The Digg Thief
By David Cassel
What would you do?
Last month Jonathan Schlaffer found one of his articles, which criticized Windows XP, on the front page of Digg. But then he realized someone had stolen his article, put it on their own site, and submitted their URL instead of his!
This is the story of “the Digg thief” — and how Jonathan fought back.
First Jonathan sent an email — and the thief responded immediately. He apologized, admitted he’d stolen the article, and acknowledged that stealing the article was “not cool”. But then he did nothing about it. Instead he offered to help “push” one of Jonathan’s other stories onto the front page of Digg.
Jonathan’s angry editor then sent an email asking him to remove the post immediately. But unfortunately, the article’s thief wrote back that “It would be very hard to remove the article.” Why? Because “it’s in front of Digg right now and iit [sic] would be stupid to remove it.”
Presumably he didn’t want to acknowledge his mistake in front of the big wave of traffic coming from Digg. “You’ve ripped off the article,” Angry Editor replied, adding “It doesn’t concern me whether it’s stupid or not to remove it from your perspective.” Would he at least consider adding a link back to the article’s original source? Sure, Digg Thief wrote back — but not now…. In the end, Jonathan’s original article got just 329 visits for the entire month of September.
Revenge would’ve been fairly simple. A few minutes of web research turned up the thief’s home phone number, his address, and even a satellite photo of the house where he lived with his parents in Canada.
Ultimately our editor counselled against straying beyond the situation at hand. After some soul searching, he contacted the web site’s ISP — and informed them of a clear copyright violation. They removed the stolen article within 24 hours.
And because the stolen article had been displayed on the front page, the thief’s entire web site also disappeared from the web.
Maybe he just gave up on the web business altogether. Because it’s two weeks later, and his entire web site is still nowhere to be seen.
And that was the last we ever heard from the Digg thief.
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