Piracy, Thievery and Skullduggery On the Internet
Posted: Thursday, September 17, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
I am getting really disgusted with all the new content sites that don't spend a moment of their time creating anything original.
What they do instead is grab stories, news, blogs and anything else they can find to create pages that they can add Google advertising to.
The newest foray into thievery is all these alleged news gatherers who have never asked permission from anyone to take their work and use it for their own gain.
Of course just a redirect of a story isn't plagiarism but when a portion of the work is posted without permission it goes beyond plagiarism to downright thievery.
Now I imagine you can spend all day telling these pirates to remove your work. You can also spend days threatening lawsuits but outside of Gatehouse suing the NY Times I haven't seen anyone get anywhere trying to stop these people. And in the case of Gatehouse, they were mad about redirects to their stories which really didn't make any sense. But Gatehouse is a corporation that went from $20 a share to 20 cents so what would you expect out of their brain trust?
Another reason why lawsuits wouldn't be effective is that most of these no work to try and get rich people' come and go like dandelions in the spring. How do you sue someone who is out of business or has so little capital that there isn't anything to get?
I blame these sites on us and on Google. If we go to these sites and use them we are helping them and all we have to do is ignore them and they will go away. Google, which brags about how they must approve a site for their Adwords campaign could also stop this theft in a heartbeat by just stating these sites cannot use anything but the redirected headlines. Obviously Google's stringent standards don't come into play when they think they can make more money allowing this to continue.
The e-mails of winning a lottery you never entered or needing you as a clearing house for millions of dollars just keep coming too. The reason these haven't gone away is that from time to time a really dumb person gets caught up in these swindles and that makes it worth their time. All we have to do to stop these is for ALL of us to ignore them and they will go away. But we don't and we won't, will we.
And then there are all the product salesman, who finding the National Do Not Call list has hurt their chances of pestering us by phone, use the computer to do the same thing. Could the FTC or someone in authority get involved and make unwanted e-mailers go away? Maybe: but the World Wide Web is world wide and how can you clamp down on someone who uses multiple IP addresses from anywhere in the world. They keep sending those junk mails by the way because some of us are actually dumb enough to buy from them. If no one did, they would all give up but that isn't likely in this age of smart enough to use a computer but too dumb to know when you are being electronically harassed.'
The internet is an amazing tool that has grown beyond anyone's imagination. But there are few rules or laws and the few there are, are almost impossible to enforce.
Ando so as we go along watching people steal from us or try to steal from us there is little we can do. At least for now.
This Article has been viewed 2,354 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)You bring some excellent points here. I think of the Internet as a version of America. Lots of great things coupled with several seedy characters doing things they shouldn't be. And as with this country, we have to take the good with the bad. Sure, it would be great to have laws against piracy and especially against spammers, yet as you say these fly-by-nighters are gone before you can think about stopping them.Well done.Yep Michael we do have to take the bad with the good. It is a shame that so many lazy people can steal others work. MikeI can tell you now these guys arnt lazy. And certainly not fly-by-nighters. They will setup up 100s if not thousands of scraper or autoblogs. They will then hope to make about about 10 dollars or so from each one. then when they get them shut down it happens all over again. The whole thing is constructed on offshore servers with little or no tracability. This is deffinatly not a lazy way to make money it takes a whole lot of knowledge and time. but it is extremely profitable.Nice article Mike Cheers
Great article. Well done.I've seen people stealing my work (it takes a while to work out it is yours as it does not have your name on it and you have to close 20 pop ups before you see the site). I also get 100's of emails from fake lotteries and African Bank accounts worth millions. It is annoying but what can I do?I agree Connor. Not much we can do.Mike
I do believe they are arresting internet spammers ~ when you see a significant decline in spam mail, that means they've caught another one who will be replaced by someone new LoL!
This article is so true. More people should adhere to these sentiments. If people want a site they should take the responsibility of adding original content. This should be just plain common sense.
It should be common sense plus a sense of honesty Debra.Mike
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.