Stolen content - what's the Best Practice for reporting?

[Ed]

I'm only guessing, but the article's purchases are probably difficult to trace because CC was a vastly different site in 2005. Records from that time might not be as complete as they are today.

If you really want to close your account, Support will certainly honor your request. However, having content stolen is an occupational hazard of writing for the web - it will happen if you plan to write online no matter where you decide to post your work. Additionally, Constant Content has been shown to be more diligent than other sites in investigating cases of plagiarism and taking measures to protect work. From another thread:

[quote]We do not index anything, and prevent any bot from crawling our database. That only works so much, though, and to be honest of the over 20 000 articles on the site, this problem only affects roughly 1% of our authors. We are doing a good job and will continue to be vigilant.[quote]

Other writers have decided to leave CC because their content was stolen, but it seems to me that authors who wish to make a stand against plagiarism are only hurting themselves when protesting CC becomes a part of the strategy. Authors who leave CC lose what umbrella of protection they have by writing for a this site and the support of a helpful community.

Thanks,
Ed

[Celeste Stewart]

Unfortunately, it looks like that article still remains on ezines - a free article directory. I also found it on another site this morning after looking at your profile and googling a phrase or two:
http://www.new.citynewslive.com/ezineready.php?id=47818
This is being pushed as free "ezine ready" content by that same Pallab character. What sucks is future bloggers and webmasters have no idea that the content originated at CC and is not licensed to be distributed all over the net for free by that guy. Since it's on these free directories, I suspect you'll continue to see it circulating as people take him up on his offer of free content. Some may even defiantly drop HIS name from the article. So even if you close your account, the article will still be copied and pasted into other sites and blogs. It's really unfortunate.

[Celeste Stewart]

Here's what I would do. Ask support to remove the article from CC. Cut your losses on this one. You've sold it 6 times for $8, so it's sold for $48 which is probably what it would have gone for full rights for anyway. Now, since this is a popular article and topic, rewrite the article, changing it enough so that it is fresh and unique and post it for sale here. Perhaps in this case Ed will let you change it just enough since the original content is yours but I'd go with completely new myself. Once you say goodbye to the old article, you'll hopefully have less stress about it. I know it sucks and I'd want to go after that guy and set him straight (apparently you have permission to do that too) but that's what I would do in this case.

[Constant]

Here is my response to her complaint to support:

Think about this for a second. We have thousands of dollars in preventative theft deterrents. In four years your article has sold six times. That means that it sits, unprotected on six different sites that are designed to drive traffic to them to make their proprietors money. High levels of traffic to six different sites, will indubitably result in some copying and pasting, and theft. It is impossible to keep track of what customer's site is which, since they often sign up with email addresses that don't correlate to their site. We make sure that articles are not stolen off of our site and that our writers are protected, but we also cannot protect our client's sites to ensure that they are doing everything to prevent the purchased article from being stolen off of their site. If that seems like an unreasonable sentiment to you the you are welcome to leave the site. If you would like to also put some time into protecting your work, especially work that has sold so many times to various buyers, then go ahead and do it.

I, without mitigation, assert, that we do everything in our power to prevent the theft of articles from our site, but we cannot prevent articles from being stolen from other sites, once purchased, that is, unequivocally, beyond anyone's power to do so. To pursue an article that is four years old and has been sold six times, is a waste of everyone's time. If your article sells six times, be grateful, and let it go from your mind, it may even sell some more. Though the comments above, frustrate me to no end, I am going to leave this post open for community comment, since I hope that other authors can learn from this discussion, and in their minds create reasonable expectations of the life of an article that is out in the wild, and focus on what they should be focusing on, writing new content. We continue to work hard to insure the valuable work that you do, but there is a limit to the technology and resources at our disposal, and we find that our time spent finding you all buyers for your articles is more important than creating an impenetrable vault that would make it impossible for your articles to be sold. And so we live with the trade off. C'est la vie!

