Nothing out there is going to search sites, open up PDFs, scan them, and report back. Just isn’t going to happen.

The best tool for this problem is a well drafted “boiler plate” document from your lawyer. Send to the offender, if he doesn’t comply, your lawyer goes after him. Easy enough. My lawyer doesn’t charge unless he collects. So, my cost is a 1 time fee for the document, and a little time sending it out. It’s worked for me. Probably will for you too.

For the little guy making $25 a month from his blog, yeah it isn’t but to that person its a dinner, it’s drinking money etc.

Sentinels business model is free for that little guy, ad support for us. For the larger blogger it starts out at $5 and goes to $20. There is the commercial side to those entities such as The WSJ, US News, GM etc. Larger corps that have more blogs to protect and need faster timely reporting of matches.

There is another aspect to Sentinel, we take ourselves out of the mix of stating that “we are 100%” that what was found is a splogger. We have the user identify that to us. After 3 confirmed accounts of this taking place to the same url, it is moved to a publicly available blacklist, available to say Googles Blogger for possible integration. A means that they can utilize to assist in pruning their Blogger sites that are listed by our users as a confirmed splogger.

We are trying to make a difference one step at a time. It hasn’t been easy either. Its not as if we are another clone of some other video sharing site or social network. We are paving new territory as we go along.

So, we can help the little guy possibly save his $25 a month by giving him the ammunition that he would need to send to say Blogger, free blog host or hosting facility.

There is also a side effect of Sentinel. It can also be utilized as a way to track reputation.

By no means is it and end-all to be all solution but as stated, its a start and in this arena we are the first ones to the punch as far as using our own technology from the ground up. There is CopyScape, but then again they use Googles search API. So, its basicly doing the same search.

If you would like to discuss further or give me additional insight I would welcome the conversation. Its always good to get different opinions to know if your going in the right direction.

Tony Moura
tony(@)iwerx.com
407.402.5871

You could and should. The difference is that there is no effective tool that would allow you to search for your content that had been plagiarized. A splogger will change the title, author, remove any linking back to you. They will go as far as using synonyms to effectively change the blog post. The overall meaning is the same and thats what counts.

You could use Google to an extent but at best it will make exact matches. Also, it would take you a great deal of time typing in different search strings hoping to make a match.

Not to self promote but, this is where our solution Sentinel is different. once you sign up there is very little for you to do but identify the splogs and logout. Sentinel also monitors every blog post that you put out. So, you could post away knowing its running in the background. Sentinel also has the ability to still make matches on non-like words or splogs that have used synonyms. There’s no code to put into your blogs or feeds. You can have a free hosted blog solution utilizing any blog platform and Sentinel will still work. Will it be the end all to be all? Of course not but its a start.

While I do see your point and a valid one at that. There is a huge need for some way to at least try and combat blog content theft.

Would it be used by small time Bob who just wrote about going to Disney with his family on vacation? Why would he care if someone scraped his content?

There is a sense of ownership no matter how small and for someone else to possibly be using your content for profit the “I should get paid not them” comes into play. You also have advertisers that are paying for clicks that are not of quality but quantity. Then there are the larger blog sites, corporations and individuals that once that content is scraped have no way of controling its use.

Is there a magic bullet that will make splogging go away of course not. But an attempt has to be made to at least providing a solution. We didnt need another search engine but one was built and its now become the standard for most users.

Guys like Arrington that put in a great number of hours, effort and expense in getting the material for a blog post of quality also have something to lose when their content is plagiarized.

So, is a solution like Sentinel going to work for everybody? No and we understand that. Will it work for the Techcrunches of the world, sure it will. Giving the user the ability to see where their content has been scraped, the ability to send out a pre-designed DMCA to the blogs host along with a report of offending URLs. As well as a few other tidbits.

I would look forward to hearing more of your insights and having further discussion about the subject. Maybe there is something I’m missing.

Wouldn’t it be appropriate to include a disclosure here that the author has served as a paid advisor to BlogBurst — rather than requiring readers to click through to previous BlogBurst articles?

- How many blogs actually have such compelling content that the profit potential from licensing it is significant? On the whole, most blog content is unsaleable. It would be very interesting to know the average amount of money being made from Blogburst participants.
- Some blogs make decent amounts of money. More make a minimal amount of money. And most make practically no money. As such, is there a significant market for tracking down theft of blog content? The cost of enforcing copyright, for most bloggers, is vastly greater than what they make from that content, and when you consider that the theives could be overseas, it makes no economic sense for 99.9% of the bloggers out there to take any action against infringers (i.e. splogs) who may be almost impossible to identify and in exotic locales.

Thanks for the mention about Sentinel. We’re excited about what Sentinel will be able to offer bloggers and the ability to track down their contents theft.

Private beta will start by mid Dec. We’ll launch Jan 30th.

Thanks again.

Tony Moura - Founder / CEO
Iwerx