Tony Johor Kaki Travels for Food · Heritage · Culture · History

Food Explorer Storyteller with 63 million+ reads 📧 johorkaki@gmail.com

Commentary on Web Internet Piracy 🌐 Who Stole from Johor Kaki Blog?



Image credit: Wikipedia   

Who stole from Johor Kaki blog?

FoodAdvisor.my
GoodyFeed.com
StreetDirectory.com
Sgmycar.com
Sgmytrips.com
Rakyatnet.com
Etc 

Mentioning only some commercial sites. There are also copycat personal blogs (I shall leave them unnamed but why start a blog only to steal content? Isn't blogging about personal expression? 🤦‍♂️ ).


For commercial sites, stealing is a deliberate, calculated business decision. Stealing keeps costs low (almost "free of charge") and profit margins high.

Food spotting is expensive - it involves travel expenses, paying for food, web and communication related charges, equipment (e.g. camera) costs, staff salaries and a lot of time. It does not make business sense to go taste food one stall, one restaurant at a time (especially in Johor which is geographically large and eateries are far apart).

The alternative is to steal it from people who have already done the hard, expensive work i.e. tasted the food, and shared their experiences on the web with photos and written descriptions.

In the past, the web pirates steal photos and text - lock, stock and barrel.

After receiving complaints from original food blog owners, the pirates photo edit away the watermarks and paraphrase the texts.

Today, to be on the safe side of copyright laws, web pirates simply download or embed photos from Instagram and Facebook, and paraphrase the stolen text - posting these as their own content. Without ever tasting the food or visiting the stalls/ restaurants, but stealing systematically on an industrial scale, web pirates declare "Top 10 Best", "Must Try", "Ultimate Best", "Best Food" awards etc.

The business model of web pirates is to churn up their numbers with stolen content and use these numbers to secure clients (e.g. restaurants) for paid "reviews" i.e. disguised advertisements. 

One of the consequences is the decline in numbers of original content, independent food blogs (there are only a very small handful left). Most food content on the web are now recycled pirated content or articles paid for by the restaurants or stalls (yes, now even humble food stalls pay to be featured because there are very few hobby bloggers left).

Original, independent food blogging is more or less finished as a hobby due in large part to piracy. On the other hand, more and more web pirates appear.

Today, we reached a stage where web pirates are cannibalising other web pirates (due to dearth of new original, independent content). It's a vicious cycle that harms the usefulness of Google search results and credibility of web content in general.

Obviously, this commentary will ruffle a lot of feathers but I just need to get this off my chest. Thank you. 

Discuss 😄

You have permission to use my content by just crediting Johor Kaki with this link johorkaki.blogspot.com.

Date: 6 Jan 2020

7 comments:

  1. Yes, very true, we have also experience it. If you have no passion don't blog la, why steal people hard work.

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  2. Feel very angry too. Real food bloggers, like Johor Kaki spent effort, time and money to taste the food and shoot the photos for his blog. Those despicable people stole and used the photos and sometimes description for free, to gain profit or credits for assignment!

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  3. Maybe go into food vlogging on youtube. That cannot be pirated?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Been thinking about it. At the moment, photos and written words are my preferred means of expression.

      Delete
  4. Lat's fight back.
    Can I propose that all friends of Johor Kaki to coordinate flooding a specific thieving site on appointed day or week with negative comments?
    What website hate more then having their article pilfered?

    Let's troll em.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I would think that vlogging is the way nowadays. Unfortunately that still won't stop some unscrupulous people from recycling the content of your videos by translating it to written content, although it might make it harder somewhat that the usual copy and paste.

    On the bright side, this could be the beginning of a youtube channel of Johor Kaki.

    I really enjoyed reading your posts Tony, as they provide some temporary escapes from mundane reality at times. Please don't stop travelling, eating and posting. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Tri. Happy New Year. I actually feel translating video content is fine as long as the original is embedded and proper credit is given. This is the same as social media sharing (the proper way using the share button). (Same for photos and text.) This allows other language audiences to access the content. Where it is not OK is when people steal others' content and pretend that it is created by them by removing watermark and paraphrasing i.e. web piracy. :-D

      Delete

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