Thursday 7 April 2016

Academic theft - against me?

I needed some data on the TJX case, so I went to google, expecting to find a few articles. The first one I found was from the University of Sydney, so I was curious and clicked on it. Oh, I thought, this looks familiar. Yeah. It’s several large chunks of my old squidoo article on the TJX case. In fact the first page and a half are pretty much my old article word for word. It has been put up uncredited, in PDF format, with no link to the source, no link to where my article has moved to, and they are taking my traffic because google ranks their data first. Squidoo was not Creative Commons and nor is Wizzley. I have put some of my work up under that, but not on those sites, it is all clearly marked, and it requires attribution and link back. This has happened before, and you might recall I always go after the culprits. I’m just shocked that this time it is a University responsible and it has done it this blatantly. This is theft. Every click to wizzley or squidoo I have lost over the years because someone clicks this instead has cost me at least one cent. I am trying to resolve this. I’ve tweeted them. If they don’t respond I’ll be calling their ISP about stolen data. DMCA takes far too long, and if they are like the last bunch it gets ignored. Of course, my contact data is available on any site they could have harvested it from, so it does raise the question of why they didn’t ask first. We’ll find out whether this was deliberate, the action of one misguided staff member, or an oversight, depending on their reaction. If they apologise and add a cannonical, my credit, or a link, it may have been a mistake or oversight, and we can sort it out. Otherwise, just for once in an IT matter, my membership of the Society of Authors is likely to come in more handy than my IPSE membership (although it is the second that gives me legal cover in these matters). Meanwhile for anyone who wants the actual live article it is on wizzley: https://wizzley.com/tjx-data-loss-and-security-breach-case/ It was up on squidoo before 2008, moving to wizzley when the site shut. I have an archive copy on hubpages with a registered date. The borrowed one? http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~info5990/Supplements/Week07_Malware&Security/Supp07-4TJXCaseDetails.pdf – Put up in 2012 by its header info. You might notice just how close the first few paragraphs are.


This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Academic theft - against me? - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2016/04/07/academic-theft-against-me/ was published on April 7, 2016 at 7:31 am.

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