Attention Fellow Bloggers: People May Be Stealing From You!

Fellow bloggers,

Today is a sad day in the blogosphere.  It seems that fellow bloggers are stealing from us.  No, not money… not content… it’s bandwidth.  They are stealing our images that we host on our own servers.

I noticed that one of my blog posts has a massive amount of views to it, so I decided to do a little research.  The research lead me to a blog hosted on Blogger where someone simply copied some images that I have on a few blogs posts and added that image to their post.

Now I will give the individual the benefit of the doubt, and calmly think he just didn’t know any better.  However, when researching who he is, I found out that he is some sort of Internet Marketing consultant for small businesses.  Eeeks.  Enough said.

I did everything I could to find his contact information to send him an email and kindly ask him to either remove the images or upload them to his own server so he’s eating the bandwidth.  However, the only way that one could contact him (note: the ONLY way) is by paying $20 to use some service to call him on the phone.

How in the heck do prospective clients contact him?  He has no other sites that I could find with his name on it.  Well, just one about 4 pages deep into Google, but that number has been disconnected.

Now I’m not starting a war against this man, I do hope to talk to him via email or phone.  Like I said, maybe he just don’t know since a good 100 or so images on his blog are all taken from other blogs - Maybe Even Yours!

I did post two comments on his blog letting him know the deal - we shall see if he responds.  If not, it’ll require me to do some more digging to find all of the images he stole from me and delete them from the server, change file names, and upload new images.  All of with is added busy work that takes time out of my day - not good.

Another crazy thing is that if you try to report the blog to Blogger, they state that they don’t host the blogs.  Ummm… anyone can set up a free blog there.  Who hosts the blogs on their servers?  The who what?  That makes no sense.  Of course the free blogs are hosted on their servers.  After all, the free blogs begin with www.name.blogger.com or www.name.blogspot.com or whatever.

So if this ever happens to you - and there is a very good chance it has already, here’s what I suggest to do:

1. Try to contact the blog owner and resolve it peacefully.

2. If that fails, contact their host and they’ll be suspended until changes are made I assume.

3. It’s a pain, but change the file name of the image, log into your server, delete the old image, upload the new image, go back to your blog and edit the post that has the image that they stole from you.  This way they’ll get a nice and sweet red X where the image should be.  That’ll teach them… well, probably not.

There is also a WhackedOut Marketing Lesson here.  Have you spotted it already?  Here it is…

If you call yourself an Internet Marketing Consultant for businesses, it would be very wise to have at the very least a “contact me” link on your website where someone could email you.  I cannot fathom how much business he is losing because the only way to contact him is by paying $20.

Errrr Hmmm… (as I step onto the soap box…)

Make yourself accessible Mr. Blogger Man.  Isn’t that the reason why businesses are hiring you - the Internet Marketing Business Consultant - to help their business become more accessible on the Internet?

Seriously!  Now don’t get me wrong, you may be a nice guy Mr. Blogger Man and who knows, we may do some business together down the road… and heck, once you fix those images, I’ll even forgive you… but for God’s sake, make it easy for people to contact you.

And never charge people unless you take them on as a client!

That’s like a gas station charging you to even pull into the gas station to get gas.  It’s even like Google charging you 25 cents every time you do a search.  It just doesn’t make sense… and because of it, you’re losing a lot of cents.

‘Fo shizzle.