4 ways to fight content thieves

Last year, I received an alert on a blog post that was picked up by PR Daily.

The blog that had linked to my post was for an ad agency’s blog, and it was a complete scrape of my content. I commented on every post that was mine with things such as, “You can’t scrape a blogger’s content and not attribute correctly” or “Boy, this blog post sure looks familiar.” An editor at PR Daily called the agency’s owner.

You know what he said? He said, “We have an intern running the blog. Sorry.”

Within 30 minutes, the entire blog was taken down. It’s never been republished. This was for a very large ad agency that should know better. And the CEO blamed the intern.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where content is scraped. In the best situations, the person just didn’t know adding your byline without your permission isn’t okay. In the worst, pure laziness prevails and all of the content is stolen.

It happens to every content producer, no matter how many readers you have or how many people share your content.

You sort of accept that robots do it—the crappy little websites that are still trying to do search engine optimization the old way. When it’s shocking is when people who should know better do it.