A website is systematically stealing loads of articles published on DEV, this is what you can and should do about such infringements.
A short ti...
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Well made article! It reminds me of a time, about 6 months ago, when I published a post on dev.to, then reposted it on medium but before I reposted it, another website stole my article without even mentioning me. Now, I couldn't really care less, until the day after I reposted my article on medium, medium banned my account because they thought I stole the article from the website that actually stole it from me. Long story short, I wrote to medium, they fixed it, but what's really interesting is that my stolen article was ranking like 5 places higher on google than my original.
Thanks! Glad to hear it turned out well for you in the end.
Wow that is interesting. Did medium banned the account that stole your article?
@perssondennis I believe I found some of my DEV posts on a site that is most likely the one you refer to here. Looks like they just randomly replace words here and there. They didn't even notice that one of the posts in question was specifically about DEV and wouldn't really make sense on other sites. I just submitted reports to Google. I was wondering what your thoughts on reporting to the hosting provider for this specific site? Any sense of whether it will be effective in this case since you've already experienced this site's blatant infringement.
Hello Vincent, I would guess it's the same site. I have seen a couple of sites like this, but this one is the only one I know replacing words like that.
I did never report the site to the hosting provider when I wrote this article. I have only reported a few stolen articles to google, and they do remove them.
I did look up the hosting provider though, but didn't go any further because both their support and contact page is behind a login screen. You can find the hosting provider by searching for the site on whois and look at the name servers. The hosting provider's site has a blue theme. I won't mention their name here since it's not good publicity.
However, I did get a bit curious now when you asked about it. So I decided to simply ask them in their chat on their website. Turns out their terms of service forbid copyright infringement and when asking if they would take down such a site they answered:
They told me reports should be emailed to abuse@THEIR_WEBSITE_NAME.com or support@THEIR_WEBSITE_NAME.com.
Hard to tell if they would take the whole site down, but I'm sure they at least would help to remove articles you own the copyright to.
Thanks for detailed reply. I did look up their host via whois. I suspect it is the same site. Your description of theme of host website matches. Google removed 1 from search results already. The other requests are listed as approved, just not removed yet. Ironically the one case was a post I made yesterday where the DEV version isn't even indexed yet.
Ah I see :) The indexing happened for me too, neither DEV or my blog was visible, only the fraud copy. I simply requested a new indexing of my site at search console and now mine show on top :)
This is an interesting post. Thanks for the info. I would also recommend you to publish your article to multiple other sites with your original canonical link ( POSSE) quickly after you publish the original. This AFAIK should increase the legitimacy of your article and there by make the leech articles to come down on search engines. Do correct me if I am wrong here.
Another interesting aspect others should think about ( not the author since his work is copyrighted) is license. If you use Creative commons licenses, make sure you use Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) or Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND. Every other licenses in CC AFAIK lets you make derivatives. All they have to do is attribute you. Which doesn't enforce linking it as canonical links. You will lose traffic here as well.
Great point there with licenses, that's something people often forget to think about :)
That seems terrible :(
Did anybody else experience the high ranking of cheap StackOverflow clones, that are replicating all the threads as well? Seems to be a Trend nowadays.
I don't like pay/subscription walls, but have the impression, that they may become handy for decreasing the amount of such infringements. And suddenly the World Wide Web becomes the accumulation of Group Wide Webs. (Not all) people are evil.
Ya, I have seen a StackOverflow clone once or twice recently. Not more than that. I'm surprised to see they getting ranked so high though.
This sounds terrible, Dennis. I'll go ahead and subscribe to the replies. I'm curious if someone has other ideas 💡
Yeah it is quite terrible actually. Visiting the site on a phone without an adblocker prompts for notifications and shows popups about the phone being in danger. Definitely not a legit site.
screenshot of the site here.
Wow didn’t know about all this thanks for sharing it.