content?

I’m still trying to search to see if my posts are on there (I get internal server errors from their site when I try), but I’m sure they are. I see the Bitacle bot in my logs all the time, and I never took the time to check them out. Looks like I need to ban them when I get a chance(of course, not through robots.txt, since they don’t feel the need to follow that.)

Adsense

In the meantime if they ever fix their search and I find my content on there, I’ll submit a complaint to Google Adsense and their host about the copyright infringement. If you’re interested, the best way to complain about Adsense on a site is to click on the “Ads by Google” link under the ads. You’ll get a page that, among other things, has a links that says “Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw.” Choose whatever category seems best (probably “report a violation” or “web page showing these ads”) and explain that the site has stolen your copyrighted content without permission and are attempting to republish it under a different license. Obviously, if your blog has a Creative Commons license that allows them to republish your content, you can’t complain, but for the rest of us, go for it.

Getting them banned from Adsense would be probably the best way to defeat their content theft, IMO.