About time for another DomainGang editorial.
Shane Cultra wrote an interesting article a couple of days ago, about “the value of unique.”
I fully agree, creativity comes at a premium and those that can churn out copy – per the old school approach – will always come on top of those that simply copy and paste.
That being said, I discovered by accident that the Chinese love to re-create. They love to reverse-engineer creative copy and as it happens, they have been reverse-engineering articles from DomainGang.com
My Chinese is slim so I depend on Google Translate that does a wonderful job, so here are some examples:
- American Airlines original article from 11/29/2011 – Chinese copycat article from 11/30/2011
- Obama.com original article from 1/9/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 1/13/2012
- Africom original article from 2/6/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 2/8/2012
- New UK forum original article from 2/8/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 2/9/2012
- Pirate Bay moving to .SE original article from 2/1/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 2/2/2012
- cPanel against SOPA original article from 1/19/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 1/20/2012
- Megaupload no more original article from 1/19/2012 – Chinese copycat article from 1/20/2012
Hundreds more articles are taken from other domain bloggers, translated into Chinese, and then posted on zixun.www.net.cn without any references to the original sources.
It’s comic that the article about the Obama.com sale was in fact a parody post. 😀 When you’re a Chinese geek among 1.3 billion others, you don’t stop to think for a second what exactly is it that you’re reading; you just hit CTRL-C/CTRL-V.
Unfortunately, I’ll have to consider blocking all Chinese traffic from now on, because a couple of bad nuts believe that it’s ok to replicate content that I killed a few thousand braincells of my own to produce.
People that lack creativity and simply copy the work of others have nothing intelligent or unique to offer.
In a digital world, data on a computer drive seem to have permanently substituted the need for analytical thought and creation, leaving people to function in ON/OFF states; the adoption of a linear behavior is thus a reality. Pavlov’s dog would be proud.
I wonder if my Chinese copycats will replicate this editorial as well.
