EgotoBot/4.8

spiders dmoz listing, "caching" pages

[stevenha]

Here's a story you may find interesting. I discovered in my logs, some references from eGoto dot com, and when I backtracked to the page, I discovered they had completely copied my page, put it on their site, with a small disclaimer at the bottom saying it was a cached version.

I was not pleased, since this is a violation of my copyright, as far as I'm concerned. I emailed them (with some difficulty), and got a reply saying that they removed one instance of a copied page, but also said that their spider would get my page again anyway, next time they spider newly updated dmoz info.

The guy suggested I could prevent this, by blocking "EgotoBot/4.8" in my robots.txt or with a meta noindex specifically on each page.

Is it my responsibility to prevent them from violating my copyright? I don't think so, but is there another point of view? It's somewhat analagous to Google's cache I suppose, but probably stretching the definition of "caching" way too far.

[wilderness]

Is it my responsibility to prevent them from violating my copyright?

Too everybody's disappointment, that's the way copyright works.
The party which has been violated, incurs the legal expense to stop the abuse.

Why not just ban the IP range or the referring website?
It's much simpler.