The mass duplication of WordPress blogs

Posted on by LittleFears

“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.

176 thoughts on “The mass duplication of WordPress blogs”

      2. I’ve put your question into the bottom of the post with a credit link to your blog for asking.

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  2. I knew a long time ago that when I started putting my work online that there was a HUGE chance that it could be plagiarized, copied, duplicated, etc . . . I went into it knowing that this could happen and that has helped. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been copied by another. I have my work saved in various files and time-stamped, and a ton of it is copyrighted, thanks to my books and published works. shrugs Content creators and artists will always have to deal with this if we want our work publicly appreciated.

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      1. Ooof, the whole of WordPress.com has this issue. I doubt there’s anything WordPress can do about it, either.

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  4. I thought it was bad enough when my bird and wildlife photos that I posted on Facebook were being posted (not shared) by other people as if the photos were theirs. Now I have to worry that my silly stories of Dragon and my other 9 characters are being stolen? Grrrrrr.

    Of course, I doubt that anyone in India would have an interest in plagiarizing my stories, so I guess I’m safe.

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      1. Hmmm…you’re right, Peter – but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. My name is attached to it, and if you click on my name, it brings you back to my original posts on WordPress, so it seems much like someone on Facebook sharing a post. They aren’t claiming credit for my work, and it might give me exposure to an audience who wouldn’t have found me otherwise. Just have to wait and see what happens, I guess.

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      2. Although I’m as chill as you are about this, I should say they’re mirroring your blog complete with a Tygpress Copyright at the bottom. Your entire blog is readable on that website without ever needing to visit yours. I don’t think it’s going to have any impact on your views/stats, but it’s still a bad thing they’re doing.

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  5. Thanks for the heads up. Not going to quit, but let’s me know why do many publishers demand unpublished works- must be a headache for them to sort out who’s who. I’d cry if you left. Truly.

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    1. Aww, cheers, Abs. Yeah, even self-publishing on KDP, Amazon questioned my books as all the text had already been published online. For proper authors and publishers, it must be a nightmare.

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      4. Holy Mack. There’s a ton. Well, I’ll have fun the next couple months adding and reading these! Much love!

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      5. Hah! Doing myself out of a sale here, but if you go to my homepage (littlefears.co.uk) all series are available free to read on site. If you enjoy them, grab the paperbacks and give em to ya mates, 🙂

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  6. I think that anyone copying my work is stealing the brain he can’t make use of. They have my work, I have the brain, I make money from my work, they make too but with bad name attached. They don’t know nemesis and that one day, it will catch up with them. I leave it at that and continue with my posts. Why should I leave the world because of robbers? It’s absurd. The thing is, there is no hiding place for the people of the world. Even traditional published works get copied…so let’s keep living no matter what

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    1. They seem to be mirroring the whole of WordPress.coms blog history. So the odds are, your entire sites being mirrored on Tygpress at least. On the upside, like I said in the post, the odds are nobody is going to see it. Who, in India, is going to be interested in a personal blog written in English?

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  10. Okay, maybe I am just too new, too small or too dumb to understand it all. When I search for my stuff on tygpress, sure enough, there’s my content, but at the bottom of the page, there’s my page listed as the source and even a “Read more” link that leads to my site.

    I’d see that as free advertising, if anything. Mabe I’m missing the bigger picture?

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    1. Well I kinda thought the same thing, but if I had poetry on my website, for example, and then I went to self-publish it, people could just read it online. But I don’t even really see that as a big deal. Which makes me wonder if I should really be more concerned? Maybe if I were an artist, I would be, definitely. What do the rest of ya’ll think?

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      1. If you have it available on your site for them to copy, then everybody would be able to access it for free on your site anyway.
        I understand that it can feel disheartening to see how little control you have over your own content online, but as long as there’s proper credit, I’m not sure if it’s that big of a deal.

        Of course, it’s going to be a problem, if those copy-cats present your content as their own. Yes, there are some other potential dangers, like changing your content AND linking it back to you. Imagine if they had copied your intro as normal, but then some really nasty racist stuff or something came after that, and there would be a link back to you!

        I guess, I see now why it could be a big deal. You have no control over what other people do with your stuff, so they should not be able to get access to it in the first place.

