Cloning Somebody's blog..

This is pretty easy to do, but in my opinion totally out of order. However I have done this myself recently, completely by accident!

A few months back, when the big post on autoblogging using wpomatic had just started, I thought it might be a useful technique to get my partner into IM with. I asked her to name a topic, with the intention of very quickly getting an autoblog up with posts on her topic of choice, and a relevent template. The topic she came up with was rather obscure,and I could only find one decent rss feed in the few minutes I spent looking.

Anyway, 10-15 minutes later I proudly showed her the autoblog (thrown up on a subdomain of one of my generic domains), and explained that it would automatically update using other people's posts. She was suitably unimpressed (she's very creative rather than technical) and I completely forgot about it.

Until a couple of days ago,when I received an email headed 'Copyright violation'. Ever since I set the demo blog up, it had been posting the contents of the rss feed I had given it, and in effect was cloning the blog the feed came from. The blog owner was quite rightly a bit miffed!

Of course I immediately deleted the blog, but it was a salutary reminder of the need to respect copyright.

I really think so also, respect should also prevail. And yet, the violation of copyright can put us in jeopardy in that sense.

Hi,

Why would you wish to just clone someones work my friend ??

You are you and in the end people would discover your a fake

I guess it all depends on the kind of success you want online.... A quick buck and a lousy reputation, or a long successful business built around being genuine and true

I know what Im building right now and I know that my blog readers respect what I do because they tell me. I can only feedback on my own experiences so far.

I would look at it like this, you have a blog and have been posting regular quality unique content to it for a few weeks. You visitor numbers are growing and then doing some reseach you come accross a blog that is pretty much all your work with a few tweaks ... How would you feel ?? What would you do ???

Just think about it bro

Dean

I've seen some articles about people cloning their own blogs for various legitimate reasons. But cloning someone else's blog for your own use would definitely be a copyright issue.

I also wonder why anyone would want to do it? You might see a short term gain, but it's certainly not worth ruining your reputation for.

Barb

what do you do if your blog is cloned? what authority can you report to?