Hi Attila, Don't know if you'll get this, but can I pick your brain? You're a bit of a techy, so you might know the answer to this...

Can I ask you about bot scraping? When a bot scrapes a collection of Medium stories, do you know if it store a copy? So it then draws on its stored copy to distribute across a wide number of websites? I'm trying to figure out if once they've got it, I've lost my exclusivity. Because no matter how many times it gets taken down, it'll still pop up. So me deleting the story from Medium will achieve nothing if the bot is drawing from its own stored copy on another server. Is that how it works?

The other scenario is that for every plagiarised copy out there, it does a new scrape? This seems unlikely, but if it were true, there might be merit in me deleting plagarised stories once they're taken down - or at least cutting out the bits I'd like to retain for my own use in print. Do you understand the question? If so, do you know the answer?

I deleted one of the plagiarised stories after it was taken down, thinking that would prevent it happening again. But now I realise it's automated, I'm unsure about the wisdom of that approach... for some pieces, it's the only proof that it's my story.