One wouldn’t think that copying websites would be a large problem, after all the originals are just a click away. But much as stealing blog content for ad-clicks is a right of passage (even I’ve had it), complete website copies are common enough to spawn a community that tracks them down.

Recently there was a very active Rob Morris’ site. Often it’s easy to figure out which one is the copy… it’s the one where the the text hasn’t been 100% updated:

“private organizations in North America and Europe including [...] the Australian National University [...] and Sports Medicine Australia“

and where some of the links are broken. Since generally the copiers copy the best because they don’t have the skills themselves. However, there are cases where it isn’t clear.

Amusingly enough, there are examples of the original author being pursued by the derivative’s author. In one case on YouTube, a timelapse video of clouds was put into the public domain, then used in the background of another video — and the original author’s was taken down:

This is to notify you that your video “Timelapse Clouds Compilation” from your Google Video account has been disabled because it has been identified by our Content Identification tools as potentially lacking the necessary copyright authorization for use on the Google Video site. Content Identification is a program that analyzes similarities in audio or video between user videos and a library of reference content provided to us by copyright owners. When a video matches a reference file, that video is automatically disabled.