A bunch of scraper sites are automatically reposting blog posts from my site. Not just my own work, but that of guest bloggers and Stuart who draws the fantastic images that go with them. I am devastated by this, and doubly devastated by the fact that I can’t seem to get it taken down, despite repeated emails and reports to their domain provider, hosting provider, and others. So please do me a favour: if you are reading this blog post anywhere other than on Girl on the Net – the url is girlonthenet.com – please leave the site and come read it here instead.
Why does this matter? After all, it’s just copy/pasting some words, and I am certain the sites that are doing it get far less traffic than I do. The proportion of people reading my work there is probably very small when compared to the volume of traffic I get here. But ‘probably very small’ should really be ‘zero.’
What my words are worth
I don’t want to be a precious princess, but I have to assert that my words are valuable. They are literally the means by which I earn money – whether here or elsewhere. I earn money in a variety of different ways (advertising, freelance writing, consultancy for sex industry companies, Patreon, books, and no doubt a few other random bits that I’ve forgotten to list here). But pretty much all my money comes, in some form, from my words.
When you steal those words you’re effectively stealing my primary means of making a living: fuck you.
Alongside the scraper sites, there’s another website that has recently published some of my work but in a more roundabout way – it’s been badly edited from something I wrote years ago, and peppered with shoehorned links for adult toys. This is also not fucking OK, especially because the post itself documents something intimate and hot that I specifically asked the person involved if he was happy for me to share. Stealing it isn’t just a breach of my consent, but of his. Devastated doesn’t begin to cover it.
Not only are my words valuable, they’re also deeply personal. I am sharing stories about people I love, intimate moments, sex fantasies and kinks. I have written about relationship counselling, struggles with anxiety, body image worries, and a whole bunch of other things that I would likely not write – at least in that way – for an external publication.
It’s important to me that some of the more personal stuff is framed here, on my site, where I have editorial control of how it’s presented and what appears around it. I don’t want, for example, to write a post about the complex notion of virginity and have it surrounded by porn ads for ‘virgin teen anal’, for example. I don’t want to write about changes to the Gender Recognition Act and have some fuckhead plaster it on a porn site that’s covered with ads that refer to trans performers in shitty ways.
It’s not just that I don’t want my words taken out of context: I don’t want my words taken at all.
If you’re reading this on any site other than girlonthenet.com, it has been stolen. I have not given permission for anyone to lift content directly from my website. I am currently pursuing the sites that are stealing my content, and I will continue to do so until they stop nicking my words, the words of guest bloggers, and the images drawn here by Stuart and other talented guest artists.
It’s hard to write this blog post, because I am simmering with rage and frustration. I am pursuing both of these companies, and I’ll continue to do it until they take my work down. But every hour I spend doing this is an hour I could be spending creating new stuff. So my new work suffers because people are stealing the work I’ve done in the past.
Read my work for free, but please don’t fuck me over
I want the vast majority of my work to be available for free. Ideally, I would like everything I write to be free to the reader (or listener in the case of audio porn), with that work supported by those with deeper pockets (i.e. sponsor companies), so that it is always available for anyone with a net connection to access. That’s not 100% true right now – you have to pay for my books, and there are a couple of stories up on my Patreon as extra perks that haven’t been told on the blog before – but it’s close. I will always do my best to keep things that way.
Feel free to read, share links, copy short extracts and link back to me, etc etc. But don’t nick my fucking work. And if you see other people nicking my work, please tell me.
10 Comments
Please contact me if there is any way I can help, or tell us all if there is a way we, your readers, can additionally assist you.
“Simmering with rage and frustration” is right.
I am proud to own both your books, and intent to snap up any more you publish.
Blessed be. Until such time, all time be time.
Bless you – thanks. Much obliged for your offer of help though to be honest I’m not sure there’s much anyone can do at this point. I will keep plugging away and I’ll update this post when anything actually happens. Appreciate your support a lot, thank you! <3
This absolutely sucks. The only good(ish) thing is Google seems to penalise these sites for duplicate content quite quickly so they effectively disappear. I’ve had tonnes of images scraped over the years but the scrapers tend to be short lived.
Sorry for your trouble!
Thanks, yeah I realise they won’t ever be as big as I am because of the dupe content thing. I’d rather they just fucked off right now though tbh =) I might have found a place to send a new DMCA takedown though so fingers crossed that’ll work
How about shutting down your RSS feed? It kills me to say it since I love RSS, but no scraper-bot in its right mind would bother scraping your raw HTML. Make their jobs difficult. :)
Appreciate you’re trying to be helpful, but I have considered and rejected a lot of stuff already and I have thought about this a fair bit. Shutting down RSS might stop scrapers, but like some of the other options, it also destroys user experience for some other users, and I’m not down with that. Anything which will either limit my traffic or make life harder for users isn’t really an option, because of the whole ‘I want my stuff to be easy for people to access’ thing.
Nothing pisses me off more than getting burned. So much so that it worries me. I could see myself doing time over someone stealing from me. Your reaction is much healthier than mine might be. While I don’t remembering your listing of the ways you earn your money, I have always admired your business acumen.
It does shine through!
Haha my business acumen is quite shit tbh. If I were better at business I’d definitely be earning more £££. Thanks though!
The money counts, but not for everything. I think you must be very well thought of in your chosen ‘industry’. As time goes by and business ebbs and flows, someday someone you have done business with for years will validate your life as honestly and well led. It WILL happen.
This made me very angry indeed – on your behalf, I should say, not at you!
Through your fluency, thoughtfulness and power of expression I’d like to think that I have some idea of how hard you work, and how brave you are to make some of your thoughts and opinions public. So I too would be furious at the idea that someone would be simply copying the hard-written words you’ve come up with, and/or totally altering their thoughtful context with random ads! I’m sorry this is happening, both for the impact it’s having on you, and also because it doesn’t say much for the world in general, that it’s able to happen. I dearly hope that you get some success in removing the objectionable material; your work is valuable and precious; you, and it, deserve much better.