Yesterday Nathanael Greene made me aware that there is a website publishing our articles without giving credit to the writers and not linking back to the original. They do not have my permission to use our content so this is straight up theft.
The website in question is called enVolve and appears to be a conservative pro-Trump site. I looked around and they have dozens of Def-Con News stories presented as if they were their own. I suspect all of the content on this site is stolen from other legitimate conservative websites. It’s not like they took bits and pieces of our articles, these are full stories with all the pictures and imbeds.
I tried contacting them to tell them to stop it and to remove our stuff but they ignored me and continue to steal from us. I’m kind of hoping they steal this thing I’m doing here because it would be hilarious.
As Nathanael pointed out, the website probably has some kind of bot that scans websites and steals content so there’s likely no human eyes on what they’re taking. They stole our latest The Week in WTF? as well as the Friday Quiz, neither of which have much news value.
I’m almost thinking the website is some kind of Russian troll farm deal.
It sucks because they don’t have Disqus as their commenting platform or I’d just sic Jaydolf on them. You know he could fuck them up. Also, I’m not convinced their comments are legit. They’ll have an article (one of ours) with 14k views but only 6 comments that don’t seem related to the topic.
Obviously I’m not going to spend thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer, which is probably what they are counting on. I do have a couple of friends who are lawyers who I can maybe talk into sending them a friendly threat but beyond that I don’t know what I can do here.
If any of you guys know anything about this site or have some good ideas on how to stop them, please let me know.
In any case, until this gets sorted out, Def-Con News articles will contain the following disclaimer:
The article is the property of Def-Con News. If you are reading this on any other site besides https://defconnews.com, that’s because some asshole stole it and is using it without our permission.
