More Stolen Content

[Amy W]

Hey Eric

If you ever want to contact a site's author, do a whois search. I like whois.domaintools.com - just go there and type in the site address, and you'll get all kinds of info on them - location, email address, their service provider. For instance, I know reuterspost.com gets around 356 US visitors a month - more people saw me in my grade seven play dancing with a margarine container on my head. Good times . . .

[Debbi]

Amy, got any pics? What kind of margarine? Sounds fun!

[Amy W]

Thankfully I can't remember where the pics my parents took went! Someone organizing the play had the bright idea to dress us all up as bellhops while we sang songs from the 60s. The margarine containers were supposed to be hats, but they just looked like black margarine containers. And they say school isn't torture.

[EricScott]

Thanks for the info Amy. I'm taking this whole thing as a learning experience since I'm pretty new to this. I went onto whois and there is a contact email address for the reuterspost site. It is registered in Russia. Should I send this person an email, or just let Google eventually handle it?

[Debbi]

If CC support now wants the authors to handle stolen content problems, it would be very helpful if there was some kind of tutorial on how to go about it in the Writer's Guidelines or FAQ. I'd say, first contant the site owner (copying CC) and keep other measures (contacting the hosting service and Google) as a back-up if the site owner refuses to take down the content. In my last two thefts, AC took the article down immediately upon my request and banned the poster, and the other site owner worked with me to get the problem resolved. There are some unscrupulous site owners but so far I haven't run into any, just people being taken advantage of by content thieves.

Associated Content knows all about CC but most site owners don't. If we use our thefts as an opportunity to educate site owners to the rigorous professionalism and originality standards CC requires before approving an article for sale, maybe we'll create some new CC customers. That way everyone wins--the customer gets exceelent original material and CC and the authors get the moolah

[LindaM]

Tyler Cleaver stole 2 of my articles months ago on AC! I guess they suspend their authors for a period of time, but do NOT ban them permanently! This is really disappointing. It would appear that the standards and practices on AC are really lax...

Debbi, your situation with your unlawfully purchased article on 'dailyarticle' is truly scary! Glad it all worked out, but what an ordeal.

Linda

[Celeste Stewart]

From a marketing standpoint, I don't think that informing people that the content that they purchased elsewhere was stolen from CC necessarily instills confidence in the CC system and would lead to more customers. Why would they want to buy "original content" from us if their first experience involved a blatant theft from the CC system? Why would they think that other articles here are "pure and untouched"? After all, if a thief stole one article from CC, surely there must be a security problem. How can they be sure that the article that they are buying hasn't been copied and pasted and posted elsewhere?

Filing notices, whether CC does it or we do it, is reactionary. I know CC has some measures in place to guard our content, but theft still happens. What else can we do while still balancing the customer's need to see the content before they buy?

Ideas:
* Don't let random people/bots browse the catalog. Maybe require registration before browsing is allowed?
* Maybe place a capcha before displaying an article's long summary?
* Maybe let us post screenshots of the article in lieu of copying text into the long summary?
* Consider eliminating RSS feeds
* Consider letting customers run a final iThenticate scan right before purchase to verify that the article hasn't been posted elsewhere since the article was first approved. Could lead to lost sales if the article in question has been stolen, but much of what customers are buying is originality.

I know some of these ideas reduce usability and staying ahead of thieves is a game of cat and mouse. Perhaps allow customers who have reached a certain level of trust (x amount of purchased articles) have full access to the catalog when they sign in. . .

[audrabianca]

D,
Thanks, D.

[Debbi]

Celeste, I agree with all the precautions you suggest, especially with viewers having to register and use captcha (or something like it) before they can see articles. I know CC wants to make it as easy as possible for customers to find and purchase articles, but most people these days are used to creating accounts, profiles, and verifications, especially business people who know the importance of security. Prevention is always best, IMHO. When you deal with this problem, do you direct the site owner to CC or just not mention CC to avoid revealing thefts from the site? I'm not sure how else to handle it. This is why I would like an addtion to the Writers FAQ on the subject.

