Stolen articles available for usage only

[CieleEdward]

Unfortunately, whether the article will or will not sell for usage twice should be a moot point.

The fact of the matter is we didn't sell full rights to anyone. I honestly feel like someone kicked me in the head. It's not the fact that the article got stolen. It happens. It's the fact that I am floored that we are the ones being forced to suffer for that act.

And...maybe its juvenile, but CC had become the one writing site I could trust. Now how am I supposed to feel when I am being made to pay for someone else's bad judgment?

If and when the articles appear elsewhere CC should treat that just like any other stolen article. We shouldn't have our privileges stripped because of the additional effort that would entail. I'm sorry, but I absolutely hate being punished for something I didn't do. It's not the fault of CC's security system, or Paypal, but its not our fault either.

Do not do this to us CC. We don't deserve this.

[4rumid]

As I wrote above, I completely agree that this isn't the best way to handle these thefts. I wrote to support about it and they've been responsive, but still think taking away full rights is the way to go. Perhaps more direct emails to support will have a greater impact?

[Celeste Stewart]

Theft victims DO get hurt even though they didn't do anything wrong. In this case, the articles were fraudulently purchased. Just as if someone used a stolen credit card to buy an item off the shelf of a store, the owner of the stolen item is harmed financially. The writers still have copies, but can't claim that the copies are the only ones out there because the thief has his own copies that he could be posting elsewhere (online or in print) or marketing to others. It sucks, but the articles have been compromised and I understand CC's position based on that.

Of course shop owners have insurance against theft. I wonder if there's any sort of insurance that applies here? There's a lot at stake and we are all concerned about article theft.

[4rumid]

Celeste -- I understand your/CC's perspective on this. But my question is why handle this situation differently from when articles get stolen from the posted content on CC (from writers who post the entire article)? In that case, once they're located, the relevant people/sites are contacted and the articles get taken down.

It's just incredibly frustrating to have lost hours of work because someone stole my article and it may or may not one day appear somewhere else. I really feel for the people who had several articles stolen.

[Elizabeth Ann West]

Here's another way to look at it:

What if I sold my articles on my own website. Someone bought the article, and then never paid for it, or it was a stolen account. Would I be comfortable turning around and selling the article to another client, presenting it as pristine copy? No way, I could get into legal trouble for knowing the article wasn't clean, or worse, the client gets ticked he or she paid for full rights only to find it in other places, so I get a bunch of complaints or bad press on other outlets.

As an author, I can afford to lose full rights on the occasional article (thefts are fairly rare), I can't afford for C-C to get bad press and lose customers. I also don't want some notation like "this article was stolen, so buy at your own risk" because then it probably would never sell! Theft is a nasty business. Here are some ways you can deal with it

1. Start putting the article to other uses, like on revenue sharing sites. It takes time, but it might just make up for the loss, especially if you promote it.
2. Rewrite the article from a new angle, if the thief found it interesting someone else probably will too. You already did the research, reuse it.
3. If you are super concerned about theft, investigate the inventory method of accounting for tax purposes. It's more involved than with just cash, but you could then write off loses to inventory from theft. But I would talk to a tax professional on that one, using inventory for intellectual property has a bunch of restrictions. You will also have to report income you haven't earned yet because the article exists with that system, usually not worth it unless you are experiencing heavy losses from theft.

Theft is part of life. We sell our writing, just like if we sold trinkets in a tourist shop. There are unscrupulous people who will damage products or steal them. Sometimes damage is accidental, sometimes intentional. As a retailer, we just have to make due, and maybe raise our prices a little to mitigate losses. Perhaps we will now see an uptick in usage prices.

[CieleEdward]

The reputation damage is already done. Both authors and buyers are affected by this. Not only that, but after this incident, authors are likely to go after theft on their own rather than notifying CC of the incident due to a legitimate fear that their right to sell the full rights of their content will be stripped from them.

I'm not denying that stolen articles could raise an issue. I simply agree with 4rumid - Treat this incident the same as other stolen articles. Yes, it happened en masse and that is going to require a lot more work on the part of CC. What has me so incredibly disappointed is that CC would rather simply take our ability to sell full rights away rather than actively back us up on going after stolen content. That is reputation damage in and of itself.

An honest explanation as to why we can only sell usage now would go a long way. As it stands, we were told that our full rights abilities had been taken away and that was that. No explanation was offered. We authors can speculate on the forums all day, but we may never touch on the reason. What guarantee do we have that this won't continue to happen and become a frequent problem?

