UPDATE, 3:25 p.m.: Success! The ladies from the Derbyshire Writers Guild, which shares the austen dot com domain, were as disturbed by this situation as the rest of us. They contacted the domain owner, who claimed that the requests to remove the offending material were sent to an outdated e-mail address and that he had never received them, and now that he knows about the objections, he will do so. So many thanks to Crystal and Margaret from the DWG for intervening! *tosses confetti*
It really warms our icy, tar-coated, dried-up spinster heart to see the way Janeites online have come together on this situation. We know Laurel Ann very much appreciates all the goodwill as well.
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We are very disturbed by a situation presently taking place involving our friend and fellow Jane-blogger Laurel Ann and her excellent blog Austenprose.
The owner of austen dot com (which also houses the Derbyshire Writer’s Guild, which part of the site was not involved in this situation) contacted us a while back and asked if we would like to write for the blog he was setting up called Jane Austen Blog. (ETA: Please don’t go looking for the site; we purposely did not provide a link, because we don’t want to drive traffic to that site.) We responded that we already had an established blog that kept us very busy, and by the way our blog, which had been around for four years, had a similar name, so please call your blog something else. (It was changed to Austen Dot Com Blog, which is really, really different. Not.) Laurel Ann said he also wrote to her and she also turned him down, again, because she had plenty to do on her own, already established blog. He attempted to recruit other writers to blog, but they all seemed to lose interest pretty quickly. The owner of the site (really the owner of the austen dot com domain, who we are told is not a Jane Austen enthusiast in any way) then set up the blog to simply be an aggregation of RSS feeds, of both a Google News feed of anything mentioning Jane Austen–we get such a Google Alert ourself, and it is 99 percent useless–and also using the RSS feed from Austenprose.
RSS feeds, for those who do not know, feed the content from one site to another set up by an end user. A reader can set up an RSS aggregator–for instance, Google Reader–to get the posts from the blogs and newspapers she likes to read, all on one page. She has to click through to comment, and in some cases to read the entire post, but in many cases the entire post is collected in the feed and published to the feed reader. Therefore, because Laurel Ann set up her blog that way for the convenience of her loyal readers, the entire content of her posts was published on this other blog, with all identifying information stripped away. It was made to look as though Laurel Ann was actually writing posts on this other blog, when of course she was not. In other words, they were basically stealing her content.
While it can be said that Laurel Ann provided her posts as an RSS feed and the site owner was just taking advantage of it, this is clearly a misuse of the RSS feed; and Laurel Ann has asked the site owner repeatedly to not use her feed in this way, and he has ignored her requests.
Why would he do this? you may wonder. For SEO–search engine optimization. Search engines would pick up HIS blog as having desirable content that people were searching for on Jane Austen, thereby raising the value of his own site, and driving visitors to his site, where he has Google ads installed. Each visitor to his site, visiting because they think there is good, original content on the page, gets him some money. (You’ll notice that there are, at present, no ads on Austenprose.)
Does it work? Just a week or so ago, we received from a correspondent a link that she thought we would find of interest, which she received in a Google Alert for “Pride and Prejudice.” Though the URL said austen dot com blog, we knew it to be a post from Austenprose, because we had read it there, and immediately let our correspondent know the true situation. She had simply sent it because she received the e-mail. She thought the content belonged to the site where she had sent us. And why not? It was set up to look that way.
Gentle Reader, you may wonder why the Editrix is so exercised about this situation. We are entirely sympathetic to Laurel Ann’s plight and would also be upset at such a use of our content, because we know how much time and effort goes into keeping up an excellent blog like Austenprose. It is not just the writing and the posting, but the time spent assembling links, and the hours and hours and hours searching the web for information and links. We can’t imagine the hours she spends on her special events concentrating on a single Austen book, not to mention herding the cats, er, writers who contribute guest posts. And we Jane bloggers don’t do it for money; in fact, we usually spend our own money doing it. We do it for the love of Jane Austen, and because we really enjoy interacting with our readers. It makes us exceedingly angry that someone would just take that hard work so boldly. It’s like having your necklace snatched and then seeing the trampy little piece that took it strutting down the street wearing it, and then slapping you in the face for good measure.
We just wanted to make everyone aware of this situation, and swing the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness a little bit, because a site purporting to operate in the name of Jane Austen and her fans should be held to a higher standard of behavior. This kind of crap is all very well for garbage spam blogs, but the Janeites deserve much better. This is so Not What Jane Would Do.
Also, like Laurel Ann we’ve changed the way our blog is presented in RSS readers; instead of whole posts, you will now see partial posts, and must click through to read on our blog. We are sorry to take this step and inconvenience those Gentle Readers using the RSS feed for legitimate purposes.
AustenBlog 
Isn’t there any way to block his access to the site? That is really low…and very lazy.
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I don’t think so, without blocking access for everyone using the feed legitimately. If anyone knows a way, please do let us know!
I am rather hoping that public shaming makes a difference.
