grumpyoldmen

Copyright Theft has become Rampant on WordPress

I often have to defend my food blogs from Copyright infringement (people taking and using my photographs and or text without seeking my permission even though I clearly claim copyright on my photographs and text, but it has become Rampant on WordPress.  

Why does this matter?

My blog traffic and sometimes work is generated by the posts (recipes and articles I write). So I defend my property, because when I don’t it costs me money or opportunities to do a travelogues (I have done in Croatia, Austria, Spain and Canada amongst others or be a chef judge at a food show in the UK, Ireland, Spain and France.

Google Rankings

Your rankings on google and other search engines are closely connected to the posts you write and publish, in simple terms the more they are seen the the higher they will climb the rankings. But if you allow someone else to post your work it may help them, but hurt you.  For example if they are better at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) their version of your post could rank higher in search engine results than the original. Over the years blogging since 2006 I have learnt if i don’t defend my intellectual property then not only could it hurt my Search Engine ranking but others can make money on my work.

WordPress 

In recent years I have notice more and more occasions when my copyrighted  images and text have been used without my permission. Usually, in the past when I fill in a DMCA take down notice then WordPress will make the blogger remove the post.

But every day I am finding more and more anonymous blogs with no one  named as the owner, no information as to where they live and much of their content re-blogged posts from other WordPress bloggers.   

June 15th 2021

For example I found a blogger called Cheflytical who had copied and posted a photo on their blog without the owners permission, this is theft. https://cheflytical.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/grilled-steak-tacos-foodie-crush/

Original post here https://www.foodiecrush.com/grilled-steak-tacos/

Reblog Button

The reblog button at the bottom of many bloggers posts compounds the problem if then others unknowingly reblog a stolen photo, and the poor author has to chase WordPress and hope in time their stolen property does not end up on multiple sites.  

Choice 

Whether a person is blogging as a hobby, creating a diary or trying to make money their posts should be protected by the blog platform, especially since they are already making money on our content by selling adverts. It adds insult to injury when the WordPress system allows theft to happen so easily. 

When I set up my main food blog in 2015, I removed the reblog button and expressly claimed copyright all of my posts in the hope readers will respect my wishes and not repost my images and text without seeking permission.

But then I found that if people only see and like my posts in the WordPress Reader they can share my work without knowing I have claimed copyright! This is outrageous and I have sought help from Automattic (the company that deals with copyright infringement for WordPress and is infact the global distributor of WordPress.  The CEO  Matt Mullenweg was the lead developer in the open source WordPress. So far neither Matt  or his assistants have bothered to reply to my plea for help.

My exit from WordPress

WordPress say they have no plans to remove the reblog button and its ability to steal my copyright material without my knowledge in the Reader.

Of course to move my well established blogs to another platform is a very large, time consuming undertaking, which in the short term will hurt my google rankings and obviously loose me followers, but I feel I have no option unless WordPress the now imperious juggernaut recognises that whether a bloggers chose to share their content or not…that choice should be theirs and theirs alone.

Update October 2023

Finally, Wordpress acted and took down Cheflytical for multiple copyright infringements, to mine and other sites, but Wordpress still refuse to acknowledge that their reblog button encourages copyright infringement.

 

A Rogue Food Site Called Recipeler

A few posts back it seems I could both make a point and be humorous, but at the moment it is hard to raise even a rye smile particularly when talking about the internet.

The internet has brought the possibility of worldwide communication, the chance for an oppressed people to tell their story to the world, for small businesses to sell their products/ services around the globe and for wrongdoers to be exposed.

For most of us the workings of the internet is a mystery, but just like owning a car we shouldn't have to be a mechanic to take advantage of the benefits.  But unfortunately at the moment, unscrupulous people are stealing from us left right and centre and we need to fight back!

 

Rogue sites

Continue to steal my photos and recipes and post it on their own sites; they do this first and foremost because it boosts their own search engine rankings, and because they think you won't notice.  In September 2017 I wrote about the theft I suffered from a website called The Black Pudding Club http://grumpyoldmen.typepad.com/grumpyoldmen/2017/09/the-black-pudding-club-theft.html  Currently, I am fighting with a rogue food site called recipeler.com

As far as I can tell all of the content on the food site called recipeler.com is content they have stolen from search engine results.  I'm not talking a few dozen recipes but a few hundred recipes, taken from sites like All Recipes without their knowledge or permission. A few of my high ranking photos were also taken and posted on this rogue site without my permission.

