As my father always said – “It’s amazing the amount of effort that some folks will put in to avoid an honest day’s work”. On the Internet that boils down to clowns ripping off other people’s stuff (images, designs, text) for another web site without permission, credit or payment. Saves them the effort of writing their own material (or researching the material or even knowing the subject matter at hand). Another hope is that the purloined material will (maybe) give them a boost on ‘content is king’ search engines. Our studio web site has been ripped off so many times that we started an entire section – copycats – that outlines some of the more egregious copies of TLF designs and web copy. One of the tools that we use in tracking these scoundrels is Copyscape, a web-based engine that allows you to search the web for copies of your web site text. Copyscape allows you to enter web URLs one-at-a-time for free, or for a paid subscription, will allow you to monitor a series of web addresses at regular intervals.
For example, it was through Copyscape that we found these pinheads – so-called Impact Corporate Logo Design who on their ‘logo design articles’ page feature a slew of articles from other sources, including a word-for-word-rip of our changing your current logo piece that’s part of our logo design articles section. Let me make this absolutely clear – these dudes do not have permission to use our material (and one could argue that if their attitude towards copyright issues is so cavalier, how can they present themselves in a business that has everything to do with copyright issues?) Nosirree Bob, they went and plucked that article right off our web site without permish (the unlinked credit don’t cut it fellahs – even according to the flouncy fair use provisos laid out by the copyright folks). We’ve sent them e-mails (no response), their fax line “isn’t connected” (great barometer of a e-com business) and there’s no phone number to be found anywhere on the site (hmmm – I thought the deal about the internet is to communicate).
Funny thing, if you do a little digging, you’ll also find out that these twits are connected via IP#’s, payment gateways and design examples to Logo Design Pros, a lovely bunch that we featured previously in our earlier logo splog feature. Some people’s children, huh? And oh yeah, seeing as how all this chicanery has much to do with logo design search engine PR, the outbound links above have been Page Rank neutered…
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