Stolen Artilces on www.myfinancecommerce.com

[Constant]

Hi guys and gals! We had a report of stolen content being posted at www.myfinancecommerce.com. We contacted the owner and he told us that he purchased the content from a seller on www.forums.digitalpoint.com. We have submitted the name of buyer to Paypal and will file DMCA paper to see if we can't get it removed, but I am hoping that you will help us by looking on their site and seeing if you can see any other articles that have been stolen from CC. If you find them, post the CC URL here or send it to support. We will get these nefarious scoundrels!

David

[SallyA]

Hi Constant,

You already know about mine, but here's the URL of mine for anyone else who is interested: http://myfinancecommerce.com/online-ban ... ter-option.

To let other authors know, my particular article has never been sold. I received a best offer a few months ago and accepted this, but the buyer didn't bite and it remained unsold. I got a Google alert recently and found that the long summary has been lifted by someone and it was posted on said site in late October (my alert must be out of sync!).

[Lysis]

I'm sure this is obvious, but it's all finance articles. So if you write finance, you should check!

And I hate digitalpoint!

[Celeste Stewart]

Just checked. They nabbed the last three paragraphs of one of my articles. Emai sent.

[audrabianca]

This buyer sold articles from CC as a 10-pack. I know because at least one belongs to DMGutierrez and is still available on CC:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1587754

I joined to try and leave feedback about the seller (who has 100% positive feedback, I wonder why) but you can only leave feedback if you are a buyer in the transaction.

I don't know how to stop them selling our articles. I took a look for about one hour. There are multiple transactions going on everyday. There is no way we could monitor this busy website for all of our stolen articles. I don't understand why the articles pass Copyscape when buyers check them out because the titles and content (at least the part posted in the long summary) are at Constant Content. Any buyer who searched any of the home improvement articles would have found them on CC. The seller may also have used article rewriting software to change the content stolen from here just enough so that Copyscape will not bring up CC articles in the results.

[eek]

Thanks for catching that, audrabianca. The second & third articles are mine. I see in the comments below someone said "sold". I'll send a message to support.
What a great way to start the day.
Emma

[Celeste Stewart]

Those ten pack article sellers, I mean thieves, are a nuisance indeed! Of course the articles pass Copyscape because CC isn't indexed by Copyscape. I wonder if support can work directly with Copyscape to get CC listed as a site that Copyscape regularly scans? This would be different than a search engine index. I imagine it's technically possible. If set up, then the Digital Point sellers wouldn't be able to claim originality and their bluffs would be called out as soon as a customer does their own Copyscape scan.

[audrabianca]

Well, that is a great idea. Keep in mind that the customers on Digital Point are not posting the content of the articles, just the titles. I can't imagine why the buyers are not using Copyscape to check. My articles do come up in CopyScape. But you are right, not from the text of the article.

[Debbi]

Thanks, audrabianca

Yes, my poor little microwave-dried flower article is there and I recognized other CC titles. It's bad enough when people steal our articles to post on revenue-sharing sites but to actually sell our work. It is criminal!

Debbi

[eek]

Oh, but it gets worse, Debbi. My husband did some digging and found this via a link to their forums at the bottom of that page: sarahgabriel33 sold them originally to davidin80. And sarahgabriel33 is banned on their forum now. So it makes you wonder, how many times these articles have changed hands, and how many people have pocketed the money?
Walking away... Can't work with my blood boiling.

[Lysis]

I think Copyscape uses a Google API? Not sure. I always assumed Copyscape used a Google app to find stolen content. Google has so many cool APIs to use for apps to find your stuff.

[Celeste Stewart]

Even if Copyscape uses a Google API, it won't detect CC articles because the articles are purposely not indexed by Google and other search engines to ensure "original" content to CC customers. My suggestion is that CC work directly with Copyscape to instruct Copyscape to scan the CC site somehow. I don't know if it's technically possible or not but I imagine Copyscape has some sort of index of sites that it scans. So if the CC site could be manually entered into this index, then our articles would show up without being indexed on Google.

[Lysis]

It would be hard, but not impossible. If you notice here: http://web-sniffer.net/?url=http://www. ... =GET&uak=7

None of the text in the article is in the returned HTML, so that is why articles aren't indexed. CC would have to create an app that returned the text for copyscape to pick up, which is tricky. They can block Googlebot using robots.txt or using the NOINDEX meta tag, but not all robots adhere to standards. So, what happens is some rogue scraper bot picks up the content and posts it on the scraper's domain. Then, Google comes around and indexes THAT site, so now your content is indexed by Google, which is bad.

The only way to really do it is put it behind a password protected area. What a headache! But, definitely possible. My favorite part of software development was brainstorming, because almost everything is possible, but some of it is really a hassle. I'm so glad I don't do it much anymore. LOL

I'm not sure if I should be happy that no one has stolen my content yet or insulted that it's not worthy. LOL

[eek]

This same article list is for sale again here: http://www.111host.net/webmaster-talk/w ... 96%88.html

David, Jeff, Constant - is there anything you can do? A DMCA paper?