David Kool
Product & Content Manager, Web Properties
www.Constant-Content.com
david.kool@constant-content.com

[Debbi]

David,

Everything you said here is exactly what I have been thinking about this particular situation. There is no way anyone can protect an article that's been bandied about the Internet for such a long time, or in print for that matter. Think of all the students over eons who have plagarized textbooks and encyclopedias. Once something is out there for public view, it is subject to plagarism. We authors do expect CC to provide a reasonable amount of protection, with reasonable being the operative word.

I agree with Celeste about letting go and rewriting the article since it is such a popular topic. But I wouldn't take it down because, as you say, it may very well sell again. Customers who buy usage rights are well aware that the article has been sold elsewhere and have no idea whether a duplicate of it online is legit or not.

Just my 2-cents

Debbi

[jak]

Nicole - I found one of my articles under another byline at ezinearticles after it had sold for usage rights. I corresponded with David about it and he advised me to report the article on their site. When I did this and explained the situation, giving them a link to it on CC, they immediately replied that it had been deleted.

[Lysis]

ezinearticles is pretty good about removing stolen content. Any big name vendor is pretty good about it being removed. It's still a hassle and ridiculously time consuming, but at least it's not a brick wall when you need to have the content removed.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Ed, David:

My gripe is not so much the fact that my article gets stolen. I understand that this is a hazard of publishing work on the internet.

Here is my gripe:

1) Constant-Content sells content under certain terms of use. The "Usage License", for instance, states that the purchaser must not change a word, may post it once and only once, and must include the author's by-line.

2) Constant-Content alone is in a position to enforce these terms; they know who purchased the content, knowledge which I as the author am denied. Only they can tell whether an article that shows up in the wild is a legitimate purchase or stolen content. They can contact the purchasers, but I have learned from reading the terms of use and these forums that I as an author can get banned from Constant-Content for contacting purchasers.

3) David's response to me, which I quoted above, made it clear that Constant-Content, the only ones who can enforce the terms of these licenses, is not interested in enforcing the terms of these licenses. They make rules that are supposedly there to protect me, but when I report a violation of them, I am told, "Well, you go do something about it if it means that much to you."

So, Ed, my response to you, when you tell me that if I leave Constant-Content I will be leaving the protection Constant-Content offers, is, what protection?

What is the use of a content license if purchasers are not being held to their terms? If you're going to make rules, you have to be able to enforce them. Enforcing rules like "Only the purchaser may publish this content," "Only publish it once," and "include a byline" absolutely require documenting who purchased the content and where they intend to publish it. If you can't do that, then your system of licensing has no teeth.

So in future, if I am going to sell my writing through a middleman, it will be through someone who actually has a viable system for effectively policing their customers' use of content. Or it will be work-for-hire (like your "Full rights" license) through someone like Demand Studios, such that once it's sold it simply isn't mine to worry about anymore.

David has already received my notification that I want to cancel my account and remove all articles from CC's database. I meant it then and I meant it now. I already have copies of my Usage-sold articles on my own hard drive; you can go ahead and push the red button on them and my login.

(For what it's worth, I am also disappointed that CC's interface seems to have no way of removing content from availability once it's sold. All my articles that have sold under Usage License, they only have "Edit" buttons, not "Delete" like my unsold articles. Surely it remains the author's right to determine when to stop offering an article for resale?)

[Constant]

I think that you are clearly missing the point of all our communication. We DO want to protect you work. We DO have steps in place to insure that the license system has teeth. But we are also pragmatists and after a long period of time, with articles sitting on other sites, we no longer have a reasonable expectation of pursuing violations of article's copyright. If we did, then we would never do anything else. Articles that were sold years ago can't be monitored with any level of effectiveness. I wish you all the best it your furture endeavours, I fear that you will find yourself in the same position though elsewhere and hope you can find some peace in the knowledge that one can DELAY the proliferation of one's hard written content around the web, but one cannot STOP it!

Cheers!

