iGizmodo (The Gadget World) shamelessly steals other tech sites content
I’ve already written about the nasty little sites that scrape complete content from legitimate web sites via their RSS feeds, so I won’t go into huge detail here. Suffice it to say that this particular breed of scrapers, who go by the name of “The Gadget World” but have registered ‘igizmodo.com’ as their domain name (hmm, sounds familiar), see nothing wrong in what they’re doing. They even dare to suggest that our much higher ranked site would benefit from being linked to by a splog. Yeah, I don’t think so.
Here’s the truth (select image for a larger view):
Sure, they’ll deny they’re doing anything wrong, but this screenshot demonstrates that they not only steal content, but hotlink any images. So they’re also using up other people’s bandwidth.
What’s more irritating is that I’ve seen other blogs quoting their site as the original source of a news story. I don’t blame these other sites – it can be hard to tell – but “The Gadget World” is getting credit and revenue for work that other people have spent time and money creating.
What’s also interesting is that, according to Technorati, Retro Thing complained about TGW’s practises about a month ago, but the post has subsequently been withdrawn. I’d be interested to know what happened there – whether TGW took down Retro Thing’s content.
By the way, that link above also shows you just how much content TGW are stealing from other people.
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February 14th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Hi Andy,
igizmodo.com completely ignored my requests to stop republishing our RSS feeds, so we changed several of the hotlinked images to include a “stolen from retrothing.com” watermark and wrote a post that outed the site and encouraged RT readers to complain. They did. The semi-literate owner of the site responded in the post comments that he was removing our RSS content, and that we should be happy he was doing us the favour of republishing our content. He’s either very stupid or extremely brazen.
Cheers, James
February 14th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Yep, sounds like their attitude. They seem to think that because an RSS feed is available, it’s free for the taking.
August 20th, 2007 at 9:34 am
[...] iGizmodo.com, the “gadget web site” which shamelessly rips off other people’s content and was shut down earlier this year by their hosting provider, has sprung up again. [...]