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Out of curiosity a question to the HN community at large: how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you

by mustpax 18y ago

Out of curiosity a question to the HN community at large: how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content? I have been wondering about this in the context of non-watermarked photos/images. How do you prove you were the actual original creator?

martey 18y ago
Couldn't you use archiving websites like the Internet Archive, or RSS readers that save content (like Google Reader or Bloglines)?
tokenadult 18y ago
"how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content?" I defend myself by embedded comments, and sometimes by fictitious entries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry that mark my work as plainly my own. I learned a story about this when I was in school. In World War I, the Heast newspaper chain appeared to be copying Associated Press stories from the eastern front, and the AP started running stories about a Russian general Nelotsky who was enjoying great success against the Germans. Pretty soon the Hearst newspapers picked up the story too, and then AP revealed that "Nelotksy" was a completely fictitious name of a nonexistent person, based on a reversal of the spelling of the word "stolen." I was able to catch a plagiarist red-handed with a similar technique. I will say that I like the post-Google era better than I liked the era of the hand-edited Yahoo directory, as Yahoo's original directory pointed to my site in one category, but also pointed to a very blatant plagiarist of some of my best content from another category. Since Google page rank has ordered search results, generally people who search for content on the issues I write about best are able to find my site first, not the plagiarists.
kpanghmc 18y ago
It's funny that you bring this up, because that's exactly what Delimitdesign is trying to do now that they have caught wind of my post (I'm the author). They modified the post slightly to make it look less like a copy/paste job and modified the posting date back about 10 months so that it would appear to have been put up before mine. Too bad I was able to get screenshots of Google cache showing the post before it was altered. :-) If not for that, I'm not entirely sure how I would fight it. Maybe base it off of timestamps on sites like hacker news? Even then it's not a perfect solution since they could argue they simply didn't post a link to their article on the site until later.

by mustpax 18y ago

martey 18y ago

Couldn't you use archiving websites like the Internet Archive, or RSS readers that save content (like Google Reader or Bloglines)?

tokenadult 18y ago

"how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content?" I defend myself by embedded comments, and sometimes by fictitious entries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry that mark my work as plainly my own. I learned a story about this when I was in school. In World War I, the Heast newspaper chain appeared to be copying Associated Press stories from the eastern front, and the AP started running stories about a Russian general Nelotsky who was enjoying great success against the Germans. Pretty soon the Hearst newspapers picked up the story too, and then AP revealed that "Nelotksy" was a completely fictitious name of a nonexistent person, based on a reversal of the spelling of the word "stolen." I was able to catch a plagiarist red-handed with a similar technique. I will say that I like the post-Google era better than I liked the era of the hand-edited Yahoo directory, as Yahoo's original directory pointed to my site in one category, but also pointed to a very blatant plagiarist of some of my best content from another category. Since Google page rank has ordered search results, generally people who search for content on the issues I write about best are able to find my site first, not the plagiarists.

kpanghmc 18y ago

It's funny that you bring this up, because that's exactly what Delimitdesign is trying to do now that they have caught wind of my post (I'm the author). They modified the post slightly to make it look less like a copy/paste job and modified the posting date back about 10 months so that it would appear to have been put up before mine. Too bad I was able to get screenshots of Google cache showing the post before it was altered. :-) If not for that, I'm not entirely sure how I would fight it. Maybe base it off of timestamps on sites like hacker news? Even then it's not a perfect solution since they could argue they simply didn't post a link to their article on the site until later.