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      2. I think, in this particular case, you’ve nailed it in this comment. People are freaking out about the lack of control they have over their own content.

        Thankfully it’s not rife to the point of articles original authors missing out anymore, thanks to the EU. Up to last year, it was a real issue. Daily Mail, Express and Facebook, I’m looking at you!

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      3. To follow up on what Willow said, this was rife in journalism until the EU put their foot down. Websites copying each others articles was rife to the point where the original authors would be buried to Googles 16th page as all the papers with better SEO pushed them down ranks. That’s why now the likes of Facebook can only display the first snippet of text and not duplicate entire articles on their site. Duplicate content is a problem. In this case though, there’s not much you can do about it, and it’s not really a big problem.

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      5. Hey, don’t knock your own stuff. One self-depreciating comments enough. You write well, your spelling and grammars better than most people and it’s always a good read.

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      6. Ha, thank you! But I do have a particular style. I’m not into writing stuff that’s a little too…academic/obscure? It used to drive my professors crazy when I was in grad school. I was like the anarchist rebel of my history program. “History in the Streets!” raises fist

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      7. Thank you for the compliment! And I got a story accepted in a Scary Clown anthology that’s gonna be coming out soon, so I’m really excited about that!

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  11. Well, lesson learned re the type of content I post. Articles/essays, no big deal. But poetry or art…yeah maybe. I wonder if the photos I used from Canva would cause them to crack down? All new to me…

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    1. Honestly mate, I wouldn’t let this one stop you. Your stuffs always going to be ripped off if it goes online. But this is a website in India that’s going to be buried/removed from Google/Bing for duplicate content.

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      5. I was already in the frame of mind that somebody, someday, was gonna take my stuff. I like my poems, sure, but I put them on there because (gasp–some of you may be thinking) they’re totally disposable and not “good” poetry. It’s why I make the distinction that my poetry is “bad” poetry, not that it’s actually bad (or good) but that it’s a time-and-place vignette sort of thing…

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      6. I get that.I kinda used to be like that. I think after 15’ish years of blogging, the IDGAF kicked in haha.

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      10. Yep. If I’d planned it better, I would have opened with something like “hey, I stole your books off the internet” but it’s still early, here, for me. I bought them, no worries. laughs

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  12. I’m with you. but I’m also only journalizing my journey to being happier and healthier. So doubtful anyone wants to copy it! I enjoy your site and would report any copy crap I see. As an artist I get that part clearly. Blog on! 😀

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    1. I can almost guarantee you, your sites been mirrored on Tygpress.com. But like I said to another commenter, it’s a website in India, that’ll be removed from/buried on Google/Bing/Yahoo. Aside from knowing somebodies mirroring your content, does it make any difference to life or blog?

      Take that for both of us. How many Indians randomly browsing the net are going to get the English-language centric wordplay that I post? How many Indians will be interested in your personal blog? Does it make any difference to either of us that our stuffs been copied?

      Not to me, and I hope not to you.

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    1. Oh, man, I feel for you. You’ll be getting it more than most of us. Seeing videos copied has become more more common, but video hosting sites are quicker to remove copyright infringements so it’s nowhere near as easy/cheap as it is copying text. Here’s hoping it stays that way, aye.

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  14. I’m not quite sure I understand, but I did what you said, and it does appear they are mirroring my website too, but it did show my url too. Won’t we all be just feeding their stats by going there to check it out? I noticed that my old Blogger blog was visited by India this month too. Sigh…thanks for sharing this, I appreciate it.

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    1. OK, in this particular case, I don’t see website duplication as an issue. But content duplication in general is problematic. If it goes unchecked with articles being republished entirely on other sites, they can bury the original authors work on search engines and social networks. Until the EU bought in a few laws, entire articles were being republished on Facebook with a teeny attribution link. So nobody would actually visit the original authors website. Nowadays, they can only publish snippets with a ‘read more’ link. It can also cause issues if your getting your work published and your works floating around for free online. Even that 50 Shades woman unpublished her stuff online before getting it into books.

      The wholesale duplication of work is a shitty thing to happen to anyone. But this is a website that nobodies really going to visit and they’ll be pulled off Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Aside from the feeling that we have no control over out online work, this really isnt going to make a difference to anyone.

