My friend has gardening blog and she regularly posts text, owned images and videos in her blog. There are some personal images related to her family and friends in that blog. She found her blog scraped by one black hat author who refuses to take down the content. I understand that SOPA/PIPA/ACTA are bad but scraping content that includes your personal property and replying arrogantly to content owner increases the power of SOPA/ACTA/PIPA lobby. I'll not be surprised if many bloggers/content owners support SOPA/PIPA due to this type of abuse.

Here's what she received as a reply for the DMCA take down notice sent to hostgator. I don't know what hostgator did to that site as of now (it looks up for now).

"We've got your copyright complaint by the hosting service. We are not based on U.S.A. and not obligated by United State's laws. But we've got respect for other website and intellectual properties. The content which was related to your complaint was added to our website by our volunteer editors. For us a public content that's opened to world wide web is not copyright protected unless it has a literatural value or including a specific sciencetific reasearch. Any text content is not copyrighted material if it's redistribution of public knowledge without highly literature value. But we are willing to add your name to the document if you permit, or if you will not give permition we will edit the content page properly if you can prove us that you are the copyright owner more than DMCA records. We want to know this is legally your intellectual property in a non-digital legal registered document."

Check the bolded part. You need to be Picasso or Shakespeare or some apple or MS in order to have your content taken down. Sad isn't it? I also came across similar case where blackhat folks refuse to take down personal images and are challenging the original author to prove that in court. So you have to prove that you own your personal images, relations as shown in blog in order for these scrapers to take content down?It's definitely not cool and something that is giving boost to SOPA/PIPA/ACTA.

Name of the site is : newhealthtips.com ( If you're aware of blackhat stuff then it doesn't take long time for you to realize that this is yet another scraper site).

Something interesting about G on boing boing.

Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its database.

When the businesses in Mocality's database started asking them about the premium service they were offering with Google, Mocality was puzzled. They had no joint venture with Google, and they had never charged any business for inclusion in their database. When they examined their server logs, they saw a large number of hits to the records for the businesses that had been cold-called from the same IP range.

So Mocality laid a trap: when that IP range next visited the Mocality site, they fed it fake phone numbers that went to Mocality's own call center, where a Mocality operator pretended to be a business-owner and recorded the conversation. In that conversation, the caller identified himself as a Google employee, calling about a joint Google-Mocality venture, and asking the business to pay Google for a Kenya Business Online website with its own domain on that basis. This was, of course, absolutely fraudulent. There was and is no Google-Mocality joint venture.

More...               http://boingboing.net/?p=138807

So my prediction:

Google is going to buy mocality and kenyan government+press to get off the bad rep. Mocality will end up aplogizing google for such accusation. Google fanbois will end up writing big blogs posts saying "told ya, google was innocent".  :P