Seriously, there’s enough clutter already without people starting up blogs to just cut and paste other people’s material. It’s kind of like asking someone to watch your cam copy of a movie when they’ve already got their own copy of the DVD.
Today I was alerted by someone that one of the articles I published on the food site Daily Fork had been blatantly plagiarized by a site called All Top Movies. At first I assumed it was one of those sites that pretty much republishes articles in their entirety, but at least has the courtesy to include the author’s name and a link back to the original source (the online equivalent of leaving a little bit of cash on top of the dresser). Unfortunately, in this instance absolutely no effort was made to either link to the original or give me credit for my work. It’s posted as if it’s their own original content, when in fact, I’d argue it looks pretty sloppy when compared to the original.
The article in question is a stupid little list on 10 Fictional Diners and you can see the impressive placement the story is getting on their site.
Flattering...but still stealing.
After doing a little bit of digging I found the following statement on their about page:
Alltopmovies.com does not claim to own exclusive rights on all posts, images and videos published. All sources we use to create our articles are and will be credited with a proper linkback. However, we are hosting a lot of uncredited material from unknown authors we recieved via mails, from friends and our readers. If you own copyrights to some material such as images or data and you want us to remove it from our pages, contact us to claim your ownership and we will either credit you and your website, or if you wish – completely remove the content.
Sure, I get it, you can’t always track down the original source of something a person sends your way. However, I’d argue a quick google search would be a decent starting point to see if you could pinpoint exactly where the article you’re about to steal came from.
See how easy that is? It's almost like magic.
It seems like All Top Movies is basically just saying, we’ll steal whatever we want and if you don’t like it, ask us to take it down. Obviously I’ve already contacted them and asked that the article be removed, however, I think the more important issue is, if you don’t have anything worth writing about, don’t start a blog in the first place. Asshole.
UPDATE: The list on All Top Movies has now been updated to include a link to the original article at Daily Fork, and the pictures and text have been removed.
However, articles like this are still being posted when the original would be easy to find and provide with proper credit. Also, for some reason in this example they actually took the time to include “seen on AllTopMovies.com” to each of the images. Presumably so no one would steal their hard work.