Audra, I think DA acted honorably with both their customer and me in the end, and unfortunately they had to pay twice for the same piece. I apologize if I made any disparaging remarks when I first encountered this particular problem. When I first corresponded with the site owner, I had no idea the article had come from DA. I thought it was just some random sniper. As soon as I talked to DA directly, everything was resolved and very quickly. Trying to protect your intellectual property on the Internet is extremely difficult and misunderstandings arise. In this case apparently DA allowed someone to upload material they purchased from someone else (probably the thief), which AFAIK, CC doesn't, at least not if they know about it. Rules are never 100% effective and I'm sure DA acted in good faith. If there was a way that DA and AC could check prospective articles for their site against CC's library, these problems could be avoided, but that sounds really complicated and might raise more security issues than it resolves.

I plan to be more circumspect in my dealings with stolen articles from now on. This was my first experience since CC took care of problems before.

[Amy W]

Last night, I sent the owner of reuterspost an email, asking him to take down my article or I would take further action by reporting him to his service provider. Today, my article has been taken down. So if anyone else has their stolen articles posted on the site, contact the site owner - it should work.

I've always had good luck dealing with article thieves - and, in one case, their service provider - so here's what I do. I email the site owner, letting them know that I own the copyright to an article on their site. I tell them that they have to remove the article from their website, whether they bought it from a thief or they stole it themselves. I always mention where it was stolen from - I think legally you have to. I also mention that they can keep the article posted on their site if they purchase it - never hurts to try for another sale. I always end by saying if they don't purchase it or take it down by the end of the week, I will be "forced" to take further action by reporting them to their service provider.

If this doesn't work, I report them to their service provider, mention again that I own the copyright, and that the site owner posted stolen content on their website. If you go to the service provider's website, you should see a Report Abuse button - if they don't have one, just email them. In the Terms of Service of every service provider, it states that the site owner will not post stolen content - so the law's on your side.

I'd love to know what CC would like us to do in these situations - I never cc CC, and I'd like to know if I should.

Eric, I'm guessing you should just let Google handle it - if they're looking into it now, they'll probably need to see your article posted on the site.

[Celeste Stewart]

In my case, my article was stolen and then a customer purchased it. Therefore, I can't *prove* my ownership without CC's help as my content has been removed due to having been purchased.

[EricScott]

I sent the site owner an email earlier today. Even though it sucks that my article was stolen this has actually been a good learning experience. Thanks to everyone for the good advice the last few days.

[Sharion]

For those who post article excerpts with a notation about buying the full article, what about adding a mention of Constant Content?

*** For full article, please purchase rights from constant-content.com ***

That way if someone stole the excerpt using a bot, CC would at least get a plug and the reader would know where to get the full article.

Thoughts?

[Sharion]

Yesterday marked the day of my first stolen article. After following the many threads here, I concluded that we are on our own as far as dealing with content thieves and should not bother CC. (If I'm wrong, CC, please chime in!)

After reading the many threads here, my intention was to email the site owner so that (s)he would take it down or purchase it. However, the site had no contact info so I did a WHOIS lookup. As with many sites these days, the contact info was private.

I am assuming that the next step would be to contact the webhost and if that fails, Google. Is this a good plan?

As far as I can tell, both the webhost and Google DMCA require that you either mail or fax the info to them. Neither provides an email address that I could find so I plan to fax the info today. I would have preferred to give the site owner a chance to rectify this without going higher but without contact info, I don't know what else to do.

Thank you all for posting your how-to's. It was very helpful!

An interesting note: I post excerpts here, not full articles and yes, the thief stole only the excerpt. The byline was changed from "by myName" to "by Editor". And the blurb at the end of the excerpt regarding purchasing for rights was removed.

[Sharion]

In defense of content thieves, I did think of one reason that someone might think it's okay to take the excerpt. If you end the excerpt like this I can see how someone could misinterpret.

"For the full article, please purchase rights."

Even though prices are quite visible for usage and full rights, someone could read that to mean that a partial article is okay to copy. So I've gone back and reworded mine to prevent misinterpretation.

Just thinkin'...