How to copy website pages

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 5:38pm.

The internet is an amazing system. One of the chief reasons it works is that there is a collective trust that people extend to one another. Driving is like this. You trust that others on the road no how to operate their vehicles, that they don't want to run into you and that paying attention to your own driving is important.

On the internet many of those things come into play, but there are times when people break that trust. One of the more unfortunate things is when people copy website pages that aren't their own. Each of us that adds to this collective called the internet should be able to stake ownership to our creations. Unfortunately, there are people out there who simply scrape this content, check the display and tack ads onto it.

I came across a recent situation where the great site How Stuff Works had information copied from them. First, take a look at the original How Stuff Works page I landed on from a Google search.

Now, take a gander at the scraped site. This is a doozy for a number of reason we'll get to later:

If you go to the site you'll notice that it's an exact copy of the How Stuff Works site. There are a few things to note:

The scraper site took all the How Stuff Works pages and put them on one.
Even the graphics from the article were copied.
You cannot copy the scraper site. Nice touch.
The page was copyrighted by someone else other than How Stuff Works or the original author.
The page is distributed through the GNU license.

You'll notice that the page is part of the Wow Empire. If you click on that link it takes you to a site that tries to sell you software that will copy other websites and create niches for you. The sales site is "signed" by Gail Buckley. Plug that into Google with the GNU notice and you'll see the person has already started exploring other niches.

So, there you have the circle of trust broken. Someone spends time creating a new article and someone comes along and scrapes it. Sad.