What’s beef?
Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep.
Beef is when you make your enemies start your Jeep.
And, as The Notorious B.I.G. so eloquently put it, “Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in I.C.U.”
See what I did there? It’s called fair use. I quoted a small portion of a work under copyright, crediting the source.
It’s a decent thing to do, I feel.
But apparently, not everybody has gotten the memo.
Site scrapers have hit Mr Daniel’s website. (Like the snazzy new design, by the way? I’m raising the bar this year.)
My chronically friendly alter ego would usually let these things slide, if it was just a blogger somewhere, or if they had done it in a less sleazy way. But not this time.
Specifically, what happened is that some language school in the Canary Islands, which one would suppose has the budget to do soooooo much better, has decided it would be a good idea to copy and paste my articles directly to their blog. Specifically, these two: Atención: el 78% de los españoles no pueden mantener una conversación en inglés and the classic Ejemplos del uso de EVER y NEVER.
They put a link at the end, citing my website as a source, but still. No commentary, no original contribution except for really obnoxious stock photo on one. They didn’t even mention my name. And, of course, fair use doesn’t mean you can just use 100% of someone else’s copyrighted article.
So. What’s chorizo? Well, usually it’s a high-fat pork product. One of the mainstays of a healthy diet, in my somewhat-biased paleo opinion.
Mr Chorizo, in any case, ain’t nobody’s fool. Some friends have been kind enough to point me in the direction of a couple of resources for these situations. For example, Google Scraper Report allows you to report scraped content that’s outranking the original in search.
Done and done!
And you can also report violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act using another handy Google tool.
I haven’t done that yet–I’m going to send them an email first, to see what they have to say for themselves.
Another friend suggested I should tweet about it and mention them. So here goes:
Los de @LanguageCampus están copiando y pegando artículos de mi web al suyo. ¡Vaya! Han oído hablar de "fair use" y copyright?
— Daniel Welsch (@madridESL) March 22, 2015
The “author” of the blog posts is one Emanuele Turbanti. I’m going to assume it’s this guy on Twitter. Same name, lives in the Canary Islands, and claims to be a “Creative Graphic Designer” among other things.
Anyway, I’ve contacted him, too. And tomorrow I’ll send out some emails.
Eres el @eturbanti que ha republicado mis artículos en el blog de @LanguageCampus sin mi permiso? Si es así, tenemos que hablar.
— Daniel Welsch (@madridESL) March 22, 2015
In any case, I’m usually happy to let people share my work, if they do it right. Recently, for example, a gentleman named Luis, who has a website about memory techniques, asked permission to republish some of my articles. I told him it was fine. Why? Because he asked nicely! And he gave me credit, personally. At the beginning of the articles. Check them out on mnemotecnia.es.
These site scrapers, on the other hand, are gonna get a taste of The Chorizo.
You wanna throw down? I’ll throw down! My Viking ancestors would expect no less of me.
I’ll keep y’all posted.
Yours,
Mr Chorizo.
P.S. For some non-paleo dietary options, check out my new article on Vaya Madrid: From roscón to turron: the year in Spanish pastries. Incidentally, I tell the story of San Isidro and his wife Santa María de la Cabeza in there. Now, I’m going to go burn some calories. Gotta justify eating these torrijas somehow.
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