…to Mr. Dmitrij Borshhanenko of ul. Dragomanova 9, kv. 139, Kiev, Ukraine. Dmitrij loves copywriting so much that he’s scraping this site to provide content for his crappy splog, ideasforbusiness [dot] info.

Fellow bloggers: if you ever find yourself being scraped, there are a number of things you can do. First, you can send out cease-and-desist letters, though that’s time-consuming and not guaranteed to work, especially if your scraping friend is smarter than Dmitrij and has taken care to conceal his ID on the Whois lookup data of his URL.

Second, if you’re using Wordpress, you can use Owen Winker’s excellent AntiLeech plugin, which detects splogbot IPs and serves them a customised message rather than the content you’ve worked so hard to create, and which they’re trying to get their sticky paws on for free.

Third, if your scraper is making money from your content by covering it in Adsense, you can do what I’ve just done to my pal Dmitrij - report him to Google. Just fill in the details of the scraper’s site and tick the box marked ‘this site is distributing my copyrighted material without my permission’. With a bit of luck, his revenue stream will disappear in a few hours, and he’ll probably lose any money he’s already made from Adsense in the current payment cycle.