PSA on RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot

I discovered two new bots in my server logs last week: RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot. They come from RSS Amplifier and Brisk News respectively. Bot sites are built by Profullstack, Inc. I discovered that RSS Amplifier, unbeknownst to me, had been crawling New Leaf Journal’s ATOM feed and re-publishing (albeit they would not describe it as such) the entire contents of my article under the RSS Amplifier banner (note it appears it took entire articles because I offer full-text feeds; it had truncated entries for sites that do not offer full text feeds). While the articles are attributed with links back to my original source, I do not approve of wholesale re-publishing (as should have been clear from my About Page). Worse yet, RSS Amplifier describes its purpose in part as making articles from around the web readily available for AI crawlers (live About Page) and they sell access to their data (live Training Data page). Brisk News appears to host articles from around the web with AI…