Ultimate-Guitar stealing our work

I'll start adding a tag to any tabs I submit (yeah, I know, the number is at 1 right now and unlikely to grow quickly) saying something like:

If you find this tab on any site except BigBassTabs.com please give it a poor rating, as the poster stole it from BigBassTabs.com, and therefore is a jerk.

It won't help much, but if they tab thief is doing it to get the attention of a high rating on the tab it might spoil their fun.

A user on UG who saw one of my comments directed me to a thread where you can post the UG links for your stolen tabs and a mod will edit them to credit you – but only if the person who submitted it to UG is unregistered. Of the 30-some links I posted in that thread as having been stolen, the mod was able to credit me for all but five of them, because those five were posted by registered users.

But I do think the door should swing both ways. I've never stolen someone else's tabs but there are plenty of tabs here that some of our users took from UG. Just do your own work, for Pete's sake. If you suck so bad at tabbing or are so lazy that you need to steal someone else's shit, you have no business tabbing at all. Go learn how to knit or something instead.

And I'm pleased I've been vindicated over the two way traffic of tab theft. I really can't see what people are gaining by passing other people's tabs off as their own, they won't get an MBE or a VC, just some smug satisfaction that some unknown stranger thinks they're great





…even though they know they aren't

I check every day since this thread was started, but only for my own tabs. A couple more of mine showed up since the last time I mentioned it in this thread, but it's been a couple weeks ago now, and nothing since. I'm hoping the stink I raised over there and the fact that I left comment with every stolen tab I found has dismayed people from stealing from here anymore (though I'm not near naive enough to believe that lol).

I encourage all tabbers here here to check the link seanmo originally provided (and that I've copied below) to make sure your tabs aren't being stolen as well.

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/fresh?type=bass&group_by=song&order=date

I told one of the mods over on UG, when they asked if I was sure a certain tab was mine, that I include a kind of hidden signature in all my tabs that identifies them as mine. I won't say what they are (because I have more than one that I'll sometimes vary from tab to tab) but I started doing it the first time I saw one of my tabs show up on some other site. There have been many times when the person who stole the tab tinkered with it to make it appear as their own, but they failed to edit out that little hidden detail because, of course, they didn't know it was there.

And yeah, it is kind of sad that I feel I have to check every day. It means I need to get a life!