Dave Mastio's Threat To The Blogosphere

If you do a search on Dave Mastio on Google, the third page has an entry from 24thstate.com where I tell Dave to take my feed off his site.  If you look at the second page, you'll see that blognetnews/missouri has a similar posting, entirely based on the text he scraped from 24thstate.com

What this means is that Dave Mastio, by taking content from my site, now ranks higher in Google for terms that I wrote about for that content.  He has literally directed traffic from my site to his.  He has taken my content, and republished it with no comments, in a form that makes it look like his.

That makes him a thief.  Dave is full of explanations, but his e-mails all come to one thing - he can do he what he wants, and he doesn't care what we say.  He is a danger to the blogosphere, and I urge everyone whose content he has stolen to write him and demand he stop taking your content.

But be careful - Dave is known to threaten and insult people.

One example, from a blogfight he had in Georgia:

I don’t see much future in ignorance as a lifestyle, but I  wish you luck with it. - Dave Mastio.

This is how Dave acts with bloggers. Is there any wonder why we don't want him taking our content and making money off of it?

Now to the threats. I said that I was going to contact his advertisers and let them know that Dave was making money off my content without my permission. His response.

Now that I know you are the person behind 24th state, let me just say if you continue down this road, I will not be having this dispute with an anon blogger, but with you and your company. I have advertisers, you have clients.

That's right folks.  If I contact his advertisers and notify them that my content is being used without my permission, Dave is threatening to do something, we don't know what, to damage my business.  He's taking my personal political blog, which I use to comment about politics in Missouri, and threatening to hurt me financially because I object to the fact that he won't remove my feed from his site.

Dave accuses me of lying.  He says that calling what he does stealing content a lie. He claims that I tried to hurt his business by lying about what BNN does at the Post Dispatch blog. In Dave's world, criticizing his business model is not allowed.  It can't be a logical analysis of why BlogNetNews is a bad idea - it has to be my attempt to ruin him.

I suggest you judge for yourself.  Would you the readers say that my analysis of Dave Mastio and BlogNetNews is 100% accurate?

After the Post-Dispatch blogpost, stlbloggers picked up the thread, when Dana Loesch protested that content from her site was taken. She demanded Dave take it down, and he did so, probably because she brought a lawyer into it.  It's instructive that he backed down when the lawyer is involved, but he rants on about his first amendment rights when you don't send a cease and desist.

The stlbloggers uproar grew bigger, and over a dozen people wrote posts denouncing Dave and his tactics.  At that point, I sent an e-mail to Dave telling him to take my feed off, and then I forwarded him some advice.  I have no beef with Dave, but this kind of nonsense in the blogosphere certainly doesn't help any of us.  I then wrote a blogpost that since he Dave scrapes my content, would show up on his page - denouncing BlogNetNews.

I heard nothing back, but when I checked BlogNewNews, that post was missing.  Other posts before and after were there, but my post about BlogNetNews was missing did not appear.  Feed's don't have that problem on their own - and though Dave tried to blame Typepad for the problem - the original post  mysteriously reappeared on the BlogNetNews site after he commented on this site.

In a second post, I reiterated my call for Dave Mastio to take my feed off his site, as he did not have permission to steal my content.  I informed him that I would contact advertisers if he did not comply.  That's when the wrote back, threatening to call my clients if I continued to protest.

The final e-mail came, and it was a lengthy screed on how I lied and tried to hurt his business, and he was just protecting his first amendment rights.  No Dave.  You're trying to make money off the work of other people, and you should be banned from civilized discourse until you can learn some manners.

For more on this, check out State of Discontent and her excellent dismantling of Dave Mastio's arguments, or check out inMuscatine, for his proposal to file a class action lawsuit to deal with Dave Mastio.