Swik stole my content!

Update 2: After contacting one of the Swik developpers, I was able to have them clear the site of my content. Though they still appear to be syndicating my content, at least the older entries are gone, and I have since edited the RSS feed properties so that only 100 characters are fed. Lesson learned, the hard way.
Update:This article has now been republished on the Swik website. I’m speechless.

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. One could suppose that blatant content stealing would make you quite flattered indeed. Once would be OK, but having half of your websites content mirrored elsewhere is something else altogether.

It seems there’s a new splog (spam blog) on the block, and it’s being funded by none other than SourceLabs.

I found out about Swik while doing a vanity search for blandname.com, and was flabbergasted.

It seems the kind folks at SourceLabs now think it’s OK to republish full websites on their Swik websites, without so much as asking. Have a look at the evidence – blandname has half of it’s content republished at Swik, sometimes 3 times over.

I’m assuming that they simply are grabbing del.icio.us links and RSS feeds that contain the keywords “open source” – but they could at least limit what they republish to 50 words or so. But no, they take it one step further and hotlink to your images, videos, and audio files as well. Way to go you bumbling fools.
I’ve sent them a kind but stern email letting them know this isn’t so cool, and I’d recommend that anyone else affected look into this as well.

Here’s a recent example that was republished at Swik 3 whole times:

I truly appreciate what they are trying to do, but lack of testing, and not asking people if it was OK to republish their content is not very nice. But I digress.

The real issue at hand is that Swik claim that all content on their website is Copyleft, which this site clearly is not. In case they missed it, I have modified my RSS feed leaving them a note expressly stating the fact…