Over the past few weeks we have noticed that our copyrighted content was regularly appearing on a site called settledmoney.com. Settledmoney.com also used our category headings and the confusion was such that I heard from several friends who questioned me about it because the site claims to be about money now-one of my favorite targets of late.
The settledmoney.com site is owned by someone whose name, or pseudonym is Jesse James of Austin Texas. The site is registered through Godaddy.com and hosted on servers at dimesnionsystem.com in a Pennsylvania location eerily close to the folks from Bryn Mawr although no connection has been made at this time.
This author sent a cease and desist notice to Mr. James and also informed Godaddy's copyright complaint area as well as a similar department at Google. The owner of Settledmoney.com had positioned himself to profit off my content through the placement of Google Adsense ads on pages featuring my content, which again was not authorized.
This evening I received the following email from Mr. James.
From: "Jesse James"
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008
22:29:44 -0500
To:
'structures'<[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Attention "Jesse
James"
John -
I was
not aware that this site was using your content. I acquired it some time ago 'as
is' and was told that all the content was source. Upon further investigation, I
learned that there is some plugin that essentially 'scrapes' content from
various sites. Yours was on the list among others. I have personally gone in and
deleted all content (I believe) that was created from that
plugin.
I
apologize for the hassle.
Jesse
With the cooperation of Mr.James an investigation is ongoing as to who told Mr. James that the content was "source".
This author takes plagiarism of his or his company's content very seriously. Those who do not have the time, skill or intellectual capacity to produce original written content (or who are just too frickin' lazy) will not be permitted to benefit financially from stealing the content from those that do.
My experience should be a lesson to others. You have to pay attention to your content to be able to tackle these pests! Scraped content could affect your search engine rankings so again pay attention.
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