Stolen article

[cashwriter]

I went back to Grace Wesley's AC page, and my article is no longer there. I don't know if she pulled it or if AC did. I had written to her saying, "Shame on your for stealing my article. You have been reported." So she might have panicked and removed it. Either way, I'm satisfied. I'd like her to get booted from AC, but she'd just create another account, so I'm not super worried about it.

[jrichards]

The Google Alerts are really only going to work for automated republishing. In the case of most of these AC writers there must be people who are re-posting the content by hand, possibly by just re-typing the long summaries. Consequently, the Google Alert system isn't working since people are either not copying the works in an automated way or are reviewing everything before they publish it and stripping out the "This Article is Published Here..." sentence manually.

[Celeste Stewart]

I suspect that they might be manipulating RSS feeds. Unfortunately, there's software out there that makes it easy to grab a feed and post it to a blog or elsewhere. You can even use this type of software to fully automate blogs using feeds. I've heard that even if you set up your feed to only display a small excerpt that it's possible to extract the entire description from feeds somehow.

I actually use a program that has an RSS feed posting feature (I don't use it to steal RSS feeds) because the program I have makes managing multiple blogs really easy. It stores my user names and passwords and provides a single interface for publishing blog posts. I like those features. The RSS feed feature is also cool when used properly and ethically. However, I can see how it can easily be abused. And even then, it's not completely clear to users that it's not right to simply republish content found via feeds. Grrr. Must educate the world about right and wrong.

[Antonia]

Google alerts have been working great for me. Every time I submit an article, I set a random sentence as a Google alert. Yes, it adds a couple seconds to the submitting process, but I do it on autopilot now and it has been well worth it to catch the article thieves. I typically get an alert within a couple days of a stolen article being posted.

The alert for the "This article is stolen property..." insert, I've never gotten. So I recommend that if you're serious about protecting your work, you do go to the trouble of manually creating an alert for each article.

[Nessiee]

Wow, that's a really great idea. I think I'll work on setting this up for myself. Thanks.

[Amy W]

Just as a warning - Google Alerts is not all that reliable. I have alerts set up for around half of my articles. So far, I have received one alert - even though several of my articles have been stolen. And that one alert came a few months too late. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the websites themselves. If a website is reported to Google for posting stolen content, and Google decides to punish the website, it drops the website from the search results, right? So the website still has the stolen content posted, but Google has no way of alerting you to it. Of course, since I know next to nothing about computers, I could be dead wrong. In any case, I do a manual search once a month for my articles. I keep one sentence from each article in a separate file, and then I just copy and paste into the search box. It takes all of ten minutes, and I can actually see where my stolen articles have been posted.

And if anyone's bored of the Google page, head to Blackle.com. It's the same search as Google, but with a black screen - it saves the environment and your eyes at the same time!

By the way, Mrbluesky.org still has the stolen content posted. Anyone have any updates?

[jak]

Mrbluesky is a turd. I checked he site after I read Amy's last post and discovered an article of mine had been posted there on July 16th (the day before I moved house, and for various reasons I've only recently got back online). This was an article that I had withdrawn from CC on 29th July to submit elsewhere. Now it's unlikely I can sell it to my intended customer, nor can I submit it again here for usage only because it doesn't have my byline on it. Any advice will be welcomed.

[jrichards]

I've sent a message to the owner of the site asking him to remove the content. The next step will be to file a DMCA notice against the site.

The site is owned by a fellow in New Jersey so I'm fairly hopeful that we can get these articles taken down. I'll keep you posted.

-jrichards

[Lor]

I've sent a message to the owner of the site asking him to remove the content. The next step will be to file a DMCA notice against the site.

The site is owned by a fellow in New Jersey so I'm fairly hopeful that we can get these articles taken down. I'll keep you posted.

-jrichards

Is this directed at my thief? There are a few mentioned in the thread. I haven't heard from you via email, so I'm assuming yes? Thanks again for staying on top of this.


Edited later to add
The article seems to have been removed. Your doing or mine, I don't know. Thanks for responding to this issue.

[Amy W]

Lor, articlet.com is actually based in Russia. Good news about the site taking down your stolen article, though. I've had stolen articles posted on the site before, and they always seem to take them down quickly - the problem is they replace them with more stolen articles!

Thanks, jrichards, for looking into mrbluesky for us.

And Jak, you summed it up perfectly!

[jrichards]

sorry, I was a bit unclear there, mrbluesky.org is in NJ, but you're quite right though articlet is in Russia.

-jrichards

[Antonia]

Mine is STILL up there:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... tml?cat=27

Grrrrrr! I am surprised as usually Support is very quick to get these down. I wrote to AC myself just now so hopefully that will expedite things.

[cashwriter]

Damnit, another one!

http://femalecare.net/womens-reproducti ... -planning/

Word for word. And not AC, so I'm not sure how to go about taking it down.

What I'm very confused about is how they got my whole article when this is the only place I've posted it and only 1/3 of the article is posted for viewing. What the heck is going on here???

[truleigh]

Hey Cashwriter,
I just checked out the link and they posted an article of mine up there too.

[cashwriter]

So how do they get the whole article? Was yours posted in its entirety or just the 1/3 you put up on here? If they nabbed the whole thing, how the heck did they manage it? Is there a security issue here to be concerned with?