We are all paranoid with identity theft, well, maybe that’s just me. But I’m hearing and seeing more and more bloggers stealing – yes, STEALING – other bloggers’ original content and claiming it’s their own. Why would people steal? I can understand “borrowing” material and crediting the source, but when you DO NOT credit them, that’s called “stealing.”
I’m not going to put any blogs out there because I would only be giving them more publicity than they deserve. But the other day when I was browsing through various blogs, I noticed an article that looked very familiar. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t mine. Though, as I was reading the title, then the introduction and kept reading, I was thinking “damn, this looks VERY familiar.”
After I stupidly finished reading the entire article, I checked to see if there was a source or any type of credit given.
None. None whatsoever.
I realized where I read that exact article from; my e-mail. Yes, I subscribed to a directory which delivers great and informative information on blogging and just simply couldn’t believe this person was claiming it was theirs.
What is he/she thinking? If I subscribed to that directory they stole the material from, then more than likely hundreds, if not thousands, of other people did the same.
Now brings me to the next example. A buddy blogger of mine, Jake of Moremerchant.com caught someone in the act of stealing his original content. According to Jake, this person didn’t even bother changing the title, the text in the body, images – NOTHING!
And he’s not the only person getting original content stolen either. Matter of fact, you – yes, YOU! Right there with the funny glasses on sipping a Redbull – your content from your blog is probably being stolen as you read!
If you are reading this and YOU are the one stealing, you will get caught. Believe me and the millions of other bloggers out there! You will get caught!
Great Post Jay… I can’t believe someone stole content from Jake. It happens though just never had it happen to someone I know. Great post on awarness!
I know in the entertainment blogworld, it’s a dog eat dog world, people still all the time and don’t even link back. I have over 100,000 page views and over 3000 unique visitors a day, but less than ten people leave comments on a regular. They steal my pictures,and don’t even leave comments.
There are thousands of bloggers having their content stolen through RSS scrapers and it’s pretty sick. There are at least 100 of my posts that were stripped word for word and thrown on three or four of these spam sites.
That said, ever since I installed Taragana’s RSS Copyright Message plugin to add said message to the end of my RSS and ATOM feeds, the amount of word-for-word scraping theft decreased substantially.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how many people might have come to my site and copy/pasted an entire article….
Jason - I can’t believe people just continue to do this type of thing without giving any type of credit. Even a simple backlink to the original site would be fine, but none?!
I guess this is the world we live in…
Jay
I have faced this problem and still facing it….they do link back to me but they don’t do a proper credit to me…I also see many other content from other blog…they don’t even bother to change the title…I’m gonna installed the plugin suggested by Jason…