The Content Thieves Are Restless (And Why I Don't Care Anymore)

Posted by on February 18, 2010 in Annoying, Awesome, Blogging, Internet | 3 comments


Have you ever written anything (whether on a blog or in a book) only to have it copied completely and ported over to a random site?

Welcome to my world ladies and gentleman!

Back in the day when someone stole my content (which happened weekly), I would simply send a cease and desist order, or if they were anonymous I would contact their host (who more often than not shut down the scum’s site).

That was when people who were stealing my content were from nations that acknowledged copyrights.

Fast forward to today: there are now dozens who are daily stealing my content (sometimes very brazenly), with many being hosted in nations that either do not recognize US copyright laws or if they do recognize it, refuse to do anything because they currently hate my government (think China).

Since I am getting tired of this “cat and mouse” game, I think I’m going to embrace TechCrunch‘s policy and instead focus on creating great content (translation: ignore the thieves).

Will this work in the long run? Who knows! But until I can build an army of robots to lay the vicious smack down against these thieves skulls find an affordable solution, I’m going to stop sending cease and desist orders (as I’m not too sure how effective they are in English overseas).

– Posted from my iPhone

  • http://ifranky.com franky

    I have never filed a C&D, instead I have always worked at getting links and thus automatically outperform the leeches in the SE.

    • http://www.darnellclayton.com darnell

      I probably should adopt a similar strategy. Perhaps by interlinking within the posts, I'll get the evil scum to boost up my page rank. :-)

  • http://ifranky.com franky

    Do like on the other site, link images to the post URL, drop the odd tag link or link to a previous entry in it and all's fine.If then a scraper is still listed within the SE, at least you get some juice from it.