You know what is worse than someone stealing the hard work of someone else and profiting from it? No, I didn’t either, until today.
The answer? Claiming that THEY are the victim.
Yes, you read that right. Not only did this guy steal 50 of Darren Rowse’s posts (50!), but they are trying to make out that they are the victim of the situation.
Now hopefully the situation will be resolved by the time you read this so I will not “out” the blog or blogger in question, and that is not my style anyway, but it does deserve to be discussed just in case anyone else has the bright idea to follow suit, or worse if their story (unlikely as it is) turns out to be true.
Darren noticed that 50 of his articles had been ripped off with the author attribution being the only change. A simple case of “scrape, profit, ask for forgiveness later” it seems to me.
To make things even more ludicrous, the blog is set up to give advice to other bloggers …
Their claim is they outsourced the writing and didn’t check the posts, they went up immediately. They paid a writer. 50 posts. Didn’t read a single one of them.
Um, yeah.
Darren has another excuse to add to his list of horror here.
The lessons here:
- Save yourself grief and create original content, your readers will like it better and so will search engines
- When paying other people to write for you, read what they produce and check it for plagiarism!
- If you are going to automate your content, don’t just scrape, find feeds that are built for the purpose, like if you want a discount voucher site you can use Promotions.co.uk feed or for products you can find many feeds at Commission Junction. Certainly do not rip off a high profile blog like Problogger and expect to get away with it!
- Should you want to quote or excerpt a post, make sure you are not copying the whole thing, and provide attribution – people are a lot less angry when their work is copied if you don’t take the whole thing and at the very least link back
Unfortunately content theft is unlikely to be going away soon, even if we would like to run around the internet tapping people with the clue stick sometimes :)
