Strike 3: Owlcation Has Repurposed Another One of My Articles

Owlcation’s staff are actively going through old data on Myers Briggs articles. I just found the THIRD article of mine that was repurposed on Owlcation. I wrote a few INFJ articles on HubPages, and I’m not sure if I cross posted this one. I confirmed it through The Wayback Machine.

Here is a look at the two articles:

• Mine: How to Identify an INFJ Personality

• Owlcation: The Rarest of the Rare: How to Identify an INFJ Personality

I hope reading those titles gets your attention. They’re really bad at renaming titles and disguising their behavior! This is how simple it can be to discover your work has been recreated. Read the titles. Find the counterfeit.

The archived copy proves I was the first person to publish an article with this kind of title and textual structure on HubPages. The current iteration on Owlcation doesn’t give me credit despite having a works cited section, and a lengthy one at that.

Yet again, with these forged works, my upbeat, quirky, and weird personality has been removed in favor of clinical, sterile, and generalized observations. They want these articles plain and clean because they’re easier to control and streamline.

A Once Vibrant Community

In my version, it shows a large, thriving comment section. Hundreds of people interacted directly with me, and they often agreed with my quirky observations. The community was lost with TAG’s updates and restructuring of HubPages. I find it interesting that one of the first things TAG did with HP was it discontinued comments, which effectively hindered people’s ability to stay connected with each other.

Some of the comments left behind are really long too. In fact, longer than some Medium posts. There is something to be said of a HubPages article generating that much conversation, which I find hard to replicate anywhere else.

Repurposing Old, Successful Articles Without Getting Permission

I deleted all of my HubPages articles earlier this year, and this includes articles that used to be on its niche site, Owlcation. To me this means whatever contract I had with HubPages was terminated or expired. To dig into my old stories and repurpose them definitely raises a lot of questions. Looks like I need to dig deeper into the TOS!

I can say with a 100% guarantee that I have no contract with The Arena Group or HubPages. Therefore, the copy cat articles are stepping into a realm where it would be wise for me to have a copyright expert. I believe the rights reverted back to me entirely when I deleted all my work off HubPages.

The Ship of Theseus: What Is an Identity?

To end this post, I’d like to look at a classic thought experiment. The Ship of Theseus is an ancient paradox that asks: if you change all the parts of something is it still technically the same thing? If all the planks on the ship are replaced, is it the same ship? It’s gone through a massive amount of change, but does that mean it’s no longer what it was?

This is the kind of loophole people will use to avoid a lawsuit — if you change enough words, plagiarism checkers won’t flag something as a duplicate, if you change enough things maybe it’s an entirely different thing. If you only borrow the structure and title, is it a duplicate?

That’s not a safe strategy. If an article retains enough of the original structure, conceptual flow, or distinct phrasing and ideas, it can be interpreted as a bad-faith derivation. It is suspicious if someone or a group replicates what were once high performing articles that authors removed due to a company deciding it would no longer pay writers. Even if the planks went from oak to ash — it’s still Theseus’s ship.

Let’s take a quick look at what happened to cause these type of questionable articles to appear, so we can understand why we might have different versions of the same ship.

1. HubPages and its network of sites froze operations. Writers were kicked out from creating new content or editing old content. The earnings program ended.

2. Articles were left online, creating a digital catacombs. This was to trap residual search engine traffic and ad revenue.

3. Articles were deleted by authors and then in-house editors recreated them and reattributed them to themselves (or third party editors did this and not directly TAG).

If a ship was built entirely from the old parts of the Ship of Theseus, would it be a new vessel or the same one?

You might be wondering more about the Greek myth of the Ship of Theseus, so I will end the article with it. Theseus was the king of Athens. He rescued children who were taken by King Minos. The mad king had a devious plan to send the children to a labyrinth where ultimately they’d be eaten by the Minotaur. Theseus went into the maze and slayed the Minotaur. He escaped on a ship to Delos.

Each year, the Athenians would mark this victory by taking a pilgrimage on the ship to Delos. Over time, the ship’s wear and tear required new timbers. Ancient philosophers used this story to ask questions about identity over time.