On History and Blog Pirates

Please excuse my absence; I've been really busy.

If you've been following for the past year, you may remember I participated in a local event called "If This House Could Talk."  Anyone who wants to participate writes a sign with an historical tidbit about their house and it creates a self-guided tour over the course of a weekend through our historical neighborhood.

This is what my house looked like back then.  It weird to see it this way.

I've done quite a bit of research using old maps, public records and Ancestry.com to find out who the former owners such as Jennie T. Ray and residents of my home were.  As I researched these data, particularly the census records, I came across all the other residents of the street at various points in time.

When this year's event came around I suggested to the organizers that I wanted to do "A Snapshot in Time" and post signs in front of each house on my block with the 1880 census records showing the names, ages and occupations of the residents.  The idea of the event is to get each home's residents to do their own research but they later came back and told me they loved the idea.

  I wold still like to get everyone on the street to participate so I'm in the process of putting out flyers on every house asking they'll participate but if they "don't have time" could I have permission to place a sign in front of their home.  It's kind of big job but I'd love to see my street be "the" destination for the tour.

Actually I thought I would sell lemonade, hot chocolate and cookies and really clean up.  Maybe I could rent dealer booths in the garden.  I'm always thinking.  Gotta raise funds for a new kitchen.

At the same time, Nita from Mod Vintage Life sent me an e-mail early Sunday morning saying that she found a blog that had pirated ALL of our blog posts, as well as those of three other bloggers, and is using our material to generate traffic to make money on ads.  You can read her post here.

This is really unfuriating.  I spend a lot of time doing research, taking photos and crafting the story on each post.  Sometimes they don't work but, let's be real, many of them are genius!  And this lazy-ass person just steals the material to make money.

Getting them taken down isn't easy.  You have to file a complaint for every single post giving the URL for your post and the offending URL, the nature of the copyright infringement.  For me it's about 160 posts, for Nita it's about 400 posts and one of the other poor bloggers, the pirated posts go back to 2008!  I've responded to some of Blogger's boilerplate e-mails asking what we need to do to take this blog down.  I got a curt e-mailed saying "As we stated you must file the URL for the original and offending post...."

If anyone knows a better way to stop this, we'd be appreciative of your experience.

ADDENDUM 3:20 p.m. on 9/15/11: I'm happy to report the pirate blog has been taken down as of about five minutes ago. It took several days and probably well over 50 complaints between Nita and I alone, but it's gone....hopefully for good.