Fair Use, My Ass: Tools to Identify Content Scrapers Without Permission Given

I used to be annoyed when a certain academic law librarian, who presumably knew something about copyright law, scraped the entire content of some blog posts I wrote and republished them with attribution but not with permission on his law librarian blog a little too regularly. "Fair use, my ass." Ah well, they were just blog posts and I don't get too perturbed anymore -- life is just too short. In Detecting On-line Copying…. Slaw's David Bilinsky identifies a number of tools you can use to identify scrapers who go way too far, assuming you care. They include Google Alerts, Copyscape.com and CopySentry. See his post for details. Do note the limitations he identifies for Google Alerts. [JH]