I sent Retrevo a Removal Request

Occasionally I search for the names of some of my blogs to discover if anyone is using the content in a manner that I do not approve of. I recently did so with Docunext and found that Retrevo was re-publishing the Docunext feed without permission, having the content indexed by search engines, and then adding rel="nofollow" to the links bound for Docunext.com. I took a screen shot of the page I found:



I sent them a removal request:

Hello, you are featuring our content here:

[link removed]

You are using our content without permission. Remove it and refrain from copying our content without permission in the future.

- Albert

I received a note back very quickly from Mike Do:

Thank you for contacting Retrevo. [Removed marketing mumbo-jumbo] We do not claim any content as our own and only provide a short summary of the site on our search engine with a link out of our site (similiar to how Google and Yahoo! displays their search results). However, we understand and respect the fact that sites might not like having their content on our site. As requested, we have removed your site's content off of our site. If you still find your site's content on our site, please feel free to inform us so we can remove whatever is left over from our website.

I don't agree that their act is similar to how Google and Yahoo display their search results. Retrevo had published my content in a manner which allowed it to be indexed by other search engines. As far as I know, Google and Yahoo do not this.

I appreciate that they responded so quickly and amicably to my request, but I don't appreciate that they leave the door open for there still to be leftover unauthorized content. I also do not appreciate that Mike said in his email that the content was already removed, but I just checked and it is still there:



I don't mind sharing, but I can't stand leeches.

I just sent Mike this response:

Mike,

Thank you for your timely response, however, the content on the page I referred to is still publishing our content on your site.

I performed some more research and found a troubling amount of our content on your site from Docunext.com and several of our other websites. We publish a robots.txt file on each of our sites as well as terms of use outlining acceptable use. Frankly I am shocked that your company found it acceptable to re-publish our content without permission. Are you familiar with United States copyright law?

Please respond with your plan to resolve this serious problem in a expeditious manner.

Albert