Well… it is now well past the “17 July 2011 0000 GMT” deadline that I gave to the idiot that published my “HOWTO – Limiting Access to TCP-wrapped Services With hosts.allow” article without any author attribution or the original copyright notices. Nonetheless, I have just submitted a DMCA notice to Automattic, the hosting provider for the blog that the idiot used to publish a plagiarized copy of my article.

I hope that Automattic does the right thing and remove the plagiarized copy of the article in a prompt manner. I will post an update if/when they take any action.

Update [2011-07-18 12:18 PDT]: I received a confirmation from Automattic that the infringing content has been made unavailable.

It looks like another idiot* has taken my “HOWTO – Limiting Access to TCP-wrapped Services With hosts.allow” article, copied and posted it verbatim on his/her blog without attribution… again. How did I find out? Simple, I decided to do a quoted search on Google for “Any changes that are made to /etc/hosts.allow take effect immediately” and found a result that did not include any attributions or citations.

I will attempt to contact the idiot and see if he/she is willing do anything about it. If not, I guess it will be my third DMCA request. Not what I want to do during my personal, spare time.

Update: I have submitted the following message to the idiot via the comments box on the infringing page with the asking for either the appropriate attribution be added or that the page be taken down by “17 July 2011 0000 GMT”; otherwise, I will be submitting a DMCA take-down request forthwith. Whether or not the comment will actually be posted-then-deleted, or not, I don’t know nor care.

*: Please note that I am using the term “idiot” in frustration due to the person’s lack of integrity and blatant disrespect for content writers.

This morning, I sent a belated reminder to the hosting provider of the plagiarizer (was supposed to have sent it on Friday, but forgot). Later in the day, I checked to see if there was any change and noticed that, after clearing out my browser’s cache, the plagiarized copy was pulled the from site.

All I can say is that I’m happy that the hosting provider took my DMCA request seriously and took an appropriate action. I can’t say if any of the other content on the plagiarizer’s site has also been plagiarized, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Although it has only been three business days since I sent a DMCA takedown request to The Planet (the company that provides hosting to the plagiarizer), I have yet to receive an update or acknowledgement nor has there been any action taken. Considering that I’m a small fish with no legal counsel swimming against a large service provider, I doubt if I will see any action taken for a while.

Update 2010-10-22: I have re-sent the request to The Planet after receiving no response or acknowledgement, nor any action taken. If the trend continues, I will continue to send copies of the request on a weekly basis.

About a year ago, I noticed that my article on using hosts.allow was copied by someone without the proper attributions or link back. I submitted a DMCA request to the blogger’s hosting provider and the article was then removed by the provider. Well, the plagiarizer did not learn his/her lesson as the blog was moved to a different hosting provider with the plagiarized article in tact.

I have posted a comment on the offending blog post and will give the plagiarizer 48 hours before sending another DMCA request to the new hosting provider. Just like last time, I was able to find out by looking at the incoming links report provided by Google Webmaster Tools. Thank you, Google.

Update: It looks like the comment that I posted, notifying the plagiarizer about the infringement, has been deleted. I’m sorry, but that crosses yet another line and a DMCA request has been submitted to the copyright/legal department of The Planet (the hosting provider of the site maintained by the plagiarizer).