How do your reviews of movies and games get on other websites you've specifically never went to?

It’s a little something called PLAIGERISM (hope I spelled that right) or STEALING or DISHONESTY or BEING RUDE.

Unless Amazon has some sort of partnership/affiliate type side deal with the other site.

Whenever any of us participate in a public site, our contributions are not “ours”. We don’t own them. Whatever the site chooses to do is up to them.

Amazon is so huge and has so many connections (which they aren’t really obligated to divulge to us) that it’s really difficult to know for sure.

And they are quite capable of sending a cease and desist with further action threatened to the other site if they so choose.

It’s probably just a site that aggregates reviews from multiple sites like Amazon, Yelp, whatever, ala Metacritic. Whether it’s illegal or not is up to Amazon, but when you’re posting your review on Amazon, just like @Buttonstc said; it is no longer yours. Whether or not other sites can take those reviews and post them on their sites depends on the terms of a site like Amazon, but I’d be willing to bet it’s OK by them. So I doubt there’s much you can do.

If I recall correctly, a while ago some parasitic site was taking questions off of Fluther verbatim except changing the SN to make it appear that these Qs and As were generated by users of their site.

A few of our alert Flutherites noticed this and posted a Q here in Meta encouraging other users go communicate their dissatisfaction directly to the admins of said site. And I’m not certain but I believe they were contacted in an official capacity by someone from Fluther informing them that what they were doing wasn’t Kosher. If they wanted to “share” Fluther content then they must provide credit and a link back.

That apparently settled the issue. I really have no idea whether they did this in ignorance (apparently they apologized) or whether they figured they would just see how long they could get away with it before being caught.

It was an interesting little interlude. I wish I could remember the name of the offending site. They were quite new but I’m drawing a blank. I have no idea if they’re even still in business or not.

@DeanV

I was under the assumption that the user reviews on Metacritic and RT are generated by actual members of the site and not borrowed from elsewhere. Do you know?

And the reviews from published critics always link back to the individual sites for the remainder of the review past the first few sentences, right? I cant imagine any of these official critics refusing to participate since it drives traffic to their own sites (such as NY Times, Roger Ebert, etc)