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      1. I appreciate your thorough response, your additional points make perfect sense. I agree stealing content is shitty. I hope they do get pulled off Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Thank you again for sharing the info.

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    1. You’re welcome and don’t forget to pop over to Ashleys site and drop a thanks for her initial post, linked to in the blog above.

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  16. I seriously have been running my podcast for 4 years and I still get the random spam every now and again but I generally don’t try to think about it. Just block it like normal. I do writing, but my writing is so specific and you have to remind yourself that your post is a time stamp too, anyone posting the same article after you did with the same content and at another time is clearly stealing. That being said I produce a lot of audio content and video content these days so they can’t really steal much. I get a lot of hits in China and in India as well but I generally let it slide and keep a strong password.

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    1. Spam will always be around. Heck, the Brexit party are still putting their crap through my letterbox, haha. I wonder if cavemen left spam advertising on cave walls…

      You have the right way of dealing with it all. Ignore, block, mute and move on.

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  18. Thanks for this post & link of ashley.
    It is happened to my blogs also by tygpress but they had kept my details also below the blog. But permission should be taken for such thing & why to publish on own site. Its totally wrong. Either one should publish their own blogs or they should request multiple bloggers to publish on their site with due respect.

    Thanks & Regards
    Dr.Mangesh Desai

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  19. A woman writer who actually sells books had a “good friend” who copied her books, almost verbatim, for sale in Brazil and South America, and was making good money. Someone the author knew picked one up and after a breif read sent it on to the ORIGINAL author. The publishing business has had gaping holes in due diligence for quite a while. The internet just makes it easier for intillectual (I use that word loosely) property to be lifted at will. Sucks. But, what are the options? The same thing happens to iPhone apps. All based on the same SDKs, it makes it easy. They change the background, reissue it as their own. Nothing new, but it does suck. Hell, I could do with a bunch of new followers without stooping to farming. I know!! Small Scares! You know, with jokes and stuff?
    Shit behavior is rampant, all I can say.

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    1. Now we know where all the India hits are coming from. I suspected this was the cause. Their presentation seems kinda pointless, for now. It may be that eventually they start monetizing the stolen content.

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      1. You’re only in line if your stuff has hallmark moment worthy “poetry” or bad syfi. Or some really useful medical guilt trip that can be leveraged into sympathy donations/follows. The wordpressers with 1500 plus are the targets. 6k makes you a bulls eye.

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      2. Lists off a long series of super-serious ailments Peter has, but that has little to no impact on his life.

        Gimme donations, yo.

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      3. There was some person in the guise of a kid who always needed “just another 1,400 dollars” for dental surgery and charged for reblogs because he claimed to have 20,000 followers that were a number whoever it was had hacked into his sidebar. He had a good collection of scary bubba teeth. Hit my Patreon or I’ll shoot this Dog/get so depressed I’ll jump/shoot yo momma/cut your brake lines…

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      4. I had one a while back that kept leaving comments asking me to go to their site. I left a smiley face on each of their begging posts for a month, no matter how grim they were. Funnily enough, haven’t seen him since…

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  20. That is certainly crazy. Because of the internet, people will certainly try to copy things. At least I got copyright receipts for my books though. Haha! Yeah, stealing stuff isn’t cool, don’t get me wrong. It’s just tough because it’s the internet and almost anything goes.

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    1. Exactly. Fight the fights you can win, but when it’s a dodgy asf corner of the net, gotta shrug and walk away.

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      1. Definitely. The shady parts of the net especially that so-called dark web is something I want to stay away from. Some battles just aren’t worth it. The internet is certainly a complex thing in that regard.

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  21. They are definitely mirroring my web site, but as the years have gone on and I’ve discovered more of my work being illegally sold, copied, published etc., all over the world, I have learned to accept that this is the Age of the Internet — and the Age of the Sociopath. And I just move on. Otherwise, I’d go insane because I can’t combat it. So far, I have not encountered anyone passing off my work as their own, but selling my work illegally and getting whatever profits there are/were to be made. So much regrettable stuff has come into our lives as artists because of the Internet. I try to focus on the cool things that have come with it, instead.

