Textbook publisher downloading site daily

Should I be concerned?

[HRoth]

I noticed from my stats that a publisher of educational textbooks and internet educational materials is downloading my site every day. Why would they do this? Should I care?

[Leosghost]

Could they be going to ( heaven forbid that people do such things to others ) "scrape" or "plaguarize" you?

[HRoth]

Well, I immediately thought of plagiarism. I wasn't sure if I was being paranoid or not. But how would I ever find it? They're a big publisher.

[mack]

you might want to get in touch with someone from the company to understand just what they are doing. Not only will this get you answers, but it will make them aware that you know what they are doing.

Mack.

[Leosghost]

If it's straight copying ..on the net you find if it is happening by entering a block of your own unique text into a search engine and hitting go ..you should be the only one hosting the resultant "found" page ..

Plaguarizing requires much more reading / researching ..but at least you have an idea where to begin looking :)

If either of these occurs in print media only you will have a much harder job to find it ..

What you might do is to send them an email saying you have noticed that they are downloading your site and that if there are items of particular interest to them you would be happy to discuss co-operative endeavours ..

Thus giving a heads up to them that you are aware ..and maybe cutting short any problems and maybe they may even make you an offer ..if they later are to be found using your material without your permission ..you will have a much better case to present when demanding compensation ..:)

mack said it whilst I was typing

[HRoth]

"What you might do is to send them an email saying you have noticed that they are downloading your site and that if there are items of particular interest to them you would be happy to discuss co-operative endeavours .."

That is a really good idea. I used to be a ghostwriter.:) I'm going to do that, thanks!

[treeline]

There are some "anti-plagiarism" sites for professors that look at similar subjects to the texts and try to help professors spot copied essays, etc. Maybe they're keeping an eye on you.

[cws3di]

I have heard of instances where there are "education" sites out there that sell memberships to their "educational" materials - they set up whole class curriculum, etc, by scraping other sites.

This material is not spidered - it is inside the membership. If your site gets scraped like this, you won't find it through copyscape or searching for "long strings of unique text"

It seems to me that I remember reading a thread here in WW a couple of months ago where someone here was having a copyright dispute with one of these apparently reputable "education" sites, but I can't find the thread...
.

[cws3di]

Another comment - possibly burning it to CD and selling "education" CDs on ebay?

[HRoth]

They do provide educational materials besides textbooks--what they call "electronic learning materials." This is where I thought my pages might end up. And as was mentioned above, I immediately thought that there would be no way for me to find this out. It appears from the name of the server that it might be that part of their organization that is downloading the pages.:(

[Matt Probert]

What many of us do, is include "spoilers" within the text. Ideally these should be impossible to detect, but in reality they are more often just obscure and difficult to detect, but do assist one to locate copied material.

Matt

[stapel]

Matt Probert said:

...include "spoilers" within the text.

For instance, you could include your copyright notice in white-on-white text. Or include your copyright notice in a "comment" inside the HTML.

Anybody have other suggestions?

Eliz.

[HRoth]

I wrote them an email yesterday morning saying I had noticed these downloads and gave them evidence out of my stats so perhaps they could recognize which server of theirs was involved (they have a huge organization). I said I knew that they offered online educational resources and that I certainly wanted people to feel free to read the content that I wrote, but that I did not want it used without my permission. I also said that I would be happy to collaborate on a project if they were interested, as someone mentioned.

According to my stats, they did not download my site yesterday for the first time in 2-3 weeks. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe not.

[stapel]

HRoth said:

I wrote them an email yesterday....According to my stats, they did not download my site yesterday for the first time in 2-3 weeks.

Okay.... that's a little freaky....

Eliz.

[emodo]

Keep us updated. I'd love to hear how this turns out.