yep, let’s name a few google, yahoo msn etc. , i am not joking, YOU by not writing some restrictive rules in the htaccess or robots.txt or the page allowed them to take your content, index it and show snippets of it and even distribute it using the web and rss to 3rd party (which in your case some of the 3rd party are people which take this content and build “new” content pages) without them promissing you ANY financial gain what so ever.
all of these SE capetelize on your work, sell ads abd clicks etc. (and they are doing much more then we all do together)
so where do you draw the lines both legally and morally ?
i know you are pissed and i know you take it personal but i am still trying to be objective and play the devil advocate, again , i am not endorcing scrapping behavier but i am trying to put the right prespective and bring a reality check on it.
they may have not even scraped your site, they may have scraped google SERPs ….
Iwill repeat it again for the guys did not get it from the prev discussions. If someone takes your whole site, that is illegal – a few sentences is not illegal and because someone think it is “immoral” and report it to vendors, when in fact the ONLY ISSUE IS THEY USIALIZE SEO LESS. No way does it in any way harm a site ranking or anything to have a few of your sentences displayed on other sites – when I copy a block of content from some of my “real sites” into google search it returns 5k results sometimes! These “real-sites” sites rank fine. – to me it says that it has no effect what so ever, if any the effect is good since i am getting motre backlinks.
To the point – in what way could the person scrapping have possibly scraped and harmed any webmaster? Even if a couple sentences appeared on his site, as they say HE CLOAK and no one sees it – this obviously would NEVER be the reason the scrapper rank? Where is the harm? i also think the scrapper do not crawl anyones sites for content.
Lastly, it is not the vendors responsibility to determine whether a site in their network is acting within the fair use laws. Lawyers can barely determine this, no less affiliate managers!
and if a vendor doesn’t want the traffic it takes 10 minutes for the scrapper to point it elswhere (there are over 1200 vendors out there), I must say that this problem is not unique to our industry – it is everywhere and no one of the vendors care about any of this noise . (and i am talking about vendors like the biggest banks, credit card companies, insurance, auto, and online comerce lik eebay and such)
but i still want to get some constructive ideas in how to resolve this.