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    1. You’re spot on. It’s unfortunate, but the only way to stop other people ripping your stuff off, is, quite literally, never make anything ever again. Gotta accept that and keep creating.

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  22. Thanks for featuring this- I’d heard people complaining about “something” but hadn’t dug for details yet. I guess I always figured that nothing on the Internet was really “safe” anyway- still, what a crummy thing 😦

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    1. You’re right there. Nothing on the internet is safe. Just gotta accept that sometimes and keep making stuff.

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    1. Hah, I got ya. Cheers, Elle. Honestly, this isn’t a nightmare. And I don’t think it’s worth quitting the internet for. Google and Facebook were the worst for this until the EU got involved.

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  29. Actually never knew about this. Thanks for informing people!
    I honestly couldn’t care less if some random guy in India decides to swipe my content for little to no publicity. It can’t really be stopped, so if that happened, I’d just shrug it off and keep doing what I enjoy. Never been in it for the attention sites like these would theoretically be stealing away, anyways.

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  30. While I don’t see my site mirrored, I see posts over there that label my site as the source and link back. If someone wants to copy my posts about God and His love then that’s great. Now, I know why India is my number #2 country in stats.
    Thanks for the post!

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  31. They can steal my content but they can’t steal my body… which is the main feature of my photos. They can steal my posts about my paintings, even pictures of my paintings, but I have the real thing right next to me. Go the fuck ahead, cleptobots!! Make my day! You can have my stupid words and art or whatever but you can’t have my ass!!!

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  32. LF,
    You speak of one sort of plagiarism, which is filthy all its own. There is another sort. To a smallish nobody blogger like myself, larger more widely watched authors come by, and take my content, change the wording just enough and voila. Presto, they have their new post. No more writers block. Dastardly indeed. They are vultures circling overhead waiting for content to snap up. I have literally found my content even exact lines written 3 days after I wrote it on a “professional blog.” shrugs

    At the end of the day, these folks can sleep easy ripping others off.
    I deleted my first blog last year. I had been writing there for 6 years.
    BG

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    1. Ooof, I think you’ve mentioned that before, and I’m sorry to hear it happened.

      I ran (still kinda do) a theatre in Second Life. We had a tiny venue but we’d fill the sim during our hey-day. We’d have mini sketches and plays. A ten-minute play would take 5-10 hours of writing and 5-10 hours of practice. One day, one of the biggest theatres owners in SL told me she enjoyed one of our plays. I told her I was surprised as I’d never seen her at our place. She said she’d never been, she’d read the script. I asked who gave her the script and she told me one of her staff members had visited and transcribed the whole play.

      What… I… Huh?

      They then started running 10-minute long plays on their off nights, which all followed the plots and puns of our plays, with slightly different wording in the scripts.

      When someone wants your content, they will take it. No matter what.

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  33. Wow, I wasn’t aware that this was going on! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Maybe I should save all of the writing I do for my blog in future.

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    1. Like I said in the main post, I wouldn’t let them slow you down unless you’re going to try and get your writing published. In that case, don’t ever post it online. If it’s good or not, it will be copied.

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      1. I only post book/films reviews on my blog, so it’s ok ( sort of, not sure I feel good about people stealing my opinions. My fiction writing, is never shared online.

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  35. Oh no I had no idea this was even a thing! That’s pretty awful isn’t it? It’s hard work and takes time to think of a topic to write about and of course the time it takes to write, what on earth gives someone else the right to just copy it 😕

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    1. There’s not a lot you can do about it. They’re mirroring the whole of WordPress.coms blog feed. If you absolutely, do not want a single piece of your work on Tygpress, back up and delete your website and move to Medium.com or Tumblr. But in all truth, there were websites that mirrored both of them too. Fandango made a badge for WP users posts, but don’t think Tygpress owner will even notice it. https://fivedotoh.com/2019/08/03/feel-free-to-use-this-badge/

      I say, carry on as you are. A website nobody is going to look at isn’t going to do your blog much harm.

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      1. Haha yes you are right there! If it sends links back to our sites then it would be a good thing I guess because it’s extra traffic! They have copied my other site too -Why on earth someone in India would be interested in me reviewing dog friendly places in the UK I have no idea 🤷‍♀️

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      2. They probably don’t intend/aren’t interested, to be honest. They have, quite literally, mirrored the entire WordPress.com feed. So every single site hosted on WordPress.com is on Tygpress.

