If you Google someone who recently died, you might see a flood of near-identical videos of men reading obits. Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money. Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED, joins us to discuss her recent article about this strange phenomenon. 

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Hosts: Steve Barnes, Leslie Fram

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