Although theft like this has now happened to me many times, it still doesn't make it any easier to take, I feel violated as if someone has robbed my house.  My copyrighted recipes and photos help me to get work, as such I defend them fiercely. 

I don't just blame the individuals that steal my stuff, I also blame the big players like Google and other search engines that make it so easy to illegally copy other people's property. Both Google and Facebook make billions of dollars selling adverts, but this is only possible because of the content we (all of us) create.  Without that daily tide of content, the world would not be watching and reading those ads.  Google and Facebook should be protecting our content against theft, if for no other reason than to protect its own financial interests, but that is not the case at the moment, so lawmakers need to step in and force them to do the right thing.

Worse still...

I found out the other day that Google+ Tumblr and Twitter are selling access to our data to third party companies such as compute.info

Haven't any lessons been learnt from the Cambridge Analytical scandal?   The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable said, "People should be "empowered" to sell their own

data if they want to, to share in the profits of technological advances." He continued to say "data was "the new oil" yet people were happy to give it up for free."

 

 

Back to the Recipeler story.......

As the internet has grown up and become more sophisticated so have the tools and methods to aid the theft.  In complicated situations, you can have several different companies that host a site or a conduit in the process.  Like other shady websites, recipeler.com do all they can to hide who owns them and what company has been used to host the site.

 

Telltale signs of dishonest intent

Recipeler has no contact information on their site, none whatsoever, which is always a bad sign about the honesty and intent of a website or blog.  So I'm forced to spend time trying to track that information down.  At the moment I am still sending emails off to verify which hosting company Recipeler uses, but I am close very close.

Here are a couple of Screenshots of my stolen photos on Recipeler.com

Here are links to my original recipes

Roast Belly of Pork with Apple Cabbage

Green Tomato Soup with Roasted Chillies

As part of my fightback, I have begun to contact other websites that have had recipes stolen to make them aware of the illegal behaviour of recipeler.com 

I will update this post as I uncover who is the host company and their response to the outrageous theft by recipeler.com

The Black Pudding Club Theft

It seems that every year I have to fight hard to defend my recipes and photos from unscrupulous bloggers that think it is fine to cut and paste one of my recipes onto their site.  

The Why

Climbing up the Google rankings is a slow process if you are a new site; however, if you are unscrupulous you can copy and paste say 20-30 of the top black pudding recipes, and suddenly your site is now in the nosebleed section of Google page1. Having gotten onto google page 1 using other people's work, the site can now get organic traffic because most people will click on a link from page 1.  Which of course helps to keep them on page 1 and makes the selling of adverts possible.  

Copyright

If a piece of work has been copyrighted then it should NOT be used without the owner's permission, period!!

Making lame excuses saying that they credited me as the author and my blog as the source, is not good enough by a country mile.

Why should they gain google ranking benefit and possibly money (by selling Google Ads) from stealing my work? Just because a recipe on the internet is less physical than a car doesn't make it okay, in fact, it's worse because at the moment too much theft like this goes on, and perpetrators are shocked when you call them thieves.

The Culprit is a site called Blackpudding.club

They have lots of black pudding recipes from popular sites, some without permission, including one of mine they posted in January 2017.

Here is the recipe that was taken without my permission:  Chicken Stuffed with Black Pudding © Kevin Ashton 2005 

I did not realise this theft until September, so they benefitted from my high Google ranking for 8 months!  I wrote to the site. also to the facebook page and here is what I said and their reply:

Dealing the faceless perpetrators

It has often been my experience (when plagiarised) that the perpetrators hide their identity, as was the case with the blackpudding.club.

Even when they wrote to me via email they signed it  'Club Secretary', which just shows their desire to stay in the shadows.

 

The Damage caused by the theft

Even after the plagiarised (stolen) work is taken down, it takes weeks, sometimes months for the original recipe and photograph to regain the search engine ranking it had.

