20

When googling to understand a recent question better, I came across a web site whose entire focus is to scoop from Academia SE; here is an example for the question I looked into. It's attributed (if somewhat wrongly; the quotes mention "stackoverflow.com").

I've come across this before, either as a question on the site-wide meta, or the one of mathematics; but forgot if SE takes action in such cases. Despite the attribution, it just doesn't seem right. It's one thing to quote a favorite question in your blog, or tweet it; another completely if it turns into a massive copy and paste operation to generate content.

6
  • 4
    This already happened with other sites. There should be a discussion on the main meta on how to contact SE managers to deal with that, and in which cases they should be contacted.
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Nov 16, 2015 at 15:47
  • 8
    If you look at the bottom of every page, you'll see "user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required". Under this license it is perfectly legal to copy and paste every post on the entire site, so long as you attribute it properly.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Nov 17, 2015 at 14:31
  • 2
    To elaborate on that, the specifics of what 'attribute it properly' mean are spelled out in the Attribution Required post on the Stack Exchange blog.
    – E.P.
    Nov 19, 2015 at 2:12
  • 4
    @E.P. The Stack Exchange "requirement" of a particular type of attribution is unlikely to be enforceable, given the terms of the CC BY-SA license.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 20, 2015 at 17:47
  • 1
    @Franck That's up for grabs / neither here not there (I tend to side with Steve Jessop's comment there, but to each their own), but even if not enforceable, breaking those terms is what's known in the lingo as "not cool". In any case, the purpose of this post is to help future visitors decide whether they should report a scraper or not, in which case the criteria that apply are exactly the ones in that blog post. Thanks for the link, though.
    – E.P.
    Nov 20, 2015 at 23:12
  • @FranckDernoncourt yes, but the site in question doesn't provide any attribution at all to the author, which is certainly against cc-by-sa.
    – Nemo
    Nov 28, 2015 at 21:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
25

See A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What do I do?. This post details:

  • When to report such sites,
  • When not to report such sites,
  • How to report such sites

The site you have given as an example does not meet the attribution requirements, so you should report it.

1
  • 5
    I reported it, as described in the question you linked to.
    – gnometorule
    Nov 16, 2015 at 17:55
6

You can easily find on their website an answer of yours which has

  • no link whatsoever back to your post,
  • no mention of your username or name,
  • no mention of the license, even less a link to it.

This is an egregious copyright violation and you, as an author, can and should send a DMCA takedown notice to defend the commons. Follow the DMCA instructions of the registrar, which is based in USA and can shut down the domain. StackExchange has less power than you in this matter, though it's nice to notify them with the general procedure linked above.

Update: newtips.co is responsive to DMCA notices, they removed a post of mine; pcusernet.com is still up; bighow.org is still up, I now sent a notice to their host ramnode.com as they are in violation of AUP.

Update 2: pcusernet.com is blocked on Firefox and Chromium as malware site, bighow.org continues business as usual but has removed my post. Do send complaints for every plagiarism of your own posts, eventually they'll give up!

1
  • I've acted on newtips.co, bighow.org and pcuser.com for infringement of my copyright on a SE post: I 0) archived the infringing URLs with archive.org and archive.is, 1) wrote the admin to terminate the cc-by-sa license, 2) filed a claim with the registrar and host where reachable, 3) reported pcuser.com to Google ads support. Let's see what happens to the sites and to the OP's posts. :)
    – Nemo
    Nov 29, 2015 at 11:38

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .