Why is Someone Always Cloning The Post & Email?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jul. 31, 2021) — In performing a search on Saturday morning, this writer discovered, yet again, that a website clone of The Post & Email is operating, this time at dailynets.com, whose pass-through representative is listed as Cloudflare, Inc.

The website represents the third in what appears to be a pattern of cloning our work without attribution, a backlink to the original article, or a request to reproduce from the author.  The site then claims it owns the copyright to the material.

There is no contact form or email address on the website, and a request to see other articles by the same “author” leads the reader back to the home page.

In the case of an article we wrote about a Shelby County, TN inmate, Quartez Gary, and the “stun cuffs” to which he was subjected when attending court, with the exception of the first instance the publication removed “The Post & Email” and substituted its own website name plus the text “& Reporter” in a brazen display of plagiarism.

The work of many of our editorial writers has also been reproduced without attribution.

The articles the website lists as “trending” can hardly be current headlines since they are old news.

At approximately 9:25 AM EDT, this writer contacted Cloudflare by telephone and spoke with a representative, who acknowledged that customer service personnel are not available on the weekends but said he would refer our concern to to be handled “first thing on Monday morning.”

Our complaint included a request for the name of the actual hosting company, since Cloudflare provides security and other services but not hosting services per se. We informed the representative that on the previous two occasions when our website was cloned and plagiarized, the hosting company was Amazon Web Services, although it does not necessarily apply to this situation.

Also in those cases, GoDaddy was the domain registrar but said it could not take action on the content of the respective websites. GoDaddy, is, in fact, listed as the domain registrar for Dailynets.

Unlike the previous two websites stealing our work in virtual real time, Dailynets has focused on The Post & Email’s material published last year.

As The Post & Email reported, in each case it took several months for AWS to take down the websites cloning our work. In the most recent case last summer, we ultimately contacted then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally about the problem, which was subsequently resolved very quickly.

Bezos is no longer Amazon CEO, having stepped down from that role less than two weeks ago.