If you follow a certain wonderful blogger called Lita then you may already be aware of this situation.
As I write this, I have been dealing with two consecutive rounds of websites “borrowing” my work. And that’s just the ones I know about. The ones too lazy to copy-paste are even formatted so they leave the source link in when they repost and it pings back my original post. There might be more out there.
Honestly, this is hardly the first time. This blog has been up for a while and now and then my content has been used by other sites without my permission. Sometimes it’s just a small blurb of my post with an obvious link to the full thing on my site. That’s actually kind of cool, like free publicity. From time to time I’ve accidentally come across blogs that just blatantly stole the content and removed any link back to my site. This was especially egregious when the post stolen was a very personal one that specifically discussed my name (Irina) and what it meant to me, while the author’s bio was some random dude with a completely different name. I’m sure there have been tons I just never found out about.
It’s a sort of background nuisance you just learn to live with when you publicly publish your work. When you’re a small creator like me, people think they can easily just lift my work and no one will call them out or notice. And they might be right up to a certain point.
But this latest round is a little different.
It first started about a month ago with a site called anime-sensai.co. The site no longer exists which is a good thing. For a little over a week, they systematically reposted all my content within minutes of my publishing it. They didn’t remove the source link but they did have a very nice little header which clearly indicated the author’s name. It wasn’t me.
Even though there was a source link, the problem with this site is that it seemed just full of viruses or at least malicious behavior. It would redirect nonstop without warning; it was riddled with pop-ups to the point that the site itself was almost impossible to read. My firewall blocked it a few times as well. I guess I shouldn’t have been too worried about my content.
Still, it made me really unhappy to be associated with such a site so after dodging a bunch of redirects and pop-ups, I managed to finally leave a comment since I couldn’t find any other way to contact them, asking for my content to be removed. Nothing happened…
Finally, I got fed up and found a link where you can report malicious sites to google. My understanding is that Google investigates the sites and removes them from their lists making them impossible to find through the search engine but that’s about it. I’m not sure if they do more because the very next day, the reposting stopped. I didn’t bother going back to that site until today and now I see that the whole thing is gone.
My respite was short-lived though because less than a week later the same thing started happening with a site called matrixat. At least this new site didn’t seem dangerous, but it was still annoying. I tried to find a Twitter link to dm them but couldn’t, so I left a comment on one of my posts asking them to please remove it. My comment was held for moderation and promptly deleted. The next day, you could no longer comment without being “logged in”. A day later, we couldn’t comment at all…
These guys, like the previous guys, weren’t only targeting me though. They were stealing from numerous anime, video games, and even tech bloggers, reposting content every half hour or so. For all I know, it could all be automated.
I thought about letting it go since they did have that source link and all but it’s still plagiarism. They still clearly name someone else as the author. In this case, the hilariously lazy name “admin” and they still don’t openly acknowledge the original. The only way to know this wasn’t their work is if you read the whole thing, or scroll down to the bottom and click on the small “source link”. And most people aren’t going to do that. So it’s not like they’re advertising my blog or anything.
And then I read Lita’s post on the same subject. Stealing from me is one thing but stealing from Lita is not cool! She wasn’t backing off either. She’s not as lazy as I am. So I was inspired to not let it go. Lita also helpfully shared an email address that had worked for her. So I also send a polite message asking them to take down my content. I got absolutely no response and my content is still up but they did stop stealing new posts…
Aside from that email address that is part of the author “admin”’s profile, there’s not much information on the site. Icons that seem to lead to Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube just link back to the home page of the blog. Same thing for the about the author and our team pages. My only clue is this, the email address is admin@mrhbaa.com and there’s also a particularly ironic copyright notice at the very bottom of the site also assigning all the rights to Mhrbaa.
If you go to Mhrbaa.com, it’s a page in Arabic that seems to be advertising site-building and SEO services. I’m assuming that the matrixat site is a quick and dirty automated site that they use as an example of their work. And that makes it sort of worse. I certainly hope they aren’t selling packages on how to quickly steal other people’s content. In any case, it’s pretty annoying. And dubiously legal.
I’m not advocating for their business to get shut down. Heck, I could even see their matrixat site staying up if they make a bit more effort to give proper credit to the original authors.
However, no matter how unpleasant this little adventure was at times, it did make me think about what my personal views and feelings are about my content getting ripped off. Is ripped off too strong a word? Reposted without permission, let’s go with that.
Maybe it’s because of my social conditioning or maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a doormat, but part of me always feels just a little flattered that anyone would bother to repost my content. For the record, I know this is a silly way to feel. These people aren’t reposting my content because they think it’s good, in all likelihood they haven’t read and maybe don’t even speak English. My post or site just fit in certain parameters and that’s all. The post itself could be complete rubbish. What can I say, I can find a way to be happy about insults.
When my rational brain takes over though, I realize that not only is there nothing to be flattered about but there might be a negative impact to ignoring such sites. Sites that steal posts usually aren’t all that picky. Just because they are stealing something I wrote today, doesn’t mean they’re not going to turn on another blogger tomorrow. In fact, it’s extremely likely that they will. So by not even attempting to do anything, I’m making it someone else’s problem down the line.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not my responsibility to be some sort of internet watchdog. I’m busy and tired and I’m not the bad guy if I choose to just look the other way now and then. But if I decide to go through the effort to work it out with one of these reposting sites, I could be helping more than just myself. And that’s cool.
I also realize that I am personally not that bothered when my content is stolen. I don’t like it or anything but compared to some other people, it’s not that big a deal to me. My blog is not my livelihood or my portfolio so there is no professional impact. Also, I find that these types of sites don’t tend to survive for long so there are no long-term consequences.
This said, just because I’m a little more laid-back in this regard doesn’t mean others should be as well. There are writers that put a ton of effort into their posts and they have a lot of pride in their work. As well as they should. Having someone else just take it away from them is very insulting. I can understand why someone would get frustrated in this situation.
Basically, navigating this online space you have to balance out how much you value your content with how much you value your peace of mind. And that kind of sucks.