This sort of illegal behaviour goes on a lot but at the moment; the internet stakeholders (internet providers, search engines and social media) don't do enough to remind users what a breach of copyright is and remind them that using other people's property without permission is theft, plain and simple. 

 Links from my plagiarised recipe and photo were still linked back to this wretched blackpudding.club 7 days later on Bing, AOL, DuckDuckGo, MetaCrawler, Yahoo, here are just 2 examples. 

 

Right now, on the internet, you have to be ready and able to defend yourself and make them wish they had never plagiarised your work.

Tools To Defend Yourself

• Plan of attack: Although it is tempting to send an angry email to the site that has stolen your work immediately.  You are better off to take screenshots of the stolen work on their blog, also take screenshots of the results in Google and Google images, to prove not only the theft but the dates it occurred and show if it damaged your own search engine ranking.
• DMCA Takedown Notice: If the site ignores your messages then you need to send them DMCA takedown notice ( you can google blank forms you can use as a template). Once you have sent them a takedown notice, you should also send another to the company that hosts the site.
• Host Site: Often the host company 's initial response is they can't  be held responsible for what is done on the site, which is true in the first instance. But once you have sent them a DMCA takedown notice with the details of the plagiarism, which is a legal document, they are then also liable if the stolen material isn't completely removed from their servers.
• Shout & Blog about it: If your copyrighted work has genuinely been used without your permission then blog about it and let the world know. You have to be factual, but if you stick to the facts, then you are only telling the truth.  Of course, the people behind the rogue site will be angry about the world knowing of their dirty little secrets, but it might make them think twice before that they do this to any other site.
• Their Advertisers: If they are selling Google Ads or some other scheme, send them copies of the takedown notice to let them know the kind illegal behaviour they are being associated with.

Tumbling on Tumblr and other Useless stuff

As any blogger will tell you, getting your efforts read is harder than you think.

With ever increasing number of blogs worldwide that create an ever increasing number of blog posts per day, you can easily spend more time promoting your blog through social media sites than actually being creative.  Worse still is many of these so-called, must belong to sites, bring very little traffic (people) back to your blog. 

Instagram is a site that brings very little traffic.  I have 403 posts 847 followers but I'm lucky if I get one visitor a week, even though I include the URLs of any recipe and photograph in the post.  The biggest shortcoming of this site is it does not allow the user to add a live link to the post, I guess the money people figure they want to keep you on Instagram, not having you wondering off following interesting links.

This is short-sighted because it would add to the overall usefulness of Instagram and ensure it's long-term future if it was more connected to the rest of the Web.   Let's be frank, along with all the breathtaking pictures of vistas, photo-shopped buildings, stunning food or gorgeous models, there is an awful lot of rubbish.  All that said, it most certainly it can amuse and delight but bring people to your blog, no.

Facebook For a time it seemed lots of people couldn't live their lives without it and would share every minute detail with the world (whether the world wanted it or not).  I do get some traffic from sharing my blog posts on my own pages and with groups, I belong to, but it is only a tiny fraction compared to the number of likes and comments I get inside of Facebook, which of course does my blog no good at all.

Never the less compared to the rest Facebook is easy to use, easy to understand and keeps you in touch with people you care about and has even helped me find a few long lost friends.

Google+ The Jekyll and Hyde of social media. I guess google wanted to set up a rival social media platform but in its attempt to be different, at the moment, it is just not as good.  In fact, it is pretty damn hard to figure out.  Unlike Facebook, every time you share a post it makes a replica on your own google+ page, so you can end up with numerous copies cluttering up your home page.  It is hard to fathom how a company worth billions can not come up with a better, easier to use design....Go figure???? Though I must definitely add google+ is extremely good at getting your work seen.  Many of my google+ posts are on google page one results, though don't ask me exactly how I did it?

Tumblr For a long time I have had this love hate relationship with Tumblr.

On the one hand, my Tumblr account ranks third in my google page 1 results when I type in Chef Kevin Ashton and in China, it ranks even higher by being second.

