I'm not at all sensitive about privatising my blog, or making it somehow kind of exclusive. It's not that big a deal - if someone reads it and likes it then, good; if they don't like it then they can move on and do something else. If they protest in a comment, then I can please myself whether I publish the comment, and it's all just part of the blog world.
Like many others, I get a bit fed up with the constant lifting of bits of my labours into TMP, but since the combined attention span of TMP is minimal it doesn't matter much, and occasionally someone who comes across my blog through that channel does what I would think of as the normal thing to do, and makes human, friendly contact. [In fact, of late, the borrowed bits of this blog on TMP which appear under the "authorship" of Tango01 have also carried a house official legend identifying the original source - could it be that TMP's views on decency and intellectual property are somehow evolving? Who knows? Who cares, actually?]
Occasionally I find that chunks of my blog are on Pinterest - I am unmoved. On one occasion I was surprised to find that I could purchase a mug or a poster from some on-line pirate, bearing a photo which was actually mine, and was pinched from here. Again - so what?
And then there is LaptrinhX.
If you visit their site, laptrinhx.com, you may find, if you search for your Blogger ID, that you are one of their featured contributors. I was very impressed to find that some 800-odd posts from Prometheus in Aspic - credited to MSFoy - have simply been stolen, intact. They are reformatted, though not changed otherwise; the comments are dropped, but there they are. This is, supposedly, a news and job-advertising online journal for software developers, and they feature paid adverts which, presumably, generate revenue per hit.
I'm not awfully upset about this, to be honest, my material is in the public domain, and I realise that the pinching is done by a robot somewhere, so I am neither flattered nor personally very offended, but - for better or worse - this blog is all me own werk, Miss, and if someone generates advertising revenue for themselves and their poxy website by using my original thought and images, without any pretence of a by-your-leave, then I find that less than amusing. Thus I felt it was only appropriate to name them in this blog post, and see if it, too, is lifted intact.
Naturally, I wish to offend no-one, but thought it would be appropriate if I were to mention here that, in my opinion, LaptrinhX, their owners, advertisers, bots and readership are all a bunch of sad little wankers; please publish this. I hope they enjoy reading about themselves here today. Consider it an experimental work-out for their editing software.
I’m confused by the economics of that jobshite you mention. Do the stolen blog posts attract people to look at the job adverts, or keep readers on the site longer? I’m a bear little brain and don’t understand this malarkey.
ReplyDeleteI get the picture theft and how the thieves monetise that by flogging merch. You should take poorer quality photos so they aren’t useful 😆.
When I worked in IT, our in-house client-server network was braced by firewalls and other stuff which blocked sites which might encourage our staff to spend the whole day reading about other jobs they might apply for. I imagine that the implantation of mobile devices into our society makes it impossible to apply any control at all now [which may have some bearing on the fact that UK productivity is the lowest in the known world, but that's another matter].
DeleteAfter I stopped working in IT, for a while I published and managed a local community magazine, which had to pay its way (as a non-profit), and the philosophy of balancing the content to keep it viable was interesting (at least to someone who, like me, had never really thought about it before). Maybe this is all obvious - I didn't find it so; you could just fill 24 pages with local ads every month, but no-one would read it, no ads would come to anyone's attention, and the advertisers would vote with their feet. The End.
It was necessary to include local council news, calendars of events, a free community page and some "entertainment" - the vicar would write a monthly article on the history of the parish, a local expert would contribute a seasonal guide for gardeners, there would be a recipe, a quiz, a list of useful phone numbers...
That way, I learned, people would hang on to the thing, and even read it. When old Mrs McPherson in Walker Terrace checked to see if she'd won last month's quiz, she might notice an ad for a very useful plumber at the bottom of the page. All this must be intuitive and obvious to the newspaper editors of this world, but to me (who had only visited this world previously if it was absolutely essntial) it was a useful education.
Thus [digression over] anyone wanting IT people to keep their site open, to maximise advertising income, must offer them something to graze, apart from the ads. Nobody reads ads.
It seems that the website (blog?) in question just fills its blank space by trawling the public domain - it is more than a little sad if they just stuff it with crap like Prometheus, but hey. I would be happy if I was selling hard-drive space for big daft servers, I guess.
What really grates is that this topic is right on one of my nerve-ends. Apart from the constant search for that dream job in IT (which is always somewhere else), it is a feature of our times that the real utopia is to invent a role where we suck in advertising money and contribute absolutely nothing - at all - for the good of mankind or society. Maybe LaptrinhX is highly thought of, and improves the quality of its readers' lives - maybe that is not entirely commercially disastrous for the readers' current employers. I am proud to say that I wouldn't know.
There is some philosophical point about society in here, which I can't quite put my finger on; if it is everyone's ambition to become a parasite, there must still be someone that they can live off, someone still doing something useful. All too clever for me.
