Content Stealing Jerks

I look at this as a reality that has to be adapted to rather than fought. It would be terribly inconsistent to preach that the MPAA and RIAA have it wrong, and then get in a rut over someone copying your article.<p>Now, to be fair, these guys are trying to make a profit off your articles (unlike the average joe downloading a movie on BT), but I doubt that many are succeeding too well. I have yet to see one of my own successful articles be supplanted by a clone in the Google search results, and sites like Reddit or HN are usually pretty good at rooting out blogspam. These guys are more like poor sods trying to sell a photocopy of your book for $0.10 on the street corner, than like organised pirates making tens of thousands off illegally copied DVDs. Even if one of them occasionally manages to get some real traffic, considering how hard it is to monetise even when it's on your own site, how hard do you think it is for them?<p>Getting angry about this seems, to me, on about the same level as getting angry at someone for paying attention during your speech and then going around giving that speech to others without crediting you. Yeah, so they're copying you. So what? The minute the content leaves your computer and enters the internet, it is publicly available and copiable, in the same way as the moment your speech leaves your lips, anyone with a good memory and delivery can copy it.<p>I'm not one for fighting fundamental reality with papier maché laws. I've summarised my feelings on the topic in my blog's repository, at:<p><a href="http://github.com/swombat/danieltenner.com/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/swombat/danieltenner.com/tree/master</a><p><i>All code is open to use for whatever purpose you have in mind (though I’d prefer if you used it for a good purpose!). You can copy the content and images too (though I’d really rather you didn’t copy the content, or if you do copy some of it, please include a link to my blog). If you want to use the danieltenner.com look/CSS/etc as a basis for your look, that’s fine too (though I’d appreciate it if you evolved it over time rather than keeping it looking exactly the same).</i>

The hacker news community discovers that stealing ain't so cool when it happens to you.<p>Various posters then tie themselves into knots trying explain this double-standard. Proferred reasons why it's ok to steal from musicians, but not from technical authors:<p>- it's not that stealing is per-se wrong, it's the <i>plagiarism</i> that some posters find distasteful. That musicians' primary source of income is removed when piracy is widespread doesn't seem to concern these posters. Their currency is the kudos obtained from producing engaging and informative technical articles. E.g. (greendestiny): "I find the misappropriation of authorship to be much more offensive than acquisition without license." rcoder has this to say: "Because of that, they can still drive real revenue for those artists -- people may initially acquire an album or episodes of a TV show illegally, then go on in the future to pay for new content from the same people." That rcoder finds this theory compelling in the face of the direct and incontrovertible evidence of a 50% decline in record company revenues in 10 years is somewhat surprising.<p>- the RIAA engages in lobbying, and that's evil. Since two wrongs makes a right, it's ok to steal from them and those they represent.<p>I note also that one of the typical arguments given for why recorded music should be free is that "it costs nothing to reproduce". Which is true, although one wonders why this argument doesn't equally apply to any other creative content reproduced on the web. Books, articles, movies, computer code, anything, essentially!<p>I'm a musician/hacker and the "fuck you" attitude so prevalent here towards musicians and artists is really saddening. It's almost that people here expect us to live like paupers because that somehow fits some romantic expectation of how an artist is supposed to live, complete with alcohol problems and living in the gutter. That, or we're expected to make barbie dolls of ourselves or find new, cleverer ways to whore ourselves to ad companies (those that support this method as the only method of sustaining the industry will never be able to explain which ad company would have supported Lou Reed's "Heroin") There is no sympathy or empathy or any trace of human compassion towards this constituency.<p>And this is supposed to be the enlightened, rational hacker community?<p>Frankly watching some of the self-serving argumentation here is sickening. It's watching intelligent people who really should know better engaging in sophistry in order to justify their blatant pilfering of music.

"It's not like Jeff has a copyright on his CSS, javascript, or design"<p>Well, actually he does (and so do you). Most of the world (all the signatories of the Berne Convention, in blue at: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berne_Convention.png" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berne_Convention.png</a>) grant you automatic copyright on anything you create. You don't need to file any paperwork, you don't need to have a little disclaimer, it just happens.<p>Now, usually it isn't worth the trouble of pursuing legal action, but you can.

I always find it interesting when articles like this take the stance that piracy is bad, but articles about copying movies/music/game piracy take the opposite stance (piracy is good).<p>Perhaps I am missing something? Content is content, if someone copies you and shares it without you getting the payola, how is this any different from what happens in the movies/music/game industries?

What do you do? You exercise the rights that deep-pocketed copyright holders have acquired through lobbying Congress.<p>Send a DMCA complaint to the CSJ's ISP or hosting provider. The ISP or hosting provider gets safe harbor from the DMCA, but only if they promptly remove access to the infringing content.

Out of curiosity a question to the HN community at large: how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content? I have been wondering about this in the context of non-watermarked photos/images. How do you prove you were the actual original creator?

One distinction for me between copying an online article and copying music or a game, is that with the latter, people are pirating it because they'd can't otherwise access it. They'd have to pay or inconvenience themselves somehow, so they go for the free version.<p>A piece of online content, assuming it's free, is something anyone can effortlessly access from anywhere.<p>So they may as well go to the original source, reward the author for his work, and not support someone else who's being more parasitic.

Delimitdesign.com are using wordpress with WooThemes' "The Gazette Edition" premium theme: <a href="http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes/page/2" rel="nofollow">http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes/page/2</a><p>They removed the credits from the footer and the css file, so I bet they stole this too (Torrents for this theme are available).

and to think all this is supported by Adsense. Surely to hit them where it hurts is to get G to pull their ads from the site.

I think the idea you propose is a good one, but there is no need for a firefox plug-in.<p>It can just be a site where content providers post side by side articles detailing their content was ripped off. Just as you did. Also the community of said site can thumb up or down the poster's argument; labeling who the real jerk is!

Where are you? The site you referenced in the post is registered in the UK, which may or may not make pursuing copyright infringement feasible.