Today I searched on “Eddie Bauer hemming” because I was wondering why my Eddie Bauer rant hasn’t gotten very many hits; I wondered if it was showing up on Google.  I found this, dated July 16, 2007:

http://www.scumbagclothing.com/clothes/local-woman-screwed-again-and-again-by-clothing-industry/

It looks an awful lot like my rant, dated July 15, 2007.  Exactly like it, in fact.  Word for word, including my italics and my hyperlinks.  The scumbagclothing site has copied my original work, word for word, without attribution.

As near as I can tell, the site uses some kind of RSS bot to troll the web.  Hey, that’s cool, I’d be happy for the publicity, if they’d just attribute it to me.  I posted a polite comment, but apparently the blog has comment moderation, which seems bizarre for a blog that doesn’t seem to be the work of a human being.  At least, not the original work of a single human being.

The real slap in the face is that, when you google “Eddie Bauer hemming,” you get scumbag’s copy of my work, not my blog.

That’s why I’m not getting any hits.  I went through the first ten pages of google results, and didn’t find my blog at all.  Scumbag is sucking them away from me.

Bastards.

Without a lot of effort and expense, I probably have no legal recourse against the scumbag people, and it’s probably not that important to me, but it does cheese me off a bit.  I rather liked that rant, and I sort of hoped it would get some attention.