Theft And Birthday Thoughts...
Happy Friday,
Riddle for you. What’s the difference between a Nigerian thief and Jeff Bezos?
Can you guess?
Think hard…
Figured it out yet?
Here you go…
Minimum wage. lol. Sorry.
It’s only okay to make a profit off other people’s work if you pay them at least minimum wage. Then it’s legal. Even if your workers can’t pay their bills and qualify for food stamps. As long as you pay the legally required minimum, it’s okay.
Unless they work for royalties. Like on Medium, Vocal and any other writing platform. Then you can pay them pennies and that’s okay, too.
But, make a profit off other people’s work without paying them anything at all, and it’s either theft or slavery. In this case, theft.
Some guy in Nigeria scraped Medium.
He’s taken the content from several publications and used it to build his ad-driven site. I wrote about it yesterday.
If it’s not bad enough that he scraped Medium, he also removed author names and listed his own name as author. So all my history articles in that pub are now attributed to him. At least on his site.
I found out because I write for History of Yesterday. Andrei, the publication owner emailed his writers to let us know the thief scraped his entire publication for the “history” section of his site.
There’s tons of other sections. For all I know, he might have scraped all of Medium to build his site. Why write content when you can just steal it?
Know what someone said in the comments?
They said they’d only worry about it if the site outranks Medium in Google. But Medium probably has better domain authority.
What a world we live in, where theft is okay if it doesn’t rank first in Google.
lol.
It’s not okay to steal someone’s writing and call yourself the author of stories you didn’t write. Not like this schmuck is the first or last person to do it.
The trick is what to do about it.
Andrei contacted the host with a take down request for copyright violation. If it works, the guy will likely move to another host.
Then it becomes like a Looney Tunes cartoon. Chase the villain forever and never catch him. That’s all, folks! Tune in next week for a whole new episode.
Sigh
Andrei contacted Medium, too.
They said there’s nothing they can really do about it.
Birthday ramblings…
Most people do their reflecting on New Year’s. If they do any at all. lol. A lot of people don’t, and that’s fine. Life is made of preference.
I tend to do my reflecting on my birthday, which is Saturday in the western world. New Year’s is just when the calendar changes. My birthday is when I’ve used up another year and I get to start a new one.
Know what occurred to me, besides chocolate cupcakes?
My best paying stories are in my own publication, History of Women, and I don’t even have a way to contact the writers if something like that happened to us. I didn’t ask for an email when accepting new writers.
Plus, I don’t even have a custom domain attached to the publication.
So basically, my top paying content is under the Medium umbrella, so if someone stole it, they won’t help and I don’t have a parent domain to lay claim to it.
Guess I have some work to do.
But first, cake.
:)
P.S. If you have a publication, do you have email addresses for your writers? Maybe we should, and maybe Medium should make it easier for publication owners to contact their writers. I’m kind of wondering if I should write about that…
More reading… (Links to read free)
Did you know you earn stars when you heart or comment? You don’t get to see them, but I do. It feels real nice, so thank you. :)
xo,
Linda
Yeah, History of Yesterday has been hit before. Last time it was a Japanese outfit. We can't do much because the countries they operate out of don't have laws that protect our content. The worst part is having our names removed.
Copyright is incredibly hard to enforce and across national boundaries as is possible via the Internet, the enforcement is even harder. The Fashion Industry has to rely on Logo covered merchandise and their Trademark to have even the slightest chance of stopping a copycat. Writers really don't have a way to protect their words.
Maybe NFTs/blockchain might be useful after all.