Can stealing digitally be a good strategy?
I had a weird experience last week. Someone copied 1:1 my article Reinforcement Q-Learning from Scratch in Python with OpenAI Gym and published it on multiple sites (here’s the screenshot from one of the sites)
I couldn’t help but dig deeper into the author’s profile, and found a few things which made me self-doubt whatever I’m doing,
- One of the locations where the author had published this post was a paid one. Probably, he just got paid for Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Ving my article (and a bit of formatting).
- There was no citation whatsoever. I know I get a few leads through my blog posts, which become my freelance clients in the future, the author might have taken advantage of my work in that sense.
- Ironically, the author is a founder of a startup that teaches programming through interactive Python courses. The site looks very professional.
- He has a bunch of deleted TowardsDataScience articles (I guess all of them were copied), around 2k followers on Medium, and his Github repository associated with the article also had 20 stars (enough for it to be creditworthy)
Brendan (the co-author of the post) and I spent roughly a couple of months writing that thing, and someone just comes along sweeps it along with few hours of effort. Even though the post has been taken down now, he might have already reaped a lot of benefits (good ROI as they call it). I feel like a dumb guy in this scenario.
So yeah, now the question is, “Can it be the case that stealing is in fact, a good strategy?”
I feel the honest answer is yes, but only when you’re able to handle the feeling of guilt when you do it and embarrassment when you’re exposed. To me, these are terrible feelings. I know it from my experience because once I borrowed around 50–60 lines of code from somewhere without disclosing the source, in a 4k word article that I wrote. And when the author of the code caught me, I wasn’t able to stop thinking about it for at least a week, and the experience of sort of getting exposed still haunts me occasionally. So it’s a good strategy, but definitely not for everyone.
The only silver lining I have from this experience is some considered my work valuable enough to copy it, and I’m happy about that at least.
