Bitacle: Aggregator or Thief?

The other day I got a trackback notification from Typepad; it was for a site called Bitacle. I clicked the link in the notification, and got taken to a page that had my exact blog post, complete with a place to comment and everything. I looked around the page, and there were my archives! 

I asked Chris if he knew anything about it, and he said he'd received a similar trackback. He asked me to let him know if I found anything out.

An e-mail to Bitacle got no response.

At the bottom of the Bitacle homepage there's this sentence: "Bitacle is reader feeds by web." Yeah, okay. Whatever. So why do they reproduce my whole post? And leave space for comments? Granted, there's a link to my blog in their post, but why would anyone reading there bother to click through to AliThinks? There's no need! Everything is there; everything is archived! The page is (apparently) loaded with ads, but Adblock is doing its job; I can't see them.

There has been some discussion on other blogs about whether Bitacle is simply an aggregator or a splog, and whether the language barrier plays into the perception of it. (Bitacle is Spanish). My gut is telling me there's something fishy about it. I don't care if there's a disclaimer at the bottom of every blog post ("Articles are copyright their respective autors [sic]"). Or that their FAQ states:

What type of blogs are   inlcuded in the search?

All blogs that has a feed. This it can be RSS or Atom.

What happens if I don’t wish to appear in the list?

If you doesn’t publish feed, it won’t be   included in the blog’s search. Nevertheless, if you previously has   published feed of the site that was indexed, the old entrances will remain in   the index, although the new ones aren’t added.

Sorry, but Bloglines and Technorati and whatnot are not republishing my entire content!

Stop Bitacle.org is a blog dedicated to creating "negative momentum" against Bitacle.  The folks behind it are outraged, and I am, too.

UPDATE: Allan Jenkins has a spot-on synopsis of what's going on.

Comments

[The CEO]

You have my support on this. Totally.

[Margaret]

I have never heard of this. It is creepy, and feels like stealing of one's personal posts. I will help.

[Chris]

I'm with you `100%

[Ivonne]

I received a similar trackback and was wondering about it. Thanks for doing the research!

[barb]

wow, I never heard of that. I got some strange trackback the other day and I don't remember if that's what it was or not but I'm going to check. It does sound pretty slimey!

[Allan]

They have my entire feed as well, but since I only publish a short excerpt of my posts, that is all that shows.

All of my Flickr photos, however, are visible there.

I don't like this one bit.

[AlisonM]

Wow. I never checked - they've been showing up in my activity logs forever. Now I'm going to go look. . .

[cj]

Absolutely - that is theft. I went to look and a lot of stuff of mine is there too. WTF? I am going to the stopbitacle.org page now.

[madame l.]

head lemur weighs in on splogger hunting.

[Allan Jenkins]

Thanks for the shout out, Ali. I am going to try to stay on top of these thieves though, as Amy Gahran points out so well, it's a lot like chasing cockroaches.

I see "madamel" has linked to the head lemur, and I can only add that it's certainly worth checking out his post. Thanks, MadameL.

- Allan

[AlisonM]

Well, it looks like bitacle is only linking to my content, but internetmanagerpro.com stole it. Idiots.

[suze]

annoying. definately.

[Arthur Dent]

Hi there. Got a link to you off Echo Mouse's blog, where she was talking about Bitacle. Just on a hunch, I took a phrase from a recent post of mine, googled it, and it came back with http://www.pkblogs.com/aweaponofmassinstruction/

Who the heck is pkblogs, and what gives them the right to re-publish my entire blog, images, text and all. Even my copyright notice!!! What the hell?