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Copyright | Site Scraping & Content Theft

Criminals are Stealing Your Words: Stop Letting Them!

Holly Jahangiri
7 min readFeb 27, 2021

Bookmark this story, and stop letting thieves profit more from your writing than you do

Photo by Damir Spanic on Unsplash

Scrapers, article spinners, and willful plagiarists are the sworn enemies of all serious writers. Yes, sometimes the fight feels futile and time-wasting; it is tempting to simply let it go.

There is some wisdom in that — by ignoring them, they may well fall into an abyss of anonymity and disappear into the sucking black hole of abandoned websites, while giving them more visits (in order to determine what’s been stolen from us) may encourage them to keep doing it.

It’s the principle of the thing. And eventually, repeat infringers get themselves placed on a number of blacklists that will make it increasingly difficult to find a web hosting company willing to touch them with a ten foot pole. Because when you put their web hosting company on alert, you technically make them a willful infringer, and a potential defendant in a suit for copyright infringement, as well, if they fail to act.

What Can We Do?

First, stop feeling “flattered.” You’re not helping yourself, and you’re not helping other writers. People aren’t stealing your words because they love them; they are…

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Holly Jahangiri
Holly Jahangiri

Written by Holly Jahangiri

Writer and Kid-at-Heart, often found at https://jahangiri.us. Subscribe to my (free!) Newsletter: https://hollyjahangiri.substack.com

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