Scraping

What you are describing is called scraping and is illegal. Scraping is essentially stealing a blog’s content and using that content to gain revenue. Needless to say this hurts you because you are the owner of the stolen content, it messes up your search engine rankings, someone is making money off your content and it ain’t you, they may have content on their site that you wouldn’t approve of (including adult content), and they may link back to you thus reinforcing that you are associated with said inappropriate content. The list goes on and on.

I’m terribly sorry this is happening to you.  It’s a practice that should not be ignored. Three things you can do are send an e-mail/letter to the offending site’s owner, contact the site’s ISP, and/or seek legal counsel. John-Paul Micek has an excellent article with more in-depth information on these three options. Be sure to read the comments because his readers offer even more advice.

Other articles to read:

• Four Ways to Enforce Your Copyright via SEOmoz
• Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Copyright via Wikipedia

Not sure if you’re being scraped? You can try MyBlogProtector. Before you sign up, though, read their Terms of Agreement and Privacy Policies thoroughly to see if it’s the right site for you.

Some ways to help prevent scraping on your own site:

• John-Paul also offers some advice to help yourself avoid being scraped. Following his advice doesn’t mean you won’t get scraped, but it may help you discourage the practice.
• Cloaking to Stop Scraping via Plagiarism Today.
• Anti-leech is a WordPress plugin via Weblog Tools Collection.