        Like I mentioned to someone else in comments, how many people in India will be interested in scruffy doodles with very English-centric wordplay stories. Not many, I imagine. But the Little Fears have been duplicated too.

        It ain’t personal, they’ve just gone for everyone.

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  37. “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 did, actually, and shrugged it off. Even if I’m lucky enough to become relatively successful at some point, I will never be a Shakespeare and ultimately I and my works will be forgotten and lost in time. I’m here because I want to ‘hang out’ in a community of creative people. Since I didn’t join with financial gain in mind, I’ve got nothing to lose. I guess the idea of people reading my words without knowing they’re mine doesn’t bother me too much as long as they like what they read. (I’m aware this is not, at all, how most people are gonna feel about it and I have sympathy for those that kind of content theft hurts.)

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    1. Good ta hear you’re not bothered about your writings being duplicated. Honestly, with the Fears, it started as a creative outlet. It was never meant to become what it has become. Our motives can change over time.

      With all that, like I hope I put across in my post, I just can’t give a care about this particular rip off. It’s a shame so many closed their WordPress blogs upon realizing this was happening.

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  38. LOL. That sucks. It makes me feel guilty about taking random googled photos and using them at the head of my posts. But, I don’t have the time to draw my own stuff and write stories. (Though I’d reall like to.)

    I think it falls under fair use, and have actually reached out to a photographer whose name I was able to track down. Sent him a message sayin: hey if ya want me to pay you for using a copypaste of one of your photos, at the head of a poem I posted, please send me a message. Never heard back.

    Generally, when I’m not being a lazy shit, if I find something on Google that’s sourced I’ll be like: ‘hey XYZ badass made this.’

    I also feel that people know that a randomer on WP isn’t taking professional photos and drawing pictures from 1890, LOL.

    Any thoughts, comments, and suggestions are welcome from anyone. And best of luck to folks dealing with this BS.

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    1. Photography use is often hard when you need something specific. It’s good you at least message people. You could always make sites like Unsplash and Pixabay your first port of call.

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      1. True. I’d heard about photo repositories before but there’s just something nice about the randomness of Googling. I often find such a perfect thing very nearly by accident. If one can call algorithmic wizardry accidental that is.

        But, yes I probably should stop being cheap/explore expressely freedomain stuff before I just nick stuff off the Goog.

        Thanks for the input.

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    1. A fixed panel is pictured in the middle of the post. Fiction, image and web address for my site, all on one image. Then at least if it gets mass copied, there’s always a web address attached to it so people can find me. That said, I have seen people cut off web addresses from webcomics. That’s a whole other level of crappiness, heh.

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  41. This is awful! Researching copyright information has been on my to do list for the last couple of weeks. Thanks….for taking care of that for me. 🙂 All jokes aside…there really isn’t anything we can do and it’s very disheartening, especially when you are just starting out. Thank you for not quitting…I enjoy your creations, Zia

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  42. The latest on tygepress –

    Tygpress.com is temporarily out of service due to technical issues. will be back soon…
    Tygpress.com was created with an intention to create a blog search site , but due to some techical issues, full contents of respective sites were being displayed instead of just excerpts as intended. We thank the complainants for bringing this issue to our notice and We are extremely sorry to the content owners.

    😀

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    2. We have our eyebrows raised. Tygpress has been online for 6-8 months. How could they not notice it was fully duplicating content? Haha. Either way, good news. Keep the mallets handy for the next copy.

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      1. I check their site everyday to see what’s going on. I agree about them not noticing the duplication of content. Something is amiss on their end.

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      2. I think this is a case of “keep going, while the going is good…” hahaha… and when the attention got too hot, they pulled the plug.

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  44. I’ll go take a look at the link… For written works, it’s going to be hard to “protect” your content. At least for images, there’s watermarks.

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    1. The site mentioned in the post is now down. Cool, I guess.

      Tygpress.com is temporarily out of service due to technical issues. will be back soon…
      Tygpress.com was created with an intention to create a blog search site , but due to some techical issues, full contents of respective sites were being displayed instead of just excerpts as intended. We thank the complainants for bringing this issue to our notice and We are extremely sorry to the content owners.

