Sorry, More Bad News. Your Writing is Being Ripped Off As I Type This.
And what you can do about it
Folks?We need to talk. Maybe you haven’t heard yet, but Medium has been cloned. A lot of people are losing their collective minds.
We’ll talk about what you can do about it in a bit. But first…
Have you seen this? Scroll down. Look at the footer. Do those publications look familiar?
They’ve ripped off Medium.
It’s in Japanese, so you won’t be able to read it. Unless you use translate. But that’s okay, scroll to the bottom. You’ll see publications in the footer.
They’ve ripped off the entire Medium site. Even the publications.
Even worse? They’ve stripped out the author information. Your writing is probably there, if you write for the publications they scraped. Which is most of them. But no one will know it’s yours. Your name is gone. No credit.
Now pause for a minute. Imagine if the Ichi.pro site gets plagiarized.
Ripped off by another copy bot. Or just some random plagiarizer. Now they don’t even know whose writing they’re stealing.
Here’s another rip off site. Do you know Gillian? They got 12 of hers. So far. Some of mine, too.
See? It’s writing stolen from Gillian. And aside from the author name at the top of the collection page, the rest of the credits are stripped out. If you click any of the articles, there’s no author credit. No link to Medium. Nothing to take you back to Gillian. They just stole her writing.
Mine are there, too. Just not as many of them. Maybe yours are there, too.
There’s only one place you can write and not have your writing ripped off. In a notebook.
And I’m sorry. Sorry to be the one to tell you that. But it’s the ugly truth of the internet. Anything you put online will be ripped off by some jerk.
Right now there’s a whole bunch of writers kind of in a panic and trying to figure out how to shut those sites down.
— Omg, email namecheap, they’re the registrar. — Email the site. — Email the web-host.
We gotta shut them DOWN!
And I understand feeling that. But still? Good luck with that.
Look, I get it. I’m a writer, too.
I’ve been a writer for a really long time. First time I had an article published in a print magazine was 1996. Long time! I’ve written online so long, I forget all the places I’ve written. Wordpress. Open Salon. Too many to remember.
I get it. Our writing means something to us. Okay? I get that.
Dr Mehmet Yildiz wrote about the ichi.pro site and one commenter said if Medium doesn’t “deal with it” then they’re condoning it.
No, they’re not.
Do you even know the procedure required to shut down plagiarist site? Most people don’t.
First thing to understand is that in order to get a site taken down, you must file a take-down request. With proof of why the site needs to come down.
Because plagiarism itself isn’t a crime. It’s the copyright infringement that results in the shut down.
1) Normally, a take down would be filed with the web-hosting company. Because technically speaking, they are the ones hosting the copyright infringed content.
So you need to find the hosting company. Provided it’s not masked.
Because domain masking is a thing. Any one of us can register a domain name and set up IP masking so that the “real” hosting company doesn’t show anywhere. Most hosting resellers do it all the time.
I run a tiny hosting company. Just for my design clients. If you ran a whois on the sites I host, it will show you my domain. Not the hosting company that provides my allotted servers in the NOC (network operations center).
So that’s hurdle one.
Find the hosting company. Hope they’re not masked. If looking up the hosting company leads you back to the plagiarist, you’re at a dead end. At least for most people.
If you’re technical, you could try traceroute and see where it leads you.
Also? Hope they’re in a country that accepts take down requests.
Some countries don’t do take-downs. Hosted in China or Russia? Forget it. They don’t deal with it. They don’t do take-downs. They don’t even respond.
See, plagiarism itself isn’t a crime. It should be, but it’s not.
The issue with plagiarism is that it can lead to a copyright infringement claim. Unless the person you want to sue is in China. Or Russia. Or similar countries, because there’s no shortage of countries that allow ripped off sites and don’t deal with copyright claims. They don’t care.
If they have no problem knocking off GUCCI handbags, they sure have no problem stealing content from you or me. We’re small fry.
Ichi.pro is not in English. You think they’re hosted in America? Think again. That site isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Not if it’s hosted in China or Russia or somewhere overseas.
Maybe you get lucky!
You find the host. They agree to take it down. Most often, the site just moves to another host. You can chase them until one of you gets tired. Or they move offshore. There’s lots of hosting offshore where complaints aren’t dealt with.
