My Sys-Con Nightmare

“A little history

“It all started at the end of March, 2009, when I discovered
that I was listed as an author on a site called Ulitzer
(http://ulitzer.com)*. They had used my name as a subdomain on
their site (aralbalkan.ulitzer.com; this has since been removed)
and the site presented a photo of me, stating that I had been an
author with them for several years. They had also scraped my blog
posts and were reproducing them on the site under a different
license to the one that I had published them under.

“Beyond simply using my content without permission, they had
misappropriated my identity by stating that I was one of their
authors. And I wasn’t the only one. To this day, David Heinemeier
Hansson (http://davidheinemeierhansson.ulitzer.com/) is a Ulitzer
author (he’s apparently been writing for them since November 24,
2005), as is – quite ironically, I may add – Matt Cutts
(http://mattcutts.ulitzer.com/), head of Google’s webspam team, who
has apparently been a “Ulitzer author since September 3, 2008”.

“Other prominent Ulitzer authors include Tim O’Reilly
(@timoreilly, http://timoreilly.ulitzer.com/), Jeremy Allaire
(@jerBrightcove, http://jeremyallaire.ulitzer.com/), Dion Almaer
(@dalmaer, http://dionalmaer.ulitzer.com/), and Michael Arrington
(http://michaelarrington.ulitzer.com), among many, many, others.
Needless to say, I can only assume that many of these authors don’t
have a clue that their identities are being misappropriated and
that their content is being used without permission.”

Linux Today readers might recall that Fuat Kircaali, CEO of
Ulitzer, is also the CEO of Sys-Con Media, notorious for publishing
the infamous Maureen O’Gara’s “expose” of Pamela Jones of Groklaw.
See the links below for a bit of history.– ed.

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