“Hey there, I see you have something good going on there. Mind if I swoop in and take it?”
Ahh, if content thieves only asked first, right? You’ve heard about this weeks explosion of content theft. Please allow Ashley to fill you in. Link: mentalhealthathome.org/2019/08/02/blogging-copyright
I’ve seen and spoken to a lot of people closing their WordPress sites over this. It sucks. It’s also a wake-up call for a lot of folks. If you put anything online, the odds are, at some point it’s going to get copied.
There’s a lot of short term solutions. DMCAs, messaging hosts, having the content removed from search engines and so on. But long term, this all leads to a neverending, soul-sapping, demoralizing and unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.
It doesn’t matter where you put your content either. If text can be copy-pasted then a bot can scrape it. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tumblr, Medium or Live Journal. Are you a photographer or an artist? Well, you know what I mean. You’ve likely been dealing with your images being copied for years.
The only way to stop your content being ripped-off is to stop putting it online. For me, that’s not an option. I’m still paying my bills off of freelance work mostly picked up from the Fears.
You can try to prevent your writing, art and photography being stolen. But none of us thinks about that when starting an online project, do we? I moved onto fixed panels for social media a while ago. The only reason I haven’t done that on my home page is because of the theme and the way WordPress.com shows image posts where my main following is.
Also, in the current copy-bot mess, it’s three websites in India. I can’t see them having a huge impact on what we do on WordPress. They’re not going to rank on search engines. Your readers and social media followers know who and where you are. New followers are probably never going to see the duplicate websites. So in this case, the way I see it is the only negative impact is on your own mental state. Can you live with the idea a website almost nobody is going to see is duplicating your content in India?
I know to a lot of folks, that’s not a straight forward question. It sure as heck pisses me off. But I ain’t going to let it stop me. Heck, it makes me want to fart out more content for them to copy. Let the buggers pay for hosting all that content nobody is going to see.
OK, so, only you can decide whether or not you want to pull your content from being online. It’s an entirely personal choice. If you don’t want to publish online anymore, we’re going to miss you. Take care of yourself.
If you do want to keep publishing your works to the internet, here, take a hammer. Welcome to whack-a-mole, internet edition.
Please do drop into Ashley’s site and say hello and thanks for post.
Edited to add: Very first comment from Joanne asks “how do you find out contents been copied?” Go to one of the offending websites, Tygpress.com, and copy paste a snippet from your website into their search bar. They’re mirroring websites wholesale. In Europe at least, this is illegal. They’re allowed to post a snippet of your website and link back to your own website with a Read More style link. Not duplicate everything like Tygpress are.
Cheers to Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
Little Fears 
The Tygpress site is down. What comes up is a message that they are having technical issues.
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It’s been down for a week, I think. Another will come, soon enough.
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Yeah I just got the technical issues out of service message. They go on to say, due to technical issues full contents of respective sites were being displayed instead of excerpts as intended.They apologize to complaintants and content owners. I read your article and thought I’d see what I saw. But, another will probably come.
I always feel no matter how you try and protect things that people far smarter than I am will find a way around if motivated to do so. Including personal things like emails Once I hit send I figure I am at the mercy of the forces of the web.Our efforts and creativity become kind of disembodied and disassociated from us out in the web. Even those who think they respect intellectual property act on the convenience anyway. Wasn’t it Google who scanned copyrighted books without asking expecting the authors to find them and say no.? Sort of defeats the point of copyright….ask first.
Interesting post and article…thanks for sharing and not letting Little Fears succumb!!
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Yep, you’re spot on Judy. I would say though, it’s not necessarily people smarter than you. Remember the old days of the internet when most people didn’t have it at home. If there was a funny email someone wanted to show the family, they’d print it off on the office copier and take it home. Humans have always copied stuff on the net, it doesn’t make them smarter, haha.
And yep, Google and Facebook’s mass copying of content is what cause the EU to bring in new laws. Had they behaved themselves, Article 13 and GDPR would never have been necessary. But you can’t have one role for the corporations and one rule for everyone else, so we all get thwacked with this stuff.
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You got that right and it isn’t just wp
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Pretty much. Wherever you put content, it can be copied.
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When I write a post, it is not for my fame or financial benefit, but because I want to move people toward creating a better world. So, if anyone copies my words, I have a better chance of achieving my objective.
🙂
Bob
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Awesome for you Bob. Although I had a horrendous few years and lost my life savings, I have a house without a mortgage. I can be a bit more chill about money. Not everybody has that luxury of being able to write purely for passion.
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Great article, Little Fears. I do worry from time to time about this problem, especially since I blog my stories. I wish I knew what to do to protect my work. ~JD
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Don’t worry about protecting your work. Do the bare minimum then say feck it, it’s the internet. Or it’s something that will bug you in this great game of internet-copy-whack-a-mole.
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Thank you, Little Fears. So love your blog!
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