For reals, people.

Today I saw a Facebook link to an article about how to go about grappling with the opposite gender. Since I spent time doing just that last year, I clicked through. The piece was pretty good, up until when I noticed this in the comments.

…which it totally was.

Well, a bit later the people behind the site came back and pointed out that hey, they’d clearly linked to Chrissy in the first couple paragraphs (before they quoted 95% of her original blog post and then rounded it out with another four sentences of their own). They were just “curating” her article. I added my own comment, giving them some benefit of the doubt before assuming they were content-scraping crack monkeys.

Another commenter linked to The Blogger’s 10 Commandments of Don’t Steal Our Shit, which reminded me of the Cooks Source copyright infringement debacle. The replies from the “curators” showed absolutely no awareness that the internet isn’t public domain, not quite with Judith Griggsian levels of terribleness, but you copied 95% of someone’s blogpost to your site without telling them.

Also, there was that line about “We also quoted in grey the curated content from her site like we always do.” Like we always do. I clicked through two dozen or so of the other posts on that site and all of them were with some blogger’s “help.”

…we’ve tapped into the knowledge base of East West Martial Arts.

We’ve enlisted the help of Jiu Jitsu Mania to show you…

With the help of Gracie Mag, in this post we provide you…

Here are a few tips we gathered through BJJ for Children …

In this post we enlisted the help of Mauricio “Tinguinha” Mariano…

With help from our friends over at BJJ Weekly…

That’s when I started to feel… upset.

I hope they’re actually friends with BJJ Weekly, because I found that they had lifted posts one, two, three, and four from there. The only things on that website that aren’t reposting of others’ written content are posts with several paragraphs of text around an embedded Youtube video, which is kind of the same thing. However, since Youtube vids don’t generally come with much textual analysis, maybe that qualifies as legit content. And by legit, I mean more than 50% created by/paid for by the people who run that website. If that’s not the case, then you need to get some kind of permission from the content creator before you post that content on your site!

Currently the website says

We sourced this article from Chrissy Linzy (check her website out here Clinzy) and it starts with training as a woman first (from a woman’s perspective).

But the rest of their content is still “With the help of Turtle Guard, let’s take a look at..” sort of thing. And that’s not cool. Even if they’ve apologized to Chrissy, the whole website is still chock full of unethical use of other people’s content.

There’s just no way around it. I’m forced to conclude that Steven and the other folks behind bjjtoday.net are content-scraping crack monkeys. You can look if you like, but honestly Monica, if you’re looking for good content on Brazilian Jiujitsu, I think you’d do better to start at BJJ Weekly.