crescenta - 11:03 pm on Apr 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

I've had something similar happen. A couple of sites are "framing" a particular page of mine and putting an ad at the top (on their frame). I'm too inept to describe it properly, but I think you probably know what I mean. One of these "stolen" pages also lists on Google. Exact same content, everything. (At least they aren't trying to take credit for the page.)

I contacted Adsense about it and they won't do anything, as they say they are not a "mediator" of copyright issues. In a way I'm not even sure this is a copyright issue, since no new page has been created--they're just cleverly linking to mine in a way that makes my page's content also list as being on their site (as least as far as Google is concerned).

I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't for the search engine listing. It isn't like they are trying to take credit for my page. And one of the thieves is so incompetent that they somehow didn't "link" to my site properly. Because I have hotlink protection on, when anyone views the page on the thief's site, they see all these "This graphic belongs to mysite.com" pictures. (And since I set a background graphic on this page, the *whole* page is one big sea of "this graphic belongs to..." pictures, making it basically unreadable)!

It does irk me that these sites seem to basically exist by hotlinking to other people's content, slapping a frame at the top of the page, and adding an Adsense ad. I thought that Adsense would be interested in that. I thought that would definitely be against Adsense's TOS. The vast majority of these sites' original content is comprised of small frames and an ad. Everything else is just leeched from the rest of us.