Imitation is NOT a Form of Flattery After All

https://www.flickr.com/photos/1024/3407840726/

Recently it came to my attention that a website has been reposting blog posts that I wrote. And they have been doing it for years. The oldest posts of mine on the site were from 2013. On top of that, they had links to download 3 of the books that I’ve written over the years. To add to this, if you go to the website with an ad blocker enabled, they complain that they don’t work for free.

Laptrinhx is stealing

Except that they do, because they steal content that I’ve written as well as hundreds of other authors, possibly thousands given that they are boasting 3.6M posts, most of all of which they didn’t write. But they are getting paid for them based on adversiting.

Now I’ve got a pi-hole setup at home, so they didn’t get any ad-revenue based on my looking through their website so I could get a list of all my posts that they stole from me.

Needless to say, I’m not that impressed that they decided to not only take my hard work as their own, but then they decided to profit off of it.

Needless to say, I’ve submitted a DMCA notice to have the content that DCAC owns the Copywrite for removed from their servers. But it appears that they are hosted by Google, so my DMCA notice probably isn’t going to do much. But there are several big companies that will be able to weigh in including Microsoft, Elsevier (my book publisher), Databricks and others I’m sure.

Laptrinhx’s Twitter Header

Laptrinhx appears to have a Twitter account, but it doesn’t appear to have any followers as it’s been around since 2009, has 5800+ tweets and 12 whole followers.

Don’t be like Laptrinhx, don’t be a thief

If you are a fan of someone’s posts, there are a few things that you can do.

  1. Add them to the blog role on your site so that other people can go and to their site and read their posts.
  2. 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.

If you want to see the massive take down that I filed with Google, it’s here.

Denny

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20 Responses

  1. Hello, this website is also stealing my content, how can I stop them?

    I have tried to ban their ips from using my RSS but to no avail as they use Cloudflare and such.

  2. There’s not much you can do. The people that are running the site don’t seem to care. You can submit DCMA takedown notices to their hosting provider if you are in the US, but they are hosted by Google, so that probably won’t be very effective (I’ve received no response about the one that I submitted so far).

  3. Accreditation doesn’t equal permission. Even with a link back they are still posting copywritten works without permission. Same thing if they posted a copy of the PDF of one of my books (which they are doing).

    It’s the as of I posted a copy of a picture that someone posted on Flickr.

  4. They publish automated content using RSS feed. My feed only show excerpts and one photo, so they don’t steal the complete content. They link to the source, but not directly to avoid giving “juice” to the source.

    If the data from Similarweb is reliable, they are doing pretty well with over one million pageviews per month, probably without writing any content themselves.

  5. They don’t link to your site. They list me as the author but my name links to a page they maintain that lists me as one of their authors. Can anyone figure out who actually owns this content thief?

  6. I wasn’t able to find out anything useful about them. And I had no luck with GDPR takedown notices. Their host (Google) doesn’t appear to care. I would assume because they have a ton of ads on the page.

  7. Thanks for the heads-up on this! Looks like they’re stealing a ton of stuff from a lot of people. Including me!

    When you say they’re hosted by Google what do you mean? What part of Google?

    And their Twitter account is now suspended.

  8. Not a clue. Cloudfare referred me to Google. GCP I’d assume?

    Good to know that the Twitter account is suspended.

  9. Hi Denny,

    Ack. Add me to the list. They have stolen my last 38 posts. It looks like they got the feed off of facebook. That was getting posted automatically through jetpack. So, yes, it’s an RSS feed. I disabled that and just posted a new post and yep. No new post from me on the thief’s site.

    There has to be a way to stop this criminal.

  10. Hi Again,

    Well, I actually looked at one of my posts on that site. It feels so awful. But, all of the links, that link back to my posts do get redirected to my website. That’s a bit of good news, I believe. What would really suck the big petunia is if what he’s doing is f**king with my and other people’s SEO. Plus, there’s the duplicate content issue. I don’t know about these days, but several years ago, that was a big no-no.

    I’m established. Google knows the posts are mine. I’ve written over 800 blog posts and five e-books over the last 9 years. This is my life and livelihood.

  11. Laurel,
    Welcome to the IT side of the world. Sadly this isn’t the first time that I’ve had to deal with this, but it is the hardest to get taken care of. I haven’t gotten any responses from their host (Google) to date. I’m not sure if anyone else on this thread has either. Some information about submitting a takedown request to Google is here. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en

    Good luck. 🙁

  12. Yep, they’re nicking my blog content too.

    Is there anything those of us outside the US can do? They’ve stolen not only my words by photographs too which is frustrating, though I assume they probably don’t really get that many viewers of said stolen content, which just makes it all the more baffling. I mean i’m a small niche content creator with not that many views and barely any ad revenue so why on earth steal my content? It’s not worth anything to anyone else!

  13. Monkfish, I see from your website that you’re from the UK. I would think a GDPR violation notice might get their (and their hosting companies’ attention). Since they also took your photo’s I would assume that you could file some sort of Copywrite claim against them. I’m not sure what that would look like since I’m not a lawyer.

    Good luck, and welcome to our club of annoyed people. 🙁

  14. Looks like they are gone from Google.
    A search for “laptrinhx” only shows third-party sources.
    Good. Once I complained to Google. They told me I’d better focus on improving my website before caring about what my “competitors” do.

  15. I finally decided to do something about them. According to Cloudflare, their hosting provider is now Contabo Asia Private Limited. Contabo is a German company which is apparently known for ignoring abuse mails. Under German law, the hosting provider is liable for copyright infringements of their customers if they don’t act on reports. I’ll send them an abuse mail and will see whether they reply.

    The site is indeed gone from Google, but it is being displayed quite prominently by Bing. So I’ve reported a bunch of my articles there as well.

    1. Wladimir,
      Please let us know if you have any success with their hosting company or German law. I suspect that they chose that hosting company for a reason. If you can let us all know who to contact that’d be fantastic.
      Denny

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