Apologies to My RSS Feed Subscribers
I apologize to my many RSS feed subscribers for the now-shortened RSS feed posts and for the lengthy message following each post.
However, I had to to make a few changes to protect my blog content. It seems that this joker, Michael Rehm, a Legal Aid attorney in New York City, was posting my content (including my copyright protected Daily Record articles), in its entirety, on his blog without my permission.
His blog appears to have no original content on it.
As of 9:14 a.m. this morning, he continues to do so despite my requests to remove it. I'll be sending a DMCA Takedown notice later on today if he does not remove my content.
Again, I apologize that your RSS feed reader experience has been altered and I hope that this is resolved soon.
Updated: A few people have asked whether the Michael Rehm linked to above from California is the same as the Michael Rehm in Brooklyn. They are one and the same. If you look at his New York attorney registration and compare it to the biography on the blog and the website, you'll see it is the same person.
And, it appears that my posts have now been removed from his blog, so in the near future, I'll change the settings on the RSS feed so that the entire post once again appears in the feed. Thanks for your patience.
Sui -
As a fellow attorney, it always amazes me when people do this who should allegedly know what they are doing (this guy passed the bar, right?).
Also a great idea for a blog post or series ... what to do when someone steals your RSS feed content. :)
~ ElizabethPW
Posted by: Elizabeth Potts Weinstein | September 16, 2008 at 09:40 AM
Truncated RSS feeds make it more difficult, but don't stop scrapers. All it does is lose you subscribers and make the scrapers take one more step. You are better off hitting where it hurts and reporting them to their ad networks. Splits are a fact of life for bloggers.
Posted by: Cyndy Aleo-Carreira | September 16, 2008 at 09:50 AM
Good luck in taking him down. Do you have preserved copies of his website and what he did? This looks like behavior that should be reported to the bars of the state(s) where he is licensed.
Posted by: Bryan Sims | September 16, 2008 at 10:34 AM
As an interactive marketing professional site scraping drives me nuts. I'm glad you caught this guy and you have to be loving the social PR you are getting. This is circulating all around Twitter and other networks.
On a side note, his blog is a lot easier to read, primarily because of the layout. While he is obviously a joker and thief if there is a second positive you can take from this it would be a chance to see what your content would look like a more readable layout and design.
Posted by: James Wind | September 16, 2008 at 11:29 AM
FYI, the link to "Michael Rehm" points to http://www.rehmlawoffice.com/, which is for a lawyer in Sacramento. Not sure if that's what you really meant to link to.
The link to the blog, however, is correct.
Posted by: HS | September 16, 2008 at 12:34 PM
Shortly after you posted this, I went to the archive.org to see how long he had been copying your site (turns out it has been a few months).
Tonight I went to check again to show someone, and his blog has been removed from the archives. I assume he requested it.
Posted by: Finis Price | September 16, 2008 at 08:08 PM