How Can this Happen?

[carpenjoyce]

I've seen several posts from people who say their entire article was stolen even though they only posted part of it. I can only see two ways this could happen: Someone is hacking CC's account, or someone within CC is taking the articles. The latter seems unlikely but if it's the former, can't something be done to stop it? As a recent victim of theft (of a partial article) I really want to know if anyone knows more about this.

[aprilk10]

I wondered the same thing when I read those posts. I have also wondered if "customers" can somehow open a file that contains the entire article, or perhaps somehow copy the file, when we submit to a request. I recently had quite a few articles stolen. While I post the entire article, all of the thefts were articles that I submitted to recent public requests. They were also all articles I had written after all of the new imaging changes were made that were supposed to protect us from theft (so I know they weren't scraped before this). I have noticed a lot of public requests from the same customers. They keep posting requests, but their purchase rating never changes. I am becoming leary of submitting anything anymore to be honest. I have a couple of private request clients who appear to be a consistant thing (I hope). If things continue well with them, I probably will primarily only work with private requests from now on.

[carpenjoyce]

One of the participants here has a very good idea. The article is posted on the public site, but with the end of every paragraph missing. He or she uses ellipses (....) to show there's more to the paragraph than the poster can see.

I'm going to do this from now on. I, too, prefer private clients, but you have to have some public posts to attract new private clients.

[aprilk10]

yea, I used to do something like that, but I found that it seemed to work better (at least for me) to post the entire article. It really doesn't make a difference how much is being posted though if the entire article is still somehow being lifted. I still wonder if somehow "customers" are placing requests and can then somehow lift the file that is submitted to the request. I thought maybe they didn't get the file unti they actually purchased it, but...somehow it seems to be happening.

[carpenjoyce]

Does any one who actually works for CC or knows its workings intimately have any comments on this? Ed? Celeste? Do we have a hacker or what?

[Celeste Stewart]

I don't work for CC so I have no idea. I've always suspected RSS feeds as being a contributing factor to thefts. I don't think RSS feeds can get so deep into a site as to pull info from Word documents though, so... there goes my theory.

[Lysis]

The question is if the file is copied after it gets sent to the open queue. Copied content is a problem all over the web, and people can just open a page and copy the content on the page. There isn't much anyone can do about scraped content. That's why I always remove RSS feeds from my sites.

[carpenjoyce]

I don't see how file scraping allows thieves to get something that isn't posted on the public page. The problem here isn't just that thieves are scraping the part that appears on the public pages, they're republishing the entire article, which only cc staff should be able to see or open until the article is sold.

[Celeste Stewart]

There's a type of software called "web extraction" software that CAN extract entire files on websites. I'm sure that CC has authentication and other measures in place to protect its files from prying eyes and extractor utilities, but I'm also sure that savvy programmers can probably figure out a way around those defenses. Data security is a huge issue all over the Web and it's a constant cat and mouse game of playing catchup. Even though we haven't heard an official response from CC, I'm confident that they're working behind the scenes to figure this out.

[carpenjoyce]

Wow, Celeste, that's really depressing. Since you know a lot about this, can I ask you another question? One of my articles was posted on the web under a different title. The posting date claims to be the same date I created the file on my computer. But I didn't post the file to constant content until some days later! The poster's name is the same first name as the purchaser who bought the fullrights--but not until several weeks later. Is there some way someone can back date a posting on the web to make it look like they created or bought the file earlier than they did? I'm pretty sure my computer is secure, so I think they did this through cc somehow. To make matters even more confusing, someone using the same first name as the purchaser posted a question on the forum asking why the copyright checker didn't catch the other article. Oddly, the poster has the same first name but not the same username as my buyer. The name is not that common that I'd expect this to be a coincidence, although it's possible.

I guess what I'm asking is: can a scraper scrape the file creation date and somehow use that to make it appear the file was posted that day?

If you can make any sense out of all this, please enlighten me.

[Celeste Stewart]

I just tried backdating a blog post in one of my wordpress sites, and yes, you can do that - Yikes!

Word documents hold information about the document's author, create date, and other details. So, in theory, a person who has the Word document could look at its creation date and do with it what they will.

In Word 2007, go to the Office button, click Prepare > Properties. A new section appears on your screen showing the author's name and a few other details. If you click on Document Properties > Advanced Properties, you'll see even more details including the document's creation date. In other versions of Word, I think you go to File > Properties.

To avoid this, in Word 2007, go to Prepare > INspect Document and let the inspector run. It will then prompt you to remove all hidden document properties and personal information.

[carpenjoyce]

This is great information, Celeste. Thank you so much. It's different in my version, but I found it. All my files will be missing this info from now on.

I think it's truly terrifying that someone can steal your file and then make you look like the thief by backdating their posting. I really hope cc can find some sort of better security that will cut down on all of these problems. There have to be ways to make things more secure. You rarely see brokerage accounts getting hacked, for example, because they have mega-security. But it probably costs a lot--and even they're getting hacked more than they used to.

[Celeste Stewart]

At this point, we can only speculate. But it is crazy how vulnerable all of our information (Web content, banking, medical, credit card info, SS#s, personal photos with embedded geolocation info, etc) is on the Web. As a newbie to Facebook, I'm also troubled about some of their privacy issues but that's a topic for another day.