Another Abuse of Copyright: If This Isn't Illegal, it Should Be!

Yet another intellectual property rights violation.

This time, it's an attractive blog, Pretty Paws Stylin', with a picture of an adorable puppy at the top. At least, that's what was there when I visited a few minutes ago.

The blog posts are, as far as I can tell, ripped off from places on the Web that actually produce something.

I assume that profits from the AdSense advertising on "Pretty Paws Stylin' are going to the fellow who registered the URL.

Too bad there probably aren't more than a few words of original content there.

The, ah, author of this blog was caught recently, by one of the people he's ripped off, and started acknowledging the actual creators of posts. The recent ones, anyway.

As of this post, he hasn't gotten past this month. July posts are still unacknowledged.

The guy who runs "Pretty Paws Stylin'" has quite a sense of humor. At the bottom of each page he's put declaration, "Copyright © Pretty Paws."

The domain was created on May 26, 2007, according to Network Solutions' WhoIs service. The administrative and technical contacts are anonymous. The domain is registered through GoDaddy.com. In seems that Pretty Paws is run from Guadalajara, Mexico.

In order to follow GoDaddy's TOS with a comfortable margin of error, I won't give the sort of detail you can get through GoDaddy's WhoIs service, entering prettypawsstylin in their WhoIs. The link to this service is in a set of text links near the bottom of GoDaddy's home page.

Taking the creative work of someone else, posting in on your own blog, declaring it as your own copyrighted material, and making money from it: I'm no legal expert, but that sounds illegal. Unethical, at any rate.

Related posts on Apathetic Lemming of the North:

• Copyright: a List You Shouldn't Myth
• Copy, Steal, Rob, Whatever: Another Violation of Intellectual Property Rights (August 3, 2007)
• Copyright Infringement, YouTube, and Video Sharing (July 28, 2007)
• Sploggers: Intellectual Property Thieves (July 28, 2007)