The food pics you see here in my blog are also posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.food. Recently, Fosco discovered a website that was reposting all the content from ABF and presenting it in a discussion forum format. To make matters worse, that website inserted ads from Google Adsense into the forums. If anyone clicked on those ads, the website owner would get a kickback from Google.

Essentially, the website was making money off of my and other people’s copyrighted content.

Reposting of copyrighted content is rampant on the Internet, but that doesn’t make it right. If you or I post something on a website, blog or Usenet newsgroup, we do not automatically give up our rights to that content. No one can just take our content and use it as they please, especially if they benefit financially from that use.

I used the information found from a timely post on Food Blog S’cool to contact the website’s author, the site’s hosting provider, and Google Adsense support and asked them to remove my content. Fortunately, the site’s admin complied after I informed him that what he was doing is illegal.

I’ve now added a copyright notice to the sidebar to make it clear that my permission is needed before my content can be republished elsewhere. I’m also taking steps to protect my pictures from being misused as well. Those I will detail in a future post.

Aloha, Nate