Copy-paste protection
NOTE: Copy-paste protection is no longer active as described
As with any project where you can make money for something, read.cash has attracted the crowd that wants easy money for no effort. One of the (bad) ways to do it is to take somebody's article (like, from CoinDesk, BBC or somebody's blog) and publish it on read.cash.
Most of the time it doesn't work, it gets you nothing in terms of tips.
When you copy an article from a high-profile publication, the language that is used is very different from the one that real authors on read.cash use, so people instinctively think that something is wrong.
However, sometimes it gets an author a small random tip, so the author is now encouraged to start a copy-pasting business, copying articles from all over the place to read.cash.
One of the problems with this is that this is illegal (and for a good reason). That means that we would have to remove the article anyway if the original author asks us to. But the bigger issue is that the original author took a lot of time to research the article, write it, edit it and publish it. The user that copied the article basically stole all that effort from the author. This is pretty bad.
It's also pretty bad for the readers of read.cash, since now they have to wade through all of the hundreds of copy-pasted articles that they don't want to read.
Today we're adding some basic copy-paste protection. If you try to publish an article that is copied from somewhere - that article won't get to the main page or even to the "new" section.
The mechanism is not perfect, so if you see something wrong with it - please let us know in the forums.
Will I have problems if I copy from Word?
No. We only look for sources of your article in the Internet.
But, I have the rights to copy that article!
Yes, sometimes you are the original author and you want to post your article on as many sites as possible to get the bigger exposure.
However, this is a tricky situation for read.cash. First of all, how do we ensure that you are the author. I mean anyone can claim to be the original author. Anyone can even claim that the original author is not the author. How do we verify such claims? We're not a court to go into details of each case and declare somebody a valid copyright holder.
Here's an example to demonstrate the problem:
How do we distinguish between a user that claims she is the same person as on the other page. If we take all these claims for granted - it's basically a free pass for everybody to claim to be a popular blogger and copying everything.
So, we're taking an easy route for now - if an article is deemed to be a copy of another one already published on the Internet - we consider it to be a copy and process like all other copies.
Simplest solution for publishing to multiple sites for now: publish on read.cash first.
What happens to copy-pasted articles?
They appear on your personal page, but they aren't included on the main page or any lists. So, they basically get dramatically less exposure, but are still available.
Copy-paste detector avoidance
Please note, there are many ways to cheat the detector and we don't have time now to fix them all, so if you are caught cheating the copy-paste detector on purpose (i.e. trying to publish a copied article as an original one, like changing letters to similar look1ng 1etters, adding typoss, saving and re-saving with completely different article, etc...) - that might lead to a complete ban.
Here's an example:
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