Legal Commentary

Is Sharpy News Stealing Your Blog Posts?

By Jeralyn

Via John at Square State, I've found out there's a site called Sharpy News that has no original material and is misappropriating the blogposts of hundreds of blogs, reposting them without proper attribution or authorization, allowing people to comment on our blog posts at its site, and inserting hotlinks within our posts that redirect the reader to its site.

Example of some TalkLeft posts reproduced at Sharpy News (with their tags inserted):

• Can Evangelical Voters Win Colorado For Mccain?
  (TalkLeft version here.)
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Day In Gitmo Court (TalkLeft version here.)

Go check them out and see if your posts are there. John says they are also misappropriating material from OpenLeft.com, Firedoglake and fivethirtyeight.com. [More...]

Sharpy News is making money off its unauthorized misappropriations of our blog posts through Google's Ad Sense. You can also ask Ad Sense to remove them. John has a sample letter in his post.

You can also complain to Sharpy News' hosting company. John has the appropriate letter for them as well.

• Add2Net, Inc
  Lunarpages Division
  100 East La Habra Blvd
  La Habra, CA 90631
  Fax: 714-521-8195

Sharpy News has no contact information. John got the site's WHOSIS information and complained. He received a voicemail from a (phonetically)Lon Baffman who claims to run the site. John has posted his phone number since he left it in the voice-mail.

Sharpy News is relatively new and is doing this by reproducing the full content of our posts from our rss feeds and then inserting links within our posts to its own site. In TalkLeft's case, they are using the Feedburner feed, which makes me think Feedburner should also be advised of this.

Here is the Sharpy News list of latest "blue" blogposts and "red" blogposts they have posted on their site. Here's the WHOSIS information I found, but I'm not sure it goes to Sharpy News as opposed to an agent.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 27, 2008 (boomark / email).