To whom it may concern:
I get it. Making content day in and day out is tough; the constant pace of creation necessary to remain relevant today can really take it out of you. I would know; it’s what I do.
In all my years of writing content for the tech industry, however, I have never resorted to outright posting someone else’s content as my own. You’ve probably read one or two of my other favorites posts, and while they do reference some of the other blogs from around the industry, I do my best to add in my own take and flavor to the topic at hand.
When Imitation is NOT a Form of Flattery
There are others in the tech blogging space who don’t agree with me. Laptrinhx, I’m looking at you. This “blog,” if you can call it that, has over 3 million posts on their site, all of which gaining revenue from paid ad space. Seems like a normal-ish blog, right?
Wrong. Instead of going through the same process as everyone — ideating, drafting, reviewing, and posting new content on a daily basis — the slimy folks over at Laptrihnx have subscribed to about every RSS feed in the tech industry, and post them all on their own blog. Oh, so they’re just like a news aggregator then?
Well, you’d be wrong there, too. Laptrinhx posts “their content” as if it was coming from them, with no attribution or even rel:canonical tags to promote the sites they’re stealing from. Instead, they just keep raking in ad money while hard-working creators churn out blogs for them to keep stealing.
Laptrihnx, Stop Stealing Our Blogs
One such creator is Denny Cherry, CEO of Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting, Tech Field Day delegate, and friend of Gestalt IT. Like us, Denny’s blogs are actively being stolen by Laptrihnx. In fact, he was the first person to alert us to the fact that they were stealing our content.
In his own blog shining light on this dark situation, Cherry writes:
If you are a fan of someone’s posts, there are a few things that you can do.
- Add them to the blog role on your site so that other people can go and to their site and read their posts.
- Blog about them, and point your readers to their site.
The one thing you don’t ever do is post their content on your site. It isn’t your content, you don’t get to post it.
It seems simple, right? Just give content creators the recognition they deserve and stop stealing their blogs. It’s like, the golden rule of blogging.
You can read the rest of Cherry’s response, including his massive DMCA takedown at his blog, Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting. And, in the meantime, maybe stop stealing people’s blogs. Seriously, Laptrihnx, you know who you are. Just stop.
