A couple months ago my boyfriend (Manstery Guest) wrote an article called called 10 Fictional Diners We Want to Eat At and posted it on the food site he manages for the Village Voice. The article didn't quite make it on some of the major social news sites, but it does receive a small amount of traffic via StumbleUpon (it has a one star rating and a couple of reviews). Yesterday someone alerted him to another site that had posted the exact same article in its entirety. This site was receiving a ton of traffic from Reddit and StumbleUpon for an article that was stolen from another site. There wasn't even a mention of credit to the original source or a link back to Daily Fork. It was a rip off, pure and simple.

Irritated, Jason wrote a blog post over at Think Basis called "If You Can't Think of Anything Original, Don't Start a Blog." He also contacted the thieving site and asked the owner to remove the article. The owner ended up removing the images and a good chunk of content but kept the list intact and added a wimpy "For full info and pictures please visit Source of Story on Daily Fork...Thanks!" (As an aside, the site that stole the content is pinging off the charts on the Douche Bag Meter. They seem to steal popular lists and articles from other sites on a regular basis, including this one about the 20 Worst Action Film Stars of All Time from PopCrunch.)

Jason's Think Basis post made it onto Reddit with the title "Some asshat makes it on reddit by plagiarizing my work. Flattering, maybe. Stealing, absolutely." The submission got a ton of upvotes and mixed comments. Some users remarked stuff like, "Who cares, everyone steals," and "That's how professional blogging works" and "If I was the author of this blog post I'd almost be too embarrassed to claim authorship in the first place. It's a fucking list article not Shakespeare." The latter comment is akin to saying that it's wrong to rob a bank but it's okay to take some money out of a 7-11 cash register, as if there are acceptable tiers of theft.

As a frequent writer/content creator/list generator/blogging monkey, I can say that it doesn't matter if I've written a guide, a research paper, a thoughtful blog post, a stupid list, or drawn some idiotic illustration for shits and giggles, I created that content and I'm going to get pissed if I see that someone else has ripped it off and is passing it off as their own. The same thing happened to Matt Inman a few months ago--he created a quiz called "How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?" It did pretty well virally, and a while later I got an IM from one of my social media buddies asking me to upvote a quiz on Reddit. I checked out the quiz and it was virtually the exact same premise as Matt's quiz and even used the graphics Matt had built (the only difference was that the guy who stole the quiz MS Painted a crowbar into the dude's hand). Matt was (understandably) pissed to see that someone had stolen something he built and was reaping the benefits from his work.

If you're writing a list, designing a quiz, illustrating a web comic, etc., you delight in the traffic that your content attracts. I love seeing people react to my content and the links built to it. Having some sleazy jackass just copy and paste your content onto his site and steal traffic and links that could otherwise be going to you is infuriating. Jason's right: if you can't write or don't have an original thought rattling around your brain, don't bother starting a blog. If you want to start a blog but don't fancy yourself a writer, hire some people to write for you. Or you can mention content you found on the web and liked, but LINK TO IT and properly attribute the content like a DECENT HUMAN BEING. Otherwise, you're just ripping off other people's hard work simply because you're too dumb to put together a halfway decent pop culture list in numbered order.

The situation would have been different if the guy emailed Jason to say "Hey, I really liked your list and wanted to feature it on my site," and then they could have worked out some sort of agreement. It's much worse to come across something that you wrote and the site owner never contacted you as if he figured you'd never find out about getting ripped off. To make matters worse, these a-holes can just ignore your requests to remove or edit the content for proper attribution, resulting in DMCA take down requests that may take a long time to get addressed (if they even do at all). It's just a frustrating, stressful situation for a copywriter/content creater to find himself/herself in. It doesn't matter if your content makes you money or if you just write for the hell of it--that content is yours, and people should respect what you've produced.

Now, I know I'm preaching about an Internet world that doesn't exist ("people should get proper credit for their work, dagnabbit, and nobody should steal!"), but I'm sharing my opinion anyway. The bottom line is that you shouldn't be a douchebag and pass off other people's work as your own for your financial gain. It's not hard to attribute authorship and link back to the rightful owner, and it's also not difficult to contact the author in the first place before you plan on doing something with their content. Don't be an asshole...and if you steal my rant post and publish it as your own, I'm gonna get stabby up in here.