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  45. Well done! The site is down. And look at the traffic you generated here. A lot of people are interested. Yes, you’re right, as an artist I’ve had my work stolen before (no credits) and I really cared at the time. I think I’m more pragmatic these days – as you said, at least someone is seeing it haha.

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    1. Yeah, I knew a few people had quit WP over this. I wasn’t aware how much of an explosion of chat about it there had been until I searched Tygrpess.com on WordPress.com. That’s a lot of angry people.

      I kinda do care when stuffs stolen and not credited, but I’m also a firm believer of fighting the fights you can win. When contents wholesale copied and site owners are unresponsive, especially sites almost nobodies gonna see, eh. Shrug and move on, you know?

      Nice to see they’re down for now.

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  46. Thanks for the info. Recently had a few thousand like and follows on one of my blogs. I’m to grounded to imagine that 5,000 good folks in Bulgaria and Romania discovered the blog in ten minutes. Ugh. I just keep writing and writing. Maybe one day I’ll have something worth stealing.

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  47. Thanks so much for the information. I went to the site and it said it was temporarily closed due to things they shouldn’t be doing. Really…Good call.
    Even though I’m just challenging Nature, and my only purpose is to get their messages out there, it still frosts me that I do the work and others take the credit. The only compensation is that those in countries, that are environmentally behind times, might finally get a clue and change the way they treat Nature. Any boost Mother Nature can get benefits us all in the long run, right? I’ll keep passaging as long as there’s someone out there who might take notice and change their ways. Someone has to speak for the unseen world, that without, ours wouldn’t exist. Thanks again, Cheri

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  48. This one shows up in my “referrals” list: frame.bloglovinDOTcom. They don’t exactly mirror my site, but they scrape and reformat my posts into tiles with links, then toss up a paywall to see more of my stuff. I don’t have a paywall.

    A WhoIs search turned up nothing.

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    1. It’s been a long time since I visited BlogLovin. It used to be an aggregator for people following lots of blogs. They used to have a link to your post with a snippet of text.

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  49. Great information on scrapping. I ran into this several years ago with an outfit called Destinary. I fought back by putting the following in all my blogs, which then showed up on her blog when she stole them (it was a riot):

    “© 2015 R. Doug Wicker (RDougWicker.com)
    All right reserved — that includes you, Destinary

    “Final note: Considering The Destinary is a site listed as owned by Sonia Bosquez-Platt of Indianapolis Tour & Travel, you may want to rethink doing business with either her or her company.”

    Shortly afterward, she sold that site and the theft of a LOT of travel-related blogs ceased.

    By the way, I went to tygpress and saw this message, so you outing them may be working:

    “Tygpress.com is temporarily out of service due to technical issues. will be back soon…
    Tygpress.com was created with an intention to create a blog search site , but due to some techical issues, full contents of respective sites were being displayed instead of just excerpts as intended. We thank the complainants for bringing this issue to our notice and We are extremely sorry to the content owners.”

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  50. Hi, yes it’s par for the course sadly but definitely not acceptable. I registered all my published images (a lot of work) with one site that makes it easy to find duplicated, cannot find the site now sadly.

    The TinEye extension is great.Right click on almost any image and see other versions of it throughout the entire web. Much more useful than Google’s Image search IMO.

    As a photographer my stock in trade is primarily images so I’m more concerned about use of those than my words.

    However your point about the only way to stop it is spot on, stop publishing! Not gonna happen.

    I read a great article early on in my photography career that said basically to accept your images will be used in unintended ways. I actually condone it. The small, watermarked images I publish are intended to be distributed now. It’s free publicity and it requires a lot of work for someone to remove my watermarks and monetise those images. Most of them aren’t of stock quality anyway and besides, no-one is going to pay for watermarked images.

    So I see it as free publicity.

    Google knows which site ripped of which and is very hot on duplicated content.

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    1. The missus is an illustrator. A proper one, nothing like what I do. TinEye’s certainly shown her a lot of random places her stuff ends up. I remember a horse she did in pen and ink on paper did the rounds of tattoo websites. It was being used by tattoo artists saying “this is what we can draw for you.”

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