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I agree! Very low indeed!
I checked out the blog and the first thing I noticed were the ads that were EVERYWHERE, which I think is kind of tacky. It certainly looks like a spam blog. My sympathies to Laurel Ann.
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This is too cheap indeed! I feel bad for Laurel Ann.
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I am in the hopes that if all blog entries show up as truncated and users have to click through to get to the articles, that this austen dot com blog will sink into obscurity. The owner runs a huge site and probably needs all the money he can scrape up to keep it going. I sympathize with that but he needs to know that “no” means NO. Ugh.
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If you can’t afford to run the site, don’t run the site. Simple enough.
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Thanks for bringing this into the light, Maggie. I am similarly enraged by Austen.com blog’s larceny of Laurel Ann’s copyrighted material and am happy to see it made public.
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Thanks for your excellent post, Mags. The only consolation is that this sleazy approach makes money for him only if people click on his ads. We are all quicly becoming savvy enough not to stay long on feeder sites or to give them any business. Still. What nerve!
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I’m so sad and indignant for Laurel Ann. How terrible to have all her hard work and labor used without her permission! I hope he is put in his place for this!
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I’d be surprised if that site does well anyway with all the clicking through you’d have to do just to read the full content of anything – most of the time, you have to click twice just to get to the full content, which takes you to the original site of the content anyway. And I noticed that the comments feature on the entries is closed – likely to avoid indignant comments. It all looks rather passive and unhelpful.
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The thing is, once they get you to the page–via Google Alert or Google search–they register a hit for Google Ads. Whether the content is good or useful is not that important. It’s getting someone there in the first place. As my example showed of the friend who sent me a link in all innocence, it does work.
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And what made me laugh is that the site has a post of the first part of Laurel Ann’s apology to readers about the RSS issue. So if people read that, they’ll know what this person is doing – “shoot” and “foot” come to mind, don’t they?
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I read about somebody else having a similar problem, except it didn’t involve RSS feed but a simple copy and paste of the content, including images. The person that was being robbed asked for it to stop, was ignored, and then went to the other person’s web host and filed complaints. I don’t know the details, but the web host put an end to it…might have shut down the site, but I’m not sure. Might be worth a shot, in addition to shortening the RSS feed from her site. Good luck.
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I believe Laurel Ann has sent a DMCA complaint, but I’m pretty sure they host their own site so there is no service provider to complain to.
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I am most certainly NOT amused!
What irritates me is how this person thinks it is perfectly justifiable to steal someone else’s intellectual property. I pray poetic justice will be carried out in this situation. 🙂
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As someone who has also been victim of plagiarism (and that is the reason which forced to turn JAcastellano into a Members only mailing list) I do feel for Laurel Ann. It is outrageous that someone is trying to take advantage of all the research done. And thank you very much, Mags, for denouncing publicly Terry, the owner of the Spring.net where the DGW is hosted. He should stop doing this.
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Hey Mags–if you run your feed through Feedburner, you send out your posts by email. Email subscribers can get the full post content once a day by email. Those who choose to still use RSS will of course have to come to the site for the full post.
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That’s a good idea. I am preparing to make some improvements to AustenBlog and I think that will be one I incorporate. Thanks, Laura!
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Thanks to Mags, the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness and everyone for your support. I rarely speak up for myself, but this situation was just SO wrong from a fellow Jane Austen enthusiast? NO he is not a Janeite but a carpetbagger. He is just making money off Jane, and I am helping him? No way.
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I’m so glad for the cluebat which has brought forth so many posts in support of Laurel Anne that this person should be feeling very ashamed of himself.
Wish you all the best Laurel, and hope this thing is resoolved in your favour.
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I recall posing a question at the “iJane” conference in Rochester, NY, two years ago: “What happens if some unscrupulous person–say, at Wickham.com–starts lifting material from your site? What recourse do you have?” The answer then, as I recall, was essentially “Not much.” I’m so glad to see that it’s now possible to take a few steps to thwart Wickham. Keep up the good work, everyone!
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So saddened and angry to hear about this. I know how much work goes into maintaining high-quality blogs/sites like AustenBlog and Austenprose, and it angers me to hear about someone so blatantly and brazenly plagiarizing and stealing. I haven’t seen the website in question, nor will I be visiting it. I don’t know how ads work but I feel like the more of us that click through to the website, the less appeals like this one actually work.
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Just awful! I say do not merely swing the Cluebat–I propose a thrashing… Seriously, though, that’s just wrong. It’s nice to see everyone banding together for support.
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Good for you, Mags, that you helped bring about a rapid resolution of that situation. It’s one thing to disagree about the meaning of what Jane Austen wrote, it’s quite another for someone to so blithely abuse the privileges of the Internet in that way.
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I fully support Laurel Ann, I just can not stand such people and / or websites that say they are feeding news. The truth is they are only copying because they are mediocre people who can not even write an original line! Sorry my bad humour…
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Glad this had a happy ending…Copying is more common than it should be! 😦
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