Your first paragraph in this reply got me worried. Does that include people who might be reading wargames blogs when they should be working? Not that I know anyone that does that, of course.
DeleteThis issue is, you will understand, far above my Luddite head, but I wonder if these are the same people who keep telling me about Sexy Ingrid in the Ukraine and the Dyson vacuum cleaner I've won? Tim Berners-Lee must despair at what happened to the www he invented.
It is disappointing. What is the point of free speech when no bastard has anything useful to say anyway? I am pleased never to have seen the Dark Web, nor the race-hate sites in the US, but I have seen the fan pages on the Manchester Utd website, and I have to say the police state is long overdue. Bring it on. That nice Mr Trump is looking for a new job, isn't he?
DeleteOoh, does that mean I can buy my wife a new mug with your soldiers on it! Yes please 👍🏼
ReplyDeleteHi Marc - I guess that's right. She'll be thrilled. I'm pretty sure that, if you look for it, you will probably find that you can buy a mug with pictures of your own soldiers too - join the club!
DeleteActually, I believe you have sussed that this is all an April Fool scam - I actually run the LaptrinhX site myself, in a desperate attempt to get someone to read my blog. This is where Facebook went wrong - too much genuine content in with the rubbish.
Too much good quality content matey. Fill it with crap like mine and no one will bother. Lol.
ReplyDeleteThank you sir - you won't be laughing when your adventures in France are serialised on TV...
Delete😂
Delete😳
DeleteI admit I get mildly annoyed/amused when I search the net for some obscure bit of uniform or battle information and get presented with pictures from my blog. Usually not terribly relevent ones.
ReplyDeleteIt is useful though, not only does it remind me of how careful you have to be about what a search turns up, but it also sometimes reminds me that I've done this or that before or at least provides a nostalgic moment.
Whole posts though, hmm, don't remember coming across any. Oh dear....not considered a source of useful or interedting information by bots..oh dear oh dear ....
I have always strived to make my blog as uninteresting as possible, so as not to attract the flies. Maybe I have achieved something which is so boring it's actually worth checking out. That's not unlike what happened to my attempt to be the only person on the planet who was not a celebrity.
DeleteRoss and Tony,
DeleteI hope that you don't mind me 'cutting in'?
We could all do a service to humanity in this respect if we boycotted Pintrest. They are the worst example of plagiarists that I have seen. In fact often locking access to the original location from which the images were nicked.
James
I didn't realise Pinterest were as sneaky as that. I rarely, if ever, follow Google searches which get me to Pinterest - I usually find that you don't get to the picture you wanted, you get somewhere else!
DeletePinterest is weird...
DeleteTony, they seem to be quite the prolific plagiarists:
ReplyDeletehttps://medium.com/@jeffthewriter/i-found-this-site-too-a-couple-of-days-ago-https-laptrinhx-com-authors-4347fd9977a1
https://www.dcac.com/blog/imitation-is-not-a-form-of-flattery-after-all-fck-laptrinhx
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/why-does-cloudflare-allow-https-laptrinhx-com-to-use-its-nameservers/231817
On the other side of things, I never got upset about Raúl's (Tango01) posting of links of posts that I have done. He has always written 'original post' with a clear link and one sees the bump in hundreds of page views. (On the other hand I found the nob who was hiding behind the pseudonym of 'blog police' to be a right pain in the proverbial). In fact I have thanked Raúl on several occasions for bringing awareness of content to a group, many of whom inhabit a single forum only. The really strange thing is that while 'traffic' is drawn to the blog, none comment there. The few who do comment do so in the 'safe house' of TMP. I guess it's a different environment/population to blogger as most fellow bloggers who visit a post in which one links a post on another bloggers blog make a comment on the original (often in addition to a comment on one's own).
Regards, James
Tango got me a lot of grief when he lifted a picture of a rare old casting from my blog, and all the frothers pitched in, ranting about the terrible paintwork, which wasn't mine and wasn't the point of the original post! In those days my membership of TMP hadn't been suspended - I protested to Tango that this was discourteous and unreasonable behaviour, he promised not to do it again (hundreds of repeats since!) and I got a rocket from Armintwat about his unusual understanding of copyright law. So I don't regard Tango as harmless - I don't need that kind of publicity!
DeleteWell, Tony, I am in good company, it seems. Two years ago, my TMP account was locked for trying to reason with the Admin regarding copyright laws. I got nowhere. Since Tango has a tendency to post almost all of the photos from each post, the instance that got me the axe was a comment on a Tango repost of mine that simply asked that he please limit copyright infractions to one photo per TMP post. BAM! My account was locked within minutes and the offending post deleted.
DeleteJon - my feeling on this episode of yours is that it is unfair and despicable - my patience with people who take a stand on free speech and everybody's right to plunder the public domain becomes a lot shorter when they are making ad money out of an area of doubt.
