a.k.a.   How Internet Sites strip out Content for Their Own Purposes

These are called feed harvesters or content scrapers amongst other terms and exist solely to copy other people’s content for the purpose of serving adverts, charging folks for getting good hit rates, hosting malware… etc

I came across one while checking a Google Alert on “Crawling Chaos”.  Out popped a reply today, one I’d never seen before.  This is the phrase that you can do a nice Google search on.  It pops up in lots of places.

play bass in New Order/Joy Division/Crawling Chaos

The full text of the paragraph is:

In the wake of Tony Wilson’s death and rumours of New Order “reforming” with Hook, Hook recently wrote on his MySpace blog that “in a conversation with Oliver Wilson about a tribute gig for his father, he asked me what the chances were of getting New Order to perform. I said, ‘Seeing as we have just split up, pretty slim.’ He then said to me, ‘If I could get the others to agree, would you do it?’ I said, ‘In honour of your father, I’d do anything.’” He added that “this means I would sell the popcorn, take the tickets, sweep up after, play bass in New Order/Joy Division/Crawling Chaos.”

The thing is, that this came out in 2007!  This is the NME report on the subject: Exiled bassist hints at possible reunion for Tony Wilson.

Now here are two sites with identical text content, although one has a bit-of-an-indexing system.

• Plumbot – a site apparently for plumbers!
• AbsoluteAstronony.com – a site devoted to .. well, astronomy, I suppose

Once I found these two, I didn’t look any more as two is enough to make my point.  The sites are copying this one, Wikipedia!

• New Order – Wikipedia Main Article, no less.

Who are these people?

Here are the two whois lookups for plumbot and AbsoluteAstronomy.  They’re both USA based apparently and so must be capable of reading Wikipedia’s terms and conditions.

Isn’t Wikipedia Copyright?

We’ll yes & no. Wikipedia say this under Verbatim Copying (which is what the two sites have done)

2. VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.

Now go and check the two site – the above text isn’t included with the articles and both sites even have the audacity to put “All Rights Reserved” at the bottom!!!

Postscript

The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club

I’ve said elsewhere that Hooky was the only one out of Joyce D’Fission that I could talk to – all the rest were too posey (ACR were worse though), up their arses and well yes, unstable, in Curtis’s case.  That was my opinion at the time.    Ironically, given his comment,  I did have an idea once to get him to play with us (even part-time) and I may have actually suggested as much when I was pissed up after drinking all their lager at the Russel Club.  If he replied, I think he said it was impractical/too busy/NO/tied up/band wouldn’t like it/etc.  I liked his twangy sound and tend to play that way myself.

Time moves on.  We’ve all changed.

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