Watch Out For Content Thieves!

Weird news from the awesome Rick over at PandaPassport.com:

I was a little disappointed to see that, especially since I had written a pretty hefty Dalian piece for them a while back. Maybe they figured that if I did one piece pro-bono, that I wouldn’t mind if they lifted all the stuff I’d written about Dalian? I don’t know… They do link to DalianDalian.com
on one of their pages, but I really don’t think that’s gonna cut it on
their listings pages. Especially considering that when users search for
a Dalian bar or restaurant on Google, ChinaExpat will be right up there
in the rankings thanks to the content they lifted (word-for-word) from
us.

UPDATE: This is especially mind-boggling considering that ChinaExpat has their content stolen a while back, and made quite a bit over noise over it. I suspect this is a case of the site owners not knowing what hired writers are doing… But Jesus, c’mon people.

I guess content stealing isn’t anything new, but the China expat blogosphere has been so friendly and helpful and just so nice, that I’m surprised to see this. Really, I’ve found expat bloggers are nicer than your average net user and much less inclined to flame.

Content stealing also happened to Beijing Olympics FAN! but the scraper was for a generic sports blog, not a fellow China blogger, and I already knew there are evil scraper bots out there.

Also I think most bloggers like seeing themselves quoted on other sites, but hate seeing their words mysteriously appearing somewhere else. I guess it’s the difference between an inter-blog dicussion and just grabbing some else’s content.

Via  ChinaExpat.com, Don’t steal our Dalian content. by PandaPassport.com - China Blog