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Unread 04-18-2015, 11:38 AM
W.F. Lantry's Avatar
W.F. Lantry W.F. Lantry is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Inside the Beltway
Posts: 4,057
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This is a variation on screen-scraping, and it happens to just about every site. This particular one may be ethical, but there are many others out there with no ethics at all.

Plug your name into google, and explore the lower depths of the results. Here's a good example: http://stafaband.info/mp3/download/t...ntry_read.html

That poem was published, with a sound file of Kate reading it, in Now Culture. Clearly, stafaband.info scraped it, and put it up on their site (in violation of just about every worldwide copyright law), to increase their hit rating. There are hundreds, thousands, of these sites. It's happened to everyone who's ever put words up on the web, whether they know it or not.

To be perfectly honest, it's no big deal. I've never had an editor deny a poem or a story because it got screen-scraped. They'd have to look through thousands and thousands of links, and who has time for that? No editors I know.

I've just pruned everything on metrical and the deep end to 30 days ago. Will the scrapers still have the data up on their sites? Yes, they will... for a while, until they refresh their databases, or the sites expire. But it's nothing to get worked up about... and even if we did, there'd be nothing to do, because most of these sites would be unresponsive. It would be like writing the Nigerian prince with a cease and desist order...

Best,

Bill
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