Amazon lets conmen cash-in on other people's blogs

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 15 May 2009 at 11:05

Bloggers have accused Amazon of allowing con artists to "steal" their blogs with a new Kindle subscription service.

Amazon has allowed owners of the Kindle eBook reader to pay a subscription to read their favourite blogs on the device for some time. Customers can pay $1.99 a month to read the Slashdot feed, for example.

This week the company launched a beta of Kindle Publishing for Blogs, which allows any blog owner - not only major publishers - to submit their blog and take a 30% cut on subscription revenue.

However, a basic security flaw in the beta sign-up scheme means that anyone can submit other people's blog as their own and start collecting revenue for it, according to a report on TechCrunch, which itself was the victim of a fake sign-up.

"Not quite believing this could be so easy, I decided to create my own account on the Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta and went through the process of claiming a blog I don't own: the New York Times' Bits blog," claims TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld.

"It was really easy. All I had to do was put in the URL for the Bits blog RSS feed, which Amazon 'validated' as being a real feed. Then it asked me to enter a Blog title, tagline, description, screenshot, an image for the masthead on the Kindle itself, and search keywords that would return the blog as a result."

"Now, if you search for 'New York Times Bits' on the Kindle store, the version I created comes up as the first result and the official version comes up second.

"My tagline is there, and if you subscribe to my version 30% of your $1.99 subscription will be routed to my bank account."

Amazon admits the blog hijacking takes place, but says it immediately removes unauthorised blogs. "Occasionally, people publish material to which they do not have rights, in violation of the Terms and Conditions for Kindle Publishing for Blogs," the company says in a statement sent to TechCrunch. "In these cases we react vigorously to remove unauthorised copyrighted material."