Discussion Needs some help

Hi, I am a translation group. Recently I discovered that another site

[bad aggregator site]

had been copying and pasting the novels I translated into their website without asking me for permission.

I felt very angry and upset.

What should I do?

Translator
prosperousfood.com translator

 

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to link them here

 

Disable right click on your website. I don't know how to do that.

 

they can use keyboard to copy. Like using shift and arrow keys.

 

You have three realistic options:

1) Accept this is going to happen and carry on. There's about two dozen of those sites and they copy everything they can find.
2) You can go private. Stop listing your chapters on Novel Updates, Reddit and other places, disable subscription feeds and optionally password-protect your work. The aggregating sites cannot be bothered to monitor every single translation blog individually, so you'll stop being copied. For now at least. The downside is that it'll be much harder for new readers to find you.
3) You can stop translating.

There is no achievable legal recourse ( those sites and owners are non-trivial to locate and identify, and often based in countries that do not respect online takedown requests. ) as you most likely do not have the original author's permission and can't afford a legal team to pursue the matter through courts. The best you can do is to request that Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex remove search results pointing to your chapters.

 

Thank you. I appreciate all your opinions.

 

Don't do anything.
The readers normally won't go to the aggregator site except for the minority that will always do so.

But if you do anything that annoyed the readers, then they will go to the aggregator site.

 

Hiya.

My advice as a fellow translator (my website is http://bcnovels.com/) is to completely ignore it. Honestly, that is the best thing to do.

If you really want to, there are some things that you can do to limit websites copying your work but it takes a lot of time and effort. IMO, it would be better to devote your time and effort into creative, productive work (translation) rather than a fruitless pursuit of digital pirates (trying to stop the aggregator websites).

 

This is just for sharing what I have done and what works and what works and what does not work.

1. Disable text selection, copying and pasting, keyboard and right click. - this does not work. I believe the people doing the copying are not doing it by hand. Rather they copy from the code in the page directly.

2. I then discovered that the site is getting my posts from the rss feed. So instead of displaying the full post on my feed, I display a summary. Now I am evaluating if this works, and I will keep all of you update.

For those who advise me to ignore the pirates, I apologise, I cannot do that.

All the work took me a long time to translate, and I do not like it when someone did it without permission. That is why I am so angry, and I am determined to find out how they grab the contents of my site and prevent it from happening. This is the least I should do to protect my works and that of other translators on my site.

I just hope my post will share with other translators out there on what works and what does not work.

I will update this as and when needed. Many thanks for all replies. I had tried each suggestion and see what works and what does not. May my experience help other translators out there to protect their works from these people who just rip off your content without asking you.

 

You are reinventing the wheel right now.

https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/measures-for-avoiding-translations-being-stolen.21967/

The translations are stolen both by RSS and by bots that monitor Novel Updates release feed. The bots operate from behind proxy services ( mostly, but not exclusively Google proxies ). They are of varying degree of sophistication and tend to adapt mutate their behavior periodically.
You will not shut them out without massively inconveniencing your readers.

 

But I am. Point 2) of my original reply is the crux of what I do right now. Honeypots and fingerprinting are more of an opposition research effort for the future when going off the grid is no longer enough.

 

most hardcore people reading online novels are using Novel updates, these people wont leave to read on those website as far as i know as its much more inconvenient to do so compared to novel updates reading list, newcomers might but it depends on open the the other website is in pulling new people in towards their website, so best option is to ignore them, there is another way its going to be a bit annoying for your readers and that is to post the chapter as a picture. with watermarks stating where you translated it from.

Spoiler: something like The breaker

 

Hi all,

I have conducted my experiment and I am pleased to report the following:

You CAN stop these bots from other websites from grabbing your contents. It is possible.

And NO, it will NOT stop your readers from accessing your site through Novelupdates.

How? For the excerpt of your RSS feed, just change it to show only a few words or no words at all. This will prevent the other websites from stealing your content.

The excerpt of your RSS feed is where they stole the content from. The good news is that NovelUpdates does not care about this content, and they still update when you update your site.

I say it one more time. Regardless if it is reinventing the wheel or whatever, but I have found a method that works for everyone. Screw the bots! We can make it impossible for most of the bots to do so.

 

Sigh. No. You stopped nothing.

Your latest chapter of Kitchen Xiuzhen ( 21, published today ) is reposted in full on all the aggregating websites as of 30 minutes ago.

They do not copy RSS feeds, they use the feeds to monitor if a new update is up. They use a Python script that rotates proxy servers and operates a headless browser ( you may want to google that ) to download the HTML source the content of the page pointed at by the update link. And if that page is too short, the scripts check all links leading from that page. The HTML source is then sometimes processed to strip out certain tags and character categories.

Content scraping is a very old problem that a lot of very smart people have tried to solve, with little success, because as many smart people work to keep it going.

Wordpress syndicates full posts to all feeds by default. This can be changed in the admin panel, but you have to know this is a thing first.

 

Damn it! I really thought I got one over them when they did not have my chapters 15 mins after novelupdates got them

But I could not monitor them forever since I need to translate. So I stopped monitoring them. Then Bam! about 30 mins later, they stole the contents again.

This is war! I am not going to give up.

I got a new firewall. Let's see if the bots are better or my firewall is better!

If this firewall does not stop them, I will pay to get the security experts to come in and monitor. I do not believe that I cannot protect my site's content.

**super angry**

 

well if you want spend money and time for that then good luck

 

For you, maybe it is not worth the money or the time.

But I refuse to give up without trying my best first. It is my character, I guess.

 

For centuries, authors have been waging a Phyrric battle against piracy. Lexicographers added nonsense words to their dictionaries to detect if someone copied their content. Cartographers added fictitious locations on their maps for the same reason. Neither of those methods stopped plagiarists. More recently, we only have to look at Google's ReCAPTCHA system to see how futile an attempt to stymie bots with text is. A decade ago, CAPTCHA only asked us to read slightly wavy text. As programmers and computers got more sophisticated, Google continued to obfuscate the text to an even greater degree to prevent bots from decoding the text. At a certain point, the system was unusable for humans because the text was so hard to read.

Most techniques that would make it more difficult for a bot to scrape your website also make it more difficult for a user to read your translations. If a person can easily read your translations, so too can a bot scrape it. If you think you can prevail where even Google failed, go for it. But, ask yourself where your time is best spent. Would you rather pursue your hobby and translate, or would you rather put your hobby on hold to wage a battle that no one has yet to win?