I was browsing through my Google Reader this evening when I ran across a Google Alert that came up for my name. Upon further investigation, the alert came from a site called docstoc that was hosting a PDF from the UConn Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa. I’m 100% sure that neither I (as acting webmaster), nor anyone else from the board gave permission for our documents to be hosted on a third-party site. (see here).
There is no information on the “user” who supposedly uploaded the document, nor do the category or many of the tags make any sense based on the context or content. Here’s what I think is going on:
docstoc offers a revenue sharing model for users using AdSense: they split the revenue 50/50. Based on the abundance of user accounts with no social-networking connections, obscene number of uploads, nonsense keywords, and lack of cohesiveness in the collections, I’m guessing multiple people have decided to game the system. I made a user account and checked… there’s no captcha on the upload form. My guess is that someone created a robot to scrape PDF documents and upload them into docstoc in the hopes they could make money without doing any work (they even offer an API to make uploading easy). And of course, docstoc has no incentive to stop this sort of activity because all of these illegal postings of content not only make them rate higher in search engines, they also get 50% of AdSense earnings. A little searching shows that I’m not the only one to notice problems with illegal content on docstoc.
I also did a couple quick searches and found dozens and dozens of PDFs ripped off the site I manage at UConn. I will most certainly be bringing this to the attention of the Office of the Attorney General.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I just noticed, also, that somebody (NOT my publisher) is selling a pirated PDF of my book on DocStoc. They’ve been contacted about the violation, but they aren’t moving too quickly.
One of my kids created a web site several years ago that contains educational notes for high school and college students. The website is http://www.marysbridge.com. It was receiving a lot of traffic since its inception and all of a sudden, on Sept 17, 2010, the visitor traffic dropped to zero. When we tried to visit the web site tonight, a cryptic message about 403 Error FORBIDDEN appeared on the screen. I suspect that the web site has been hacked, although it seems like Microsoft Office Live would have safeguards against this sort of thing. I logged into the web admin account, and all the files and images are still there; but the web site seems to have disappeared. This was a free website service that Microsoft offered, so I don’t think there is a problem with domain name registration, unless Microsoft made changes that I wasn’t aware of. Anybody else have this happen to them?
Oddly, Docstoc has most, if not all of my kid’s files on their web site.
I just found out the website domain registration expired a few days ago. Microsoft’s free website was a good deal while it was lasted. Too bad they got rid of the service. A lot of students were finding the ole’ web site useful.