DeleteMy immediate problem with LaptrinhX is to find some way of getting them to remove 837 posts they have stolen from my blog, with pictures. Should I complain to Google? Doesn't seem promising. I can't find any means of contacting the site managers. Is there some kind of international ombudsman for this kind of stuff?
I'm on his list of blogs to put on TMP... do I mind? Nope, quite happy - he always links to the blog and if people want to say 'not very good painting' I just think: I'm 68, I own a chocolate factory called Garrison, and what have you ever dine.'
DeleteWell said - it must be an advantage not being a prima donna like me, too.
DeleteLate comment from me... Yes, LaptrinhX.com's site now has faithfully reproduced this post, with the pictures and the suggestions of mass self-stimulation. That's nice little achievement for April Fool's day - no marks for their editing and file pinching software though. Quite pleased with that - I don't suppose anyone will read it there, but it's a pleasing idea.
ReplyDeleteA splendid result Tony...
ReplyDeleteThough I suspect that there are very few humans working on that site...
All the best. Aly
Thanks Aly - I'm sure the management involves very few humans, but I can tell that someone is reading the stuff (and, whoever he is, he should probably get out more).
DeleteLike some of your other commenters, I really can't see the point of a recruitment website stealing posts about toy soldiers...it can't be much of a draw card for click bait???! I have NEVER heard/ read anything good about TMP or the (Anglo Saxon expletive noun removed) who runs it...sounds like it is inhabited by the same type of people who operate the site that you refer to in your final paragraph !
ReplyDeleteLaptrinhX has a vast amount of nicked stuff - news media sites, articles from all sorts of periodicals and sports journals, etc etc. They claim to actually have some people who write specifically for them, but whether those people know about this or not is a point of interest.
DeleteThough it causes me some pain to do so, I have to defend TMP just a little here - undoubtedly they have a very large and devoted membership who get a lot out of it. I was mightily turned off by the incessant banter, which is mostly brainless, and by the dreaded Internet Disease, where self-appointed experts express themselves with great pomp and contempt - the degree of pomposity is usually inversely proportional to their accuracy. There is some dreadful crap on there.
My fall from grace involved a debate about whether the fact that my blog being in the public domain completely absolved them from any kind of need for commonsense or decency when it came to reproducing personal material, and why it would not be the same thing if I published pictures from the administrators' personal Facebook accounts of their family and their home.
Giving a full reference for borrowed material is a new development.
Tony, as a clarification, works created on our blogs are not in the Public Domain. The act of publishing original work confers a copyright automatically.
DeleteJon - yes - that's correct. My usage is sloppy - what I mean is "accessible to anyone who visits the URL", which I realise is not the same thing at all. Armintwat's reasoning was that if he could see it then he could copy it, though this seems to have modified more recently - they still pinch stuff, but now they tell you where they pinched it from.
DeleteThis episode (actually your experience is far from singular) reinforces the notion that one cannot reason with the unreasonable.
DeleteA couple of comments received and one email expressed surprise that LaptrinhX, given their stated purpose, should be interested in posting items on toy soldiers, and/or that it was an unlikely attraction for their expected readership.
ReplyDeleteMaybe. I'm not awfully interested in the probabilities of this matter. To make it quite clear that this is not just another unjustified whine from me, may I invite you to have a read of my OTHER blog - the one I didn't know I had - it's at
https://laptrinhx.com/author/msfoy/
It seems, as I said, that I am one of their featured writers.
Surreal...and very annoying.
DeleteJust out of academic interest, I got onto the DMCA website and had an infuriating online chat exchange with a robot. Next I completed a preliminary complaint form, identifying the offending site. I got a reply which confirmed that they are familiar with the site in question, explained how this particular site gets around the copyright laws, and reckoned that for only $199 they could get my stuff removed - if they fail, I can have my $199 back. I reckon they can run along and play. I shall laugh the whole matter off! We are all doomed, of course, but mostly I'm past caring.
DeleteContinuing this vein of academic interest, I tried with DMCA again, and this time I opted for the "free advice" option. The free advice was that I should pay for the $199 service. Crikey, no-one expected that, eh?
DeleteThere are all kinds of scams, of course, just as there are different forms of irony.
For no particular reason, this situation reminds me of a very old joke (for which I apologise in advance...).
Around 10:30 one weekday morning, a miserable-looking man goes into a good London restaurant - the place is empty, the head waiter is sitting reading the newspaper. The man explains, with tears in his eyes, that he has just had some terrible news, and all he wants is a small omelette and some kind words. The waiter explains that the kitchen is really closed until lunchtime, but he'll see what he can do.
After a while, he appears with the omelette and some cutlery, puts them in front of the miserable man, and returns to his newspaper.
"What about the kind words?" asks the customer.
"Oh yeah," says the waiter, "if I were you, I wouldn't eat that omelette."