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.
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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.