Annals of scamming
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Following up on my recent "annals of spam" posting, Ernie Limperis has written me about a different sort of scam, involving a site that
seems to be using a sophisticated robot to generate "personal" web pages, filling standard templates with text lifted from Wiki and other sources, photos from Google and videos from Youtube. The pages contain Adsense links and links to stuff for sale on Amazon.com (of course if you buy using those links some money will kick back to [the sponsoring site].
The sponsoring site protects itself by maintaining that
This site is not affiliated with [the subject of the web page]. It is a fan site and part of the [name suppressed] navigation network.
(The "fan site" dodge is probably ironclad. I doubt that a subject could get a page removed.)
Each of the pages I've looked at has a bit from Wikipedia, plus a bunch of books for sale (some of them search mis-fires from Amazon.com). For LLog-related stuff, so far I've found Language Log itself, Mark Liberman, Geoffrey Pullum, and Benjamin Zimmer (and, working out from there, Noam Chomsky, Mark's parents Alvin Liberman and Isabelle Liberman, William Strunk Jr., and E. B. White, and then on to some other folks from Haskins Labs). No doubt there's more.