Lately, I've been seeing posts about copied content and it reminded me that something like this is what brought me to the blockchain. I went through something similar when I wrote about tech on Blogger. I came home one day and found a comment on one of my posts from a guy asking me to increase my publishing output. Curious, I checked out his blog and got the surprise of my life to see at least my last 20 articles copied word for word, with my byline stripped out!
Me of all people. This was my test blog and I was shocked anyone cared enough to bother. Who in the world would steal my content when I was still learning on the job?
He copied me like a machine...
It's been awhile, but if I recall correctly, he was from Pakistan and apparently wouldn't or couldn't write well in english, so decided to lift my work instead. I told him If he wanted to use my work, he needed to leave my byline in and link back to give me credit and a valuable SEO backlink. He refused and so I had to contact the staff at Blogger, who had me fill out an online form reporting the theft.
After checking it out, they removed the most recent post he stole from me, but when I asked them to take them all down, they said I would have to fill out a separate form for each blog post! At that point, I'd been blogging for years and had published a lot and was astonished they couldn't just batch delete them.
At the time, I was trying to build backlinks to my blog in order to help my work be found on Google. It was always a thrill to see my work mentioned on other tech review sites. I still didn't think it was good enough as I was learning at the time. Other blogs were quoting parts of my articles and giving me a proper mention or a backlink, but not this guy. He could have asked me to be a guest blogger and we would have both benefited, but he wanted all of the credit for himself. By removing my byline, his readers didn't know that I had written the posts, so it wasn't doing me any good at all.
The software or script he was using, would replace my name with his. It was all automated. I'd hit publish and shortly thereafter, my work would show up on his blog, with him listed as the author. Hours and hours of effort all replicated in an instant, without so much as a mention. Something had to be done, because the worry was that as time went on, his readers might think that I was copying HIM! So I got to work.
Moving to the blockchain
I began using the plagiarism-checking tool Copyscape and every time I'd publish a new one, he'd scrape my site and benefit as he was running ads against my content. So I decided to teach him a little lesson and began working in mild criticisms of his government into my articles which attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention for him. That finally did the trick and he stopped.
But it bothered me as each article was the result of hours of research and I didn't think my writing was worth pilfering, but apparently it was to him. After the whole episode, I realized if Blogger didn't have an easier way to deal with stolen content, it would just keep happening. So I put a pause on blogging.
Years later, I heard of blogging on the blockchain. Joined up moved on to Hive and LeoFinance and have never looked back.