Why bother?
Jan. 26th, 2009 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiI do occasionally Google myself*, although as often as not, I find references to one of the other folks with my name on the net (there are at least two of them). But occasionally I find something like this, in which someone took one of my old Bookslut columns and reprinted it entirely, linking back to the original article and crediting me as the author.
Granted, it's not as bad or annoying as when a guy named John Kahane plagiarized me a few years ago, but I'm also not sure why someone would bother. I'm not seeing any active ads (just some banner ink exchanges at the bottom), and I'm not sure what they get out of it. I could yell at them -- technically, I own reprint rights -- but there's little (probably no) harm being done, especially since they do credit me. But it's just a little strange.
For the record, I'm generally pretty cool with reprints (especially of content that was created for free, and is still fully available online), but if you're in doubt, ask me. And also the publisher.
Incidentally, I often find blog sites that pull my posts (although not my articles) to get keyword hits and milk some Google adwords money (the idea being, they'll link and partially quote every post that mentions Buffy, then hope to get searches for Buffy info sent to their site and get a few clicks), but these creatures seem to vanish quickly enough to make them more fascinating than irritating. They skirt copyright laws by only quoting a sentence or two, and since they link to the original post, there's no issue there. Also, Google tends to hate these sites and shut them down as soon as they see them crop up.
*Which does not make you go blind or grow hair on your palms.
Granted, it's not as bad or annoying as when a guy named John Kahane plagiarized me a few years ago, but I'm also not sure why someone would bother. I'm not seeing any active ads (just some banner ink exchanges at the bottom), and I'm not sure what they get out of it. I could yell at them -- technically, I own reprint rights -- but there's little (probably no) harm being done, especially since they do credit me. But it's just a little strange.
For the record, I'm generally pretty cool with reprints (especially of content that was created for free, and is still fully available online), but if you're in doubt, ask me. And also the publisher.
Incidentally, I often find blog sites that pull my posts (although not my articles) to get keyword hits and milk some Google adwords money (the idea being, they'll link and partially quote every post that mentions Buffy, then hope to get searches for Buffy info sent to their site and get a few clicks), but these creatures seem to vanish quickly enough to make them more fascinating than irritating. They skirt copyright laws by only quoting a sentence or two, and since they link to the original post, there's no issue there. Also, Google tends to hate these sites and shut them down as soon as they see them crop up.
*Which does not make you go blind or grow hair on your palms.