[Celeste Stewart]

This "usage" policy is not new. A couple of years ago, an article of mine was stolen and I lost the right to sell it for full rights based on CC's assessment of the theft. It sucked as the article was offered for $120 full rights but the decision made sense given the circumstances. (This is the same article that later sold twice for $65 usage).

Do we really want an across-the-board policy or would we rather have CC review each case individually? If an article appears online and CC can force its removal before the article spreads all over the Web or gets indexed, wouldn't we want to be able to retain the rights?

CC isn't the bad guy here. Like the writers, CC didn't do anything wrong. It processed an order that passed its merchant processing system's checks and then immediately reversed the order once notified that the customer used a stolen financial account. Taking the precaution of removing full rights isn't wrong either. We don't have to like it, but it's the right thing to do. Perhaps a review of the articles after a set period of time and then reinstating full rights if they don't appear might be a consideration?

That said, I still want to see better safeguards against scrapers (perhaps eliminating text-based samples and going with screenshots) as this is a more common means of theft here.

[Constant]

HI guys! First off I want acknowledge the frustration and anger that some members of our community are experiencing. Having hard work stolen is a terrible tragedy, and we feel this as acutely since we spend considerable time and effort editing and posting each piece of content on the site. Because of this, we are at a loss to understand the sentiment that we are 'punishing' people in this situation. No one is being punished. We all had articles stolen by people using fraudulent payment methods and now are all paying the price for the theft. It sucks and we recognize it.

People seem to be suggesting that this reaction, or 'punishment', on our part is unfair since it appears to be incongruous with our handling of article summaries being stolen, ad hoc, from the site. In this instance the thieves had access to the attached documents and not simply the long summaries. Since the long summaries include property warning, and don't have all the text, in the past we had decided to err on the side of the writer, recognizing the fact that those thefts still leave original content intact. If our writers are angry about this fact, we can change that policy and remove license rights in these cases as well. Let us know.

To address some of the other issues, there is no insurance for online content and the long summaries are as good as images, since they cannot be scrapped except through very extensive effort. There are a couple of other options we are looking into, but none of them would have prevented what happened over the weekend. That was simply something we can't stop. It only happens rarely, and when it does we have always beefed up the restrictions and fail safes, at least giving us more warning, thus time to shut the purchases down before the content gets downloaded. But this is a tight rope. The tighter we make the purchase process the more likely it is that we lose legitimate sales, and so we have to weight the cost benefits of heightened security.

To the point that this will result in authors not notifying us of theft, this would simply make it harder for us to protect writers, and since we don't remove license types from long summary thefts I can't see a benefit to that suggestion. If it is a fraudulent purchase, it won't matter since we know first anyway.

We are totally aware of the imperfection of the system and as the industry grows and more effective watchdogs are put in place to help combat content theft, we will take advantage and implement such methods. Until then, we are all in this together. No one wins when content is stolen. We hope that you can look past your frustration and understand that this was the only ethical move for us.

Please forward any feedback to support and we would be happy to answer any further questions.

Sincerely,

David Kool

[EricScott]

This site is at it again... There is some new CC content on there. Check it out to make sure your content isn't on there if it wasn't paid for...

http://www.reuterspost.com/

Google removed my content pretty quickly after I notified them. I don't know why Google hasn't shut them down (or why CC hasn't gone after them).

[Evelyn]

EricScott, when you notified Google, did you do a copyright infringement form through AdSense? That's what I just did. My theory is, if the AdSense account is yanked, it doesn't do any good to steal articles.

Yes, it's possible to sign up for another AdSense account if your account is yanked, but it needs to have all new information--different company, different email address, different tax ID number, etc. Even if our "friend" succeeds in signing up again after Google yanks their source of revenue, it will be difficult.

It looked to me like all the articles were stolen--except one that was posted on another site, and contained spelling and major grammar errors. (Just a funny side note.) Affected authors include WordGypsy, Lysis, ibloomdrop, Rick Smith, Ciele Edward, and me (Evelyn Fielding). Like I said, there were two dozen others--I didn't check them all.

Fingers crossed that it works! If others have contacted Google in the same way (copyright infringement form) about this site, what were the results?

[EricScott]

Yes, I filled out the copy infringement form with Google. It took Google about a week to look into it and then my article was taken down.