And THIS Is Why You Don’t Steal Online Content

Update: The site that was stealing content has removed their post, although I did not get any sort of reply email. And to the people that were emailing me from Web Design Tuts with those dirty messages – it was other people stealing WDT content, not the other way around :)

Second Update: The site owner has kindly emailed me and apologized for what happened. The article was removed and no harm was done. I will keep this post up as a way to help deter future content thieves. Look everyone, if you’re going to take content, at least don’t steal someone’s bandwidth, and it never hurts to give a credit link. We all make mistakes, but hopefully this will prevent some from happening down the road.

Today I received an email from a reader of Web Design Tuts informing me that someone had republished one my first tutorials on another site. I checked it out, and there it was – my six hours, and 2,000 words of work. I scrolled the page looking for any kind of link or credit to WDT, none. I soon realized that they were even grabbing the images right off of my server, thus taking up my bandwidth!

And THIS, my good people, is why you should NEVER steal online content. I have emailed them and left a comment asking for them to kindly remove the tutorial. Until they do, their readers will see what they have done.

I realize that this happens every day online, but listen everyone: the internet is a community. As bloggers especially, we need to work together to build better websites and put together better content. Stealing is never the right way to go about doing this.

Comments

  1. completely agree. I think unfortunately its a trend that is particuluarly active in the creative section of the internet.

  2. saigee84 says:

    anyways, i love yur tutorials…just keep up the gr8 job !! =)

  3. Probably the site owner hired somebody to write posts and that person was stealing! It’s unpleasant but you can take it also as a compliment…your work is worth stealing!

  4. keidi says:

    I hate copy content. You must add some copyrights. haha

  5. Scyfox says:

    Hit & Run!!

    in this case…. CTRL+C and (ALT+F4)

    hahah

  6. folletos says:

    Muy buen blog de diseño! great blog! thanks from Argentina.

  7. Marko Petkovic says:

    I think you fell for oldest trick in history. Probably he emailed you himself, you published post on your high traffic blog and sent tons of curious visitors to his 404 page.

    He apologized, looking like nice guy now and visitors do not feel he is some scumbag.

    He only forgot to redirect his 404 page to homepage :)

    Best regards from Serbia where we know tricks like this one.

  8. We had trouble with this – websites both stealing text content from our website (not much we can do about that – there were/are literally hundreds doing this) to “website designers” stealing our actual website layout, as well as listing our portfolio and client testimonials as their own! In one case we posted the offending link at http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/?p=1216 and this soon forced them to take it down.

  9. the sketch says:

    thanks for this great post:-)

  10. Well done. Plagiarism is no laughing matter. I’m glad this worked out so well for you.

  11. cool :) …thanks for the post.. thanks for sharing

  12. I have to admit I do sometimes use “foreign-content”, but I usually use only a few lines and then set a link “click here to read further” to the original. I believe that’s just fine.

  13. Bustor says:

    Such things are found out easily and net is one big open source for finding out steals.It is really a waste of time stealing which could be used to draft original content instead.

  14. Content being stolen is becoming a big problem on the web and it seems it will continue as more and more unethical companies use this method to quickly populate clients sites.

  15. Dean says:

    I recently came across your blog. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Very informative and nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

  16. manda says:

    if some site using iframe to your site is that considered as stealing? coz there’s some site that using my site in their iframe…

  17. Xaby says:

    Is it ok to republish your tutorials if full credits are given?

  18. matt says:

    so easy to do…. and tempting when the is so much good content out there…… but like drug just say NO

Trackbacks

  1. [...] luck would have it, they have been caught. Brian left a comment on the post asking for his content to quit being infringed (they didn’t [...]

  2. [...] begin quietly disappearing into the night. This is the generous web, not the selfish web. Reputations get tarnished by stealing content. I am much less likely to trust a blogger who fails to [...]

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