David

[suttonbaymedia]

I would like to add my experience, which I think is relevant to this discussion. I think your problem is with Pallab Katoky, not Constant and you can get at Pallab with some detective work. I was promoting my own websites by writing for Ezine when my articles turned up all over the place with someone else's byline. I hunted that guy down until I found him in India. He stole articles off Ezine and then resold them, claiming his writing service people had written them. I turned him into every article generator as well as called the company he sold them to. The people who bought the articles from him - rather hired him to write a series of articles - don't want to buy stolen articles but are counting on cheap web article writing companies honesty that they didn't steal content. You should have seen the flurry of emails that SEO/web company sent off when I accused them of buying stolen articles. "George, take care of this...we can't have this! Hurts our reputation!" It was wonderful. The thief even emailed me. The only way to stop this is to find the thiefs, call their clients and make them stop. If it hurts their bottom line they will be more careful. I even contacted the writer in New Zealand and Canada who my guy had also stolen from and they did the same thing.

My feeling is that I can't believe there is a company like Constant to pay me for the work I was doing for free a few years ago. Once my writing is out there, it's impossible to keep safe. The New York Times feels the same way. There can't be a one time only use, it's just not realistic. But I also don't think there are thousands of thieves. I think as internet content is developing there are those black hat SEO folks who will stop at nothing to put up thousands of websites and they are going to steal content. Period. But they aren't careful to hide their identity and in most cases you can find them and tell them to stop stealing YOUR content. I think it's a few bad apples spoiling the barrel and if you dog them, it will help. But I really don't think it's Constant's job to hunt them down. They couldn't. They would spend all their time doing that and I would rather they spend their time marketing my content!
My 2 cents too!
Nancy

[canywriter]

Nancy

I think you have hit the nail on the head. Interesting post. And good for you that you were able to track the thief down. Question is, how do you track down someone who is almost certainly using a fake identity - or perhaps multiple fake ids? Some tip?

Cany

[Amy W]

Cany, if the thief is posting the stolen content on a site he owns, you can find out who it is through a site like whois.net. Just type in the domain name, and it'll tell you the registrant's name, address, and e-mail. If he sold the content to a website, I'd just contact the site owners and let them know that they just paid for stolen content. If they paid money for the article, they must have some info on the thief.

[canywriter]

Amy,

It's a public blog site - whosis says domain privacy protected, but a little more digging unearthed an email contact and I've sent off a mail with cc to our support.

Debbi, this is the id - sid@33rpm.com (sounds a little odd, but no harm done trying) - in case you want to shoot off a mail too about your getting a dog to catch a frisbee article. I have mentioned in my mail that there are several articles by cc authors.

Best
Cany

[BarryDavidson]

Okay...

As stated above several times, an article which has sold several times cannot be protected from CC's end because the theft didn't originate from CC. That does not mean that YOU cannot protect it yourself if it means that much to you.

AmyW mentioned a whois.com search, and that site can be your friend - even if you can't reach the "owner" of the site in question. Look to see who their hosting company is. If that host is American or owned by a company which has servers in America, you have a recourse under the MDCA (Millennium Digital Copyright Act). Here's the catch. You have to be sure that the site posting the work didn't buy it at some point. (Keep in mind that it costs you money to take a case such as this to court. The only way you'll get that money back is if you, 1) win the case, and 2) specify that legal fees are a part of that damages you're seeking.)

From there (if the article was indeed stolen) you fill out a MDCA copyright violation form, sign it, and mail it to the hosting company (the form requires a physical signature). By law, they are required to take the site down until the infringing material is removed. Again, this is only for American Hosting companies. A few other countries have treaties with America for this purpose, but that will require researching the laws of that country.

Now for a real kicker. Many blog sites (and such) have little icons under the posted material. Those icons automatically post the work to other sites like Digg.com with a link to the original. While this seems shady (and is to a degree) it's on the edge of the legality issues associated with usage rights. Traffic generating usage from multiple domains is common, and was not addressed in the MDCA if I'm remembering correctly.

As for the byline issue - I too was under the assumption that it had to be added. Technically it does, but you must type it into the body of the work. In print, the publisher will usually add it no matter what. Online is a whole different ballgame.

Blaming CC for this is like blaming your hand for what someone else's foot did. Honestly, I've had an article sell here multiple times for usage that was originally published elsewhere. I'm sure it's been posted in several places I don't know about. I just don't have the time to track them down, and I make more off the full rights articles I sell.