Constant Content

I found 3 of my articles at this site: http://www.obusiness.info/

Unfortunately, there is no way to contact the domain owner on the website that I could find. Through a little investigating, I found that the owner's info is protected by http://whoisprotectservice.net/index.html. I went to their site and filed a DMCA report. There were alot of articles under the categories of freelancing, business, and marketing here. I strongly suspect they were all lifted from CC.

I would also shoot a DMCA to whomever is hosting this POS site.

I figured the fact that the thieves would actually have to type out the content they find here would stop them. I guess they've found it's worth it. After all, since the content here is displayed as an image, the thief's site will be seen as the original source.

This is the second site in a few days doing this. I don't see any monetization going on, so I suspect they plan on flipping these sites. Hopefully, anyone researching the site will find this thread and realize that http://www.obusiness.info/ is full of stolen content rather than the 100% original content that the seller will probably claim he/she/it wrote.

I haven't been able to work on my sites for a week or more. These thieves have just gotten the better of me. I'm so sick and tired of being stolen from. And I'm sick and tired of the fact that so many seem to think stealing/scraping content is OK as long as a backlink is provided. Hostek, the hosting company involved in my most recent incident, even tried to justify the theft because my page was identified as a "preview" and I was given links to my site 'which are good for SEO'. The fact that the site had scraped content from over 13,300 pages from numerous other sites seemed to not concern the webhost in the least. The webhost did finally push for my content to be removed. Sadly, the other obviously scraped content was left untouched.

I wish I could offer you a solution but I can offer my empathy. This shit hurts and makes me want to physically harm these people.

I agree. These people are just pathetic. I found these because I was going to take down two of the articles from here to submit somewhere else. I thought I better run them through Copyscape first to make sure they had not been scraped. Sure enough, there they were. I'm pretty new to the whole filing DMCA reports thing, so I am trying to learn these past couple of days. I sent a DMCA to that other site in the other thread too. (Sigh) I am also getting pretty tired of it. I am considering only working through private requests here. Unfortunately, I currently only have one really regular Private request client, though she pays extremely well! I don't know if they are retyping the content, or if they have found other ways to do it. With this site, the articles were written last year, so they may have been stolen before the new protections were put in place. The other site was recently submitted content though.

This is the info Whois gives, but I can't find an address. I run a search, but no results show up.


Name Server:NS24.USA.PARK-WEB.NET
Name Server:24NS.USA.PARK-WEB.NET

How do you find the host?

The host is probably the folks who own park-web.net. Unfortunately, that appears to have the privacy protection set too. They do have an abuse email listed. It is abuse@park-web.ru. It might prove a waste of time contacting them but I'd still give it a try.

Thanks! I just filed with them as well!

I recently dealt with a particularly obnoxious site owner who wouldn't respond or remove my stolen article. I first filed a DMCA with Google, and they stripped the site of all ads. I then found the ISP (through dawhois.com) and filed a formal complaint with their infringment department.

I just got word this week that the ISP took down not just the article, but suspended the entire site! Yay, justice prevails!

Honestly, the amount of time I spent on getting the article removed cost me any future profit on the article, but it's the principle of the thing, and I feel the victory was worth it.

Linda

Linda, I've lost track of how much time I've spent dealing with content thieves. Some writers have simply decided to not bother anymore. I keep holding out hope that the more of us who force the issue will lead to fewer successful thieves. I also keep hoping that one day Google will stop indexing the copies and/or deindex any blogs using automated programs to scrape content.

Problem is that letting it go can end up costing quite a bit. One of my articles is constantly copied and pasted to Yahoo! Answers. While Yahoo! has been great about pulling it down, they do require a separate DMCA for each report. You can, however, list more than one instance per notice. A number of sites are posting feeds from Answers on their sites. In spite of all of the copies, my site continued to rule the SERPs. That changed when a Fortune 500 company posted a feed with my article. They suddenly pushed me out of the top spots. Fortunately, when Yahoo! pulled the page, it was automatically removed from the other site as well. Pathetic that such a big company was not writing their own content. You would know the company if I mentioned it but I suspect the law would be on their side if I cast aspersions in their direction, even if fully justified.

It would seem that once someone steals content from here that the content would become impossible to sell for full rights or even unique. I would also think that a buyer, who purchases such content, would have grounds for a refund or even a lawsuit against either the author, CC or both. After all, CC states that the article passed iThenticate.

For now, I plan to keep fighting. It is making it harder for me to write and produce quality content for my own sites or write content for this marketplace.

Hi Michele,

Just this morning, after I first posted to this thread, I found yet another theft!! That's 3 in less than 2 months. I love CC, but I was truly hoping for some new security measures when they implemented all of those changes this past spring.

While I've been able to remove most of my stolen content, I had one that originated from an ezine feed (the kiss of death, once it archives since so many junk blogs get their content this way), and it roamed around the Web for almost two years!! I gave up, kept it on CC for usage, and eventually someone did purchased it.

I don't know about other CC writers, but my work here sells much, much better when I place the entire text for preview. What do you think? Have you had good luck selling with partial article summaries?

Linda

I've only posted one. It's had no views. It is seasonal, so my timing may just be off.

The thefts began shortly after I posted it. Every time I try to write something lately, I keep getting sidetracked. Why keep giving the thieves more stuff to steal? Hopefully, I'll get over it and get motivated again soon. It's just getting harder and harder for me to deal with this crap.

I did see something interesting here the other day. Someone had an article with bullet points. The bullets were the 'meat' of the article. They had ... ... where the bullet points would have been. It looked like they previewed everything else. I thought that was an interesting approach but wondered if anyone would buy under those conditions.

The host for this site is Single Hop, and you can access their DMCA section at this link:

http://www.singlehop.com/legal/#dmca

In general, the more DMCA notices a host receives the faster they are to take the site down. Where there's smoke there's fire, so to speak.

You can also file a DMCA with Google and get the thief's Google accounts suspended:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/stati ... ts=1114905


Update: just spoke to Single Hop, and you can email your complaints about the site in question to abuse@singlehop.com If you guys send a few notices in the site should be taken down soon.

I am very unhappy because C-C had to refund a customer who wanted Full Rights. The article had been stolen.
When I looked the site up, my virus protection software warned me that it was a dangerous site. It looks like I will have to
go through my articles to see if any more have been stolen.

I've also noticed that people have been stealing my blog posts.

Lisa-Anne Sanderson wrote:
I've also noticed that people have been stealing my blog posts.

That just stinks. Hope you get your articles pulled.

Don't know if this will help with your blog theft, but I use WP-CopyProtect (widget) to keep the right-clickers away. It won't deter the serious thief, but the lazy ones are deterred.

Good luck.
Mary

Thank you very much, Mary. I will use the widget on my blogs in future.