So for the last year sporadically, I have tried to share many of my recipes with my Tumblr account. But so far most of my very attractive recipes have not even gotten 1 note (the Tumblr equivalent of a like).  Indeed although many of my posts are tagged according to their own recommendations they don't even show up in Tumblr search results.  I've always had the feeling that renegade Tumblr was poorly organised and had built its name on porn and other fringe elements. But today Tumblr has a much broader type of user and content but unfortunately the inner workings of this platform is still an incomprehensible jumble.  The bottom line is if you can't get your posts seen in Tumblr search results then there is no chance of broadening your audience.

Determined to improve the visibility of my posts I wrote several weeks ago to Tumblr support, spending the time to explain and give examples of what I was talking about.

Their first and second response were about as lazy a piece of support as I have ever experienced from any internet company, anywhere in the world.  They just directed me to links telling me stuff I had already read.  Not to be so easily put off I used my LinkedIn account to locate someone further up the chain of command and pleaded my case again... twice in fact and in essence he did the same thing, just offered suggested links, one of which was partially out of date.  :) 

No one actually went and took a look at my account, that would take too much effort. So the other day I was sent one of those automatic feedback forms from Tumblr so I let them have it with both barrels, telling them their support was as good as a torn jock strap.

Around three years ago Tumblr got bought up by Yahoo for  $1.1 billion dollars in cash, but despite this Yahoo couldn't figure out how to improve it and start making serious money. So much so that two years later Yahoo admitted that the $1.1 billion was mostly a waste of money.  Founder David Karp, who is now CEO I suspect has mixed feelings about how things have turned out. On the one hand he's set for life with a fortune estimated at $200 million , but on the other hand,  "he's sold out to the man" or woman perhaps in this case.    Either way, lots of people grumble about the quirkiness of Tumblr and unless Mr Karp can find a way to make his baby less dysfunctional, the writing is on the wall.

Several years on, Yahoo, now a failing giant got bought by Verizon the largest telecommunication company in the US.   Perhaps a final irony for Yahoo, is it behaved towards some of  Tumblr's sales staff like the dictionary definition of its name,  "An unrefined and often loud or disruptive person".

The question now is does Verizon have the know how to  make Tumblr work, or it will continue to become less relevant as a social media platform and continue Tumbling towards the exit door?

©Kevin Ashton 2016

 

Do You Think I'm Sexy?

I don’t know about you………but there have definitely been a few times in my life when I felt I didn’t belong. In other words, the people around me have behaved so strangely….I end up wondering whether an Alien invasion had taken place whilst I was asleep. I know, I know……it sounds far-fetched….but what other explanation is there? When so many seemingly normal people do so many boneheaded things.

The phenomenon I wanted to talk about started roughly 2 years ago. Young women began wearing short t-shirts that exposed their tummies. My first few “viewings” were very pleasant because the women in question were both attractive and slim. One morning, however…it happened….the scary thing…suddenly overweight young women started to wear the same short t-shirts and I want to know who is to blame?
Who forces me to watch beached whales and wannabe beached whales shake their undulating rolls of sweaty fat as they waddle down the high streets of the UK?

The Suspects

The fashion designer: Oh course they have to bear some of the responsibility for coming up with the design in the first place; however since they always use skinny super models perhaps they couldn’t foresee how their fashionable efforts would be misused.

Mainstream clothing stores: Surely the shops on our high street must take a large share of the blame, after all, if certain fashions were only manufactured in smaller sizes then I wouldn’t be writing this article.

Tattoo artists and naval jewellery makers: Obviously these two groups would also gain if their art and jewellery got maximum exposure.

Parents: I’m constantly amazed at how little they seem to know about their teenage children, where they go, who they are with. They give a bunch of clichéd answers when referring to their teenagers…”going through a phase”…..”It’s my daughter’s friends who are the bad influence”… “If I buy her clothes she just won't wear them”.
What a cop out!!! Until the teenager starts work and earns their own money the parents have all the control they need…they should regain control by removing privileges when necessary. Nobody said parenting was easy…sometimes love also involves saying no to stubborn kids and following through.

You: It may be your first opportunity at being socially responsible, for goodness sake don’t let us all down. If your about to step out of your house with women who should definitely not be showing off their body please…please find a way to break the news to them…. perhaps by screaming in their ear… “You're gonna scare old men with that!”

In summary
If I want to see fat bellies…I can go to a football match….thankyou.