Constant Content

Hi all, I'm posting here in frustration as I'm not really getting anywhere with CC support. A customer bought an article for usage, but then proceeded to put it on their site under someone else's name. It happened once before with a Unique license and in that case CC were great, emailed me back the next day to say it was all sorted, but this time I've sent 4 or 5 emails over the last couple of weeks and haven't had a single reply, and the article is still online under someone else's name. Aside from the slight annoyance I'm feeling about it, as the article is still for sale as usage then surely another customer can buy it, discover it's already posted and not with my byline, and get p'd off?

Any advice is welcome, I don't want to resort to contacting the customer directly as I know that's not how it's supposed to work. In my last email to CC I asked for a simple response letting me know what the situation is, just so I know someone's actually there, but still not a sausage.

Emily

Ouch.

Not sure what I'd do in this instance. I think the whole issue is delicate. I wouldn't worry about someone finding the content and thinking it's stolen. Buying usage, they know it's out there. I really don't think they care whose name it's under. It's more of a decision of buying used content.

Is it a regular customer of yours?

I'm kinda on the easy-going side where I don't really care if my name is on it (not for stuff from here), but I also don't sell for usage unless I've already published it somewhere. I say this because if it's a regular customer, I would probably let it slide. If it continues to happen, then I would probably say something.

Nope, not a regular customer. I'm starting to reconsider my views on usage as well, and this one in particular was a bad move I think as it's season and year specific so it's unlikely to sell again at all in a few weeks! Didn't really think it through, doh.

Thanks

This is an ongoing problem. It keeps happening to me over and over with usage licences.

You really need to keep track of them. If you sell something for a usage licence, set up a Google alert with a random sentence from the article, so that when the article is posted you can check that they have kept your byline intact. If they have removed the byline, I have no problem emailing them myself. Just be tactful and friendly. You can ask them to restore your byline or to buy a full licence. Give them options to resolve the problem before you report them.

Thanks Constance, I had a response from Eric today saying Support would look into it so if I still don't hear anything I'll probably end up contacting the customer direct!

Emily

Hi there.

The first thing you should do is politely ask them to either include your name (as per usage rights allows) or simply remove the article from their site. Advise them that they are essentially stealing from you and breaking the agreement they read when they purchased the usage rights as well as the DMCA.

Odds are they will ignore you.

This is when you threaten to contact Google with a link to your CC page showing that you are the author, explain to Google support what is going on, etc.. The page YOUR article is on will be de-indexed immediately and the fun part is they may have a support person evaluate the whole site more often than not leading to the site becoming shoved to the nether regions of SEO hell.

Link here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools ... tice?pli=1&

There's more drastic and painful things you can do like reverse-SEO but you've got to be really upset and lose a ton of money for that. Not that I'd do such a thing of course >_>.

One of the problems of the DIY method is that you need to be sure that the article was actually purchased from here and not stolen, either from here or from the CC customer. I'm not sure that a google alert would pick up every instance of the use. Hopefully support will sort it out for you.