About Those Content Stealers on the Internet

I hate it when this happens. Content stealers are everywhere on the Internet, it seems. For the second time this year, one of my feature article was blatantly stolen just to be re-posted on some obscure website called “Cobold”. Because my original article contains links to my previously published articles on my main blog, here on WordPress, I got a notification to approve a backlink. This is how it came to my attention. I declined. Obviously.

I probably shouldn’t give these guys more exposure than they deserve, yet, it’s frustrating. First published on Numeric Citizen I/O yesterday, I submitted my article to the “Start It Up” publication on Medium, which they kindly accepted to republish this morning. So, the guys behind Cobold, took that article out of Medium’s paywall for re-posting it on their shitty website, in a matter of minutes.

On the first occasion, I wrote a take-down notice to the provided email contact information accompanying each stolen articles. I didn’t get a response and the article wasn’t removed. Looking who is behind the domain name with Whois doesn’t help much; the registrant contact is being obfuscated. The registrar is located in Ontario, Canada. There is nothing more that I can do to find the real guys behind this.

Trying to find a positive side of this story this morning is that I think I wrote a good piece, good enough for re-publication on Medium’s Start it Up publication with more than 700K readers, and good enough to be stolen. Nonetheless, I hate this quote: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. To all content stealers on the internet: fuck you.

Feature image: Luis Villasmil / Unsplash