I regularly find other people republishing my content without permission (and usually without acknowledgment of the source).
Here’s some of the real excuses I’ve had recently when I’ve confronted bloggers who do it:
- “I was just testing a new template with your posts.” (all 100 of them)
- “I just couldn’t resist – it was too tempting.”
- “We just installed a new plugin that promised to give us new content without lifting a finger, I didn’t realize it was using other people’s content.”
- “Sorry, my Son was playing with my blog and did it without me knowing.”
- “Oh, I didn’t see any Copyright notices.” (he was republishing my RSS feed and in doing so was republishing my copyright notice on every post too).
- “I was just doing it to see how long it would take you to realize I was doing it.”
- “Sorry, but can you tell me whose site YOU’RE scraping YOUR content off? It’s really good!”
- “But I just don’t have enough time to write my own content for all 279 blogs that I run!”
Update: here’s a new one I had today – ‘I wasn’t fully aware we were doing that.’ Hmmm – how can you not be ‘fully aware’? In my books you’re either aware or you’re not!
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Darren,
I enjoyed your post. I’ve always said that it is important to have fun and don’t take yourself too seriously. Not only does it reduce your own stress level, but people are drawn to others when they show an ability to make a serious topic more lighthearted. Ultimately, your levelheadedness benefits your popularity tremendously.
-Philip Nowak
Amit Savyon,
Excellent feedback. Some of your points are very clever and I have not heard before. I am sure that all of us can employ the use of many of your suggestions to protect our content.
Interestingly enough, Leo Babauta, of Zen Habits, went the completely opposite direction and chose to “Uncopyright” as he calls it. He has an entire page, “Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal My Content”, that explains the reasons why he has decided to go this route.
-Philip Nowak
Leo’s approach is very interesting, and, on a similar topic, I’m currently reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture”, great stuff. Recommend reading it here: http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
read this post when you did it, and laughed – just dropping a note to say i’ve just linked here, and thanks for posting the link to the Google copyright theft form – my blog was plagiarised on the second day i wrote in it by someone on Blogspot, and i was so annoyed that Google weren’t doing anything – at least now there’s a chance they’ll take down the stolen content – which in this case is the entire blog.