It’s not just writers, either…
I’m kind of a polymath. As in, I have lots of weird hobbies. For example? I restore vintage and antique fonts and lettering.
There’s a lot of fancy lettering from the 1600s to 1800s. Mostly, a few letters here and there, found in old illuminated manuscripts that have long ago gone into the public domain. People who love lettering love those old books.
One font I made? All I had to start with was 6 characters. Just half a dozen pretty letters in a tattered old 300 year old book.
But from 6 letters, you can see stroke patterns. Serif characteristics. You can see the art that the calligrapher was creating. The feel. The flow.
Hundreds of hours. Hundreds.
Slowly creating letters to match those 6 until I created an entire font from old lost letters that some letterer penned into a book 300 years ago.
Some jerk in Russia bought my font. Opened it in a font program and renamed it. And he’s selling it.
I could cry.
More weird hobbies… stuff you didn’t know about me.
I also sell my photography. And digital templates for writers. So you can open my bundles in Canva or Photoshop and make kick butt graphics to promote your books. Those have been stolen, too. For sale on Russian sites.
Here’s a weird one. I have a skill for pattern drafting. I’ve sewn for the Olympic dancers, which was a hoot, and I have my own pattern line.
They’re digital downloads. My customers live in areas where they can’t buy patterns readily. They love being able to print them out.
You guessed it. Yup. Those have been stolen, too.
My book was stolen, too...
Marketing is my day job. Many years ago, I first hit the news media when I took a company from bankrupt to a million in 18 months flat. And then did it again with the next client.
My before and after stories were featured in Forbes, The New York Times and more. I was so excited when I wrote a marketing book for small business owners. When I sent it to my list, I made a month’s income in a day.
That got stolen, too. I took mine offline. They might still be selling it, for all I know. Likely not. They probably milked it and moved on.
This stuff can break you if you let it.
It happens to freebies, too. And Google will help!
Almost any book that has a digital version — someone is giving it away free. The bigger you get, the more likely it happens to you.
For that matter, Google will help.
I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but here… do this… Go to Google advanced search. Do a keyword or wildcard search and search for pdf files. You know what I mean by wildcard, right?
Type in marketing or *marketing* and select pdf as the file type to search for.
Google will give you a whole bunch of stuff. Some of it free, some of it paid. You just need to mess around a bit.
Fact is, if people selling digital goods don’t know how to lock them down, people are grabbing them free. Sometimes for themselves. Other times to share them in black-hat forums and on the dark web.
And if you’re selling on a third-party site where you don’t control the download process, then you have no ability to control that.
It’s ugly, and it’s fact. And it happens every hour of every day.
If anyone says you can get all those thieves shut down, they’re full of crap. Because you can only get them shut down if the host will comply. In China or Russia or the may offshore countries — nah. They don’t care.
So what do you do about theft of your work? You try not to think about it. And that truly sucks.
Trust me, it sucks. My work means something to me, whether it’s a Medium piece that took 5 hours to research, write and edit — or a font I put hundreds of hours into, lettering by hand, scanning, kerning and digitizing.
What’s the option? Doing nothing?
Letting those people snuff the light that makes me who I am? So I hide my writing away in notebooks and keep my lettering and patterns on scraps of paper in a binder and die with all my dreams unborn? No. Screw that.
One of the sites I sell my fonts on has a member community. It’s one of those old archaic BBS systems. People talk about theft there. A lot.
The new members are always stunned. Shocked.
First time it happens, they’re just broken. They want to know how to make it stop. How to shut down the thief. Because there must be a way, right?
One of the top font sellers there sighs.
You can’t, she says. You just try not to think about it. Don’t think about how much sales you lost to them. Don’t wonder how much they’re earning on your work. Just pray that in the long run, it brings you more name recognition. Because no one can make it stop. Not until all countries play by the same rules. That’s never going to happen. There will always be a place that doesn’t care…
It hurts.
And we can’t make it stop.
Not as long as there are people who steal. Not as long as there are countries who don’t deal with intellectual property theft, and off-shore web-hosts that do not honor a take down request.
It’s real simple. If you don’t want your work stolen, don’t put it on the internet. There really isn’t another solution.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try. Maybe the host will cooperate. Maybe. But don’t count on it. And don’t let it break you.
I’m sorry. It sucks to be the bearer of bad news. But I’d rather bring bad news than delude people.
Thanks for reading.