 Blog thieves
Thursday, 12 January 2006
Q: When is a blog not a blog?
A: When the content is simply stolen, verbatim.
Investment Banking Central is one of those dodgy internet outfits which specialise in stealing other peoples content and posting it on their own website.
Take a look at their stolen article, for instance:
Early-stage investor HLM Venture Partners added some notches to its belt this month after two of its portfolio companies were acquired for a combined $963 million. The deals come at a critical juncture for the Boston-based firm, as its partners are actively marketing their health care and biotechnology investing prowess to prospective backers in a new $200 million venture fund. HLM has already closed, or secured, $115 million in commitments in the new fund and hopes to complete its fund raising early next year.
Then take a look at the original article from Business Journals:
Early-stage investor HLM Venture Partners added some notches to its belt this month after two of its portfolio companies were acquired for a combined $963 million. The deals come at a critical juncture for the Boston-based firm, as its partners are actively marketing their health care and biotechnology investing prowess to prospective backers in a new $200 million venture fund. HLM has already closed, or secured, $115 million in commitments in the new fund and hopes to complete its fund raising early next year.
No difference, that I can see.
Why would they so blatantly rip off someone else’s work? Because there’s money in it for them. Using automated blog “scraping” software, thieves such as Investment Banking Central are harvesting content for a blog of their own, in order to earn advertising revenue.
If you look closely at their stolen articles, they typically use phrases like “to read more, visit” which point to the original, so at first glance their website even looks authentic. After all, they are not only including a link to the original article, you have to click on the link to read the full text.
So, what’s wrong with it?
Not only is it plagiarism but these scoundrels are making money out of it.
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This seems like one of those "gray" areas and one could argue that websites like Investment Banking Central provide a "portal" service of sorts and simply provide links to articles elsewhere. I agree however, that because it's not clear to the public that all they do is provide a linking service, their service is "dodgy", as you eloquently put it.
I don’t worry about content thieves that much anymore. Most of the time when someone takes an article from one of our sites they at least provide a link back to the site and I have to wonder how many people are reading our content on our site versus the number that read it elsewhere? I’m guessing not that many even bother to read it elsewhere and if they do and like it, there is a good chance they will come to the original source and stick around. In a twisted form of logic when we complain about content thieves (the ones that provide proper attribution) we are acting like Sony who doesn’t want their content being seen in as many places as possible.