Yesterday I saw this tweet from Stephen Foskett:
Dear @YourDailyTechUS,
— Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) December 2, 2015
You appear to rip off whole articles from a wide variety of sources. Is your business model based on plagiarism?
Which spurred a discussion back and forth, with a few rather interesting statements from yourdailytech.com, like this one
@h0bbel @SFoskett Our goal is to provide our readers with relevant information and content writers with a wider audience.
— YourDailyTech (@YourDailyTechUS) December 2, 2015
The problem is that they take original content from other sites, and republish it on their own. At first glance, you’ll see Angelica as the author, even if they claim that that’s not the intention. It just happens to be that user account that published the reproduced content, like this one 5 Key Aspects for Safe Virtualization – The original author is mentioned in the article itself, in this case Camilo Gutierrez Amaya published on www.welivesecurity.com. For all I know YourDailyTech has an official partnership with welivesecurity.com, but I don’t see any information about that on the site itself.
So, what’s the problem? Well, in a nutshell what yourdailytech.com is doing is copyright infringement. Pure and simple, just have a look at the very definition of copyright infringement (from Wikipedia)
Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright law without permission, infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works.
By also adding their own ads on their “recycled” content, they are not only republishing content without permission but they are also monetizing it for their own benefit. Some of the original content owners have even paid for the content, only to have someone else republish it. Bad as this might be, the problems don’t stop there. Google punishes duplicate content, and in the worst cases it might even de-list sites that engage in it. So in YourDailyTech’s quest to connect “content writers with a wider audience.” they risk punishing the original content creators in the process.
After yesterdays discuss on Twitter, yourdailytech.com has published “an apology” called An Open Letter to Our Readers and yet again, there are several problems:
“We are deeply sorry for any ill feelings we caused by posting articles from authors without their knowledge. “
– So, they openly admit to copyright infringement, but only because they thought content creators would benefit from it. Why would anyone believe that?
“To be perfectly clear, we in no way monetized and/or profited from the hard work they put in to creating great content.”
– So, the ads the pages of your stolen content are there by accident?
“We have NEVER misled anyone into believing a YourDailyTech employee was the original author and never will.”
– Well, if you have a look at http://yourdailytech.com/author/angelica/ it even mentions Angelica as the author right in the URL itself. I would call that misleading.
The open letter is even signed by Philip Reid, but the author of the article is … Angelica. The apology seems to written as a response to being caught, nothing else.
I’m sorry, but there is no way to take a company (?) that behaves like this seriously. What YourDailyTech is doing is pure theft, and I urge anyone who find their own content republished on that site to file a Cease and Desist order, a DMCA request and publicly shame YourDailyTech.
Note: As far as I know, none of my own content has been ripped this way. I just feel sorry for the people that YourDailyTech abuses in this manner.
Update: #
If you want to check if your own content has been ripped, do a Google search for site:yourdailytech.com
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