Back on December 6th, I wrote an article detailing Videosfight.net and their theft of online MMA blog content. I had noticed that the site was receiving trackbacks (people clicking links from other sites that pull up MMA Opinion articles) from one site in particular nearly every day. After simply opening one of the links, I saw that the site was taking works from many other MMA sites in the midst of what seemed like 20 Google Adsense advertisements. Obviously someone wanted to make some money off of our work.
The owner of the site, Jeff Hudson, was contacted via email. No response. I pleaded my case to Yahoo! after receiving word from a few other bloggers (Zach Arnold of FightOpinion and Kris of UFC Daily), but nothing happened. After talking back and forth with Kris, he mentioned contacting Google since Jeff Hudson and his site were violating the Google Adsense policy of stealing content and placing advertisements where they could be mistaken for literary content.
It looks like Google was able to do something to help us out. Although they haven’t yet contacted me in regards to the site being taken down, but Videosfight.net is no longer taking our content. If you look at one of the trackback links (the link for “Putting Fighters on a Pedastal is here) you can see that it has become another one of those bland “search” spam sites which just links MMA sites. The site was up and running last week and now it has been reduced garbage within a matter of days. Thanks Google and thanks to everyone for their support.
MMA Opinion and the MMA blogging community: 1 VideosFight.net: 0
Loading ...
January 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
That’s great news Brandt, looks like we were able to do something about those spammers after all.
January 12th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Brandt,
Thanks a lot, videosfight.net have been leaching off me for a while now.
Keep up the good work
January 12th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Kris - Yea, it took a little while, but it looks like it worked.
Adrian - They were leeching off a lot of sites and posting up tons of “news”. I believe they had something around 14,000 articles up. You’re welcome!
January 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Great Job
January 13th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
We see a lot of this on a daily basis. Sites that are MMA and sites that have nothing to do with MMA steal content. These guys write a quick script to steal all new posts from RSS and make money off of our work
January 13th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Yeah. They are a bunch of thieves, but if you continue to expose their real names and contact info, they may retreat for a little while.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Hey guys, great work! Those guys have been working my site for a long time too. So annoying.
Score one for MMA Opinion!
- Caleb
January 15th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Good Job….
This guy was taking my posts as well. I informed him of telecommunication law (Digital Millenium Copyright Act)that states that if you tell the internet service provider that hosts the offending site about the infractions they have no choice but to have the violator remove the material or shut down the site. I also informed him (as you did) that I would contact GoogleAdsense about his practices.
I gave him two days to remove my material and he complied.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Caleb and JiuJitsu: Good to hear that others are benefiting from the disappearance of that site. I was getting ready to contact every site to build an offense against vdieosfight, but it seemed like it went down before I even had to go that far! I also sent him a notice, but he just ignored my demand.