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Per this question on ELU meta, some a***hole is scraping ELU content and passing it off without attribution in a Google Blog.

I'll admit that partly I ask this question in hopes that some of you good folk will be public-spirited enough to follow the link and report this abuse, so Google will take it down.

But I am genuinely interested to know whether there's a standard term for such a person (or for a website containing primarily "stolen" content like this). The words plagiarist and pirate come to mind, but neither really seems quite right to me (and I'm sure *a*****hole* isn't exactly it either).

If you don't have the time/inclination to go and rattle Google's cage about this, perhaps you might consider upvoting the question so it gets called to the attention of others who might actually do it.

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  • I have tried to report this abuse, but it seems the complaint needs to be made by someone who is familiar with the copyright position. I assume, incidentally, that we are free to recycle our own postings elsewhere if we wish to.
    – Barrie England
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 8:20
  • A further thought on that. If we own the copyright to our own postings, I suppose we could each report abuse on our own behalf. (Perhaps this should be pursued in meta.)
    – Barrie England
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 9:19
  • I hope it isn't too controversial a move, but I've removed the link to the offending site. IMHO, the last thing we need to do is provide the offender with even more traffic. This mod can be rolled back if the majority object.
    – CJM
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 9:43
  • @Barrie England: The problem is ELU itself can't complain, because we the users are the copyright holders. We have to each report abuse on our own behalf. I asked here partly so those who don't often visit meta would follow the first link above, read waiwai933's summary of that legal position and PLL's template complaint text, and report the abuse. If people don't react, it'll just carry on.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 12:18
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    I guess "attribution required" does not mean your permission is required, but only a link to the source... Isn't that what "attribution" means? Let's ask in an English Language site somewhere ... ???
    – GEdgar
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 19:48

4 Answers 4

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So far as I can tell, bloggers often refer to this as content theft. By that logic, the perpetrator would be a content thief, I imagine.

It seems that website scraper refers to the program and scraper site refers to the website itself.

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Well, since Scumbag, Lowlife and Parasite are too general, how about "Scrapist"?

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  • Why is my rant alarm going off?
    – Urbycoz
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 13:48
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I don't know if it's an accepted term, but I'd have thought that one who scrapes is a scraper.

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  • Scraper is often the software that does the scraping, and can be an abbreviation for the scraper site itself, but I think it's fine for the person behind it as well.
    – Hugo
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 9:12
  • Google's War Against Scraper Sites Continues uses scraper exclusively.
    – Gnawme
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 0:03
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Actually, plagiarist sounds like exactly the right word to me. The mechanics of the plagiarism are somewhat incidental... they could just as well be reading off a printout and typing it word-for-word onto to their own blog, the end result would be just the same.

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