New type of article theft?

[Sharion]

Google alerts flagged this page, which just shows the titles. One of my titles is here, and the word count is exactly the same as the excerpt I've posted. So this person is attempting to resell articles but in a sneakier way. Apparently they are using software to "change" the articles to make them legal.

I could not find where there was anything except the title visible. I looked up every title listed, and they are all Constant Content articles by various authors.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthre ... b7da2a795e

[jadedragon]

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthre ... st16904374 I joined the forum and outed this thief.

[Sharion]

Ditto. I outed him in two different posts. He has several groupings of articles for sale on cars, taxes, gifts, cats, stocks, and investments. I found two more of mine for a total of three. I don't get the lack of conscience by so many people out there. Do they really not care that they are stealing money directly from someone else who worked hard for it? Wow.

[Sharion]

He is SERIOUSLY going to town with this. He has posted 179 times, and each post appears to be a GROUP of articles for sale. 45 articles on self improvement, 24 articles on investments, 19 on fishkeeping, cars, dating, taxes, dogs, cats, and the list goes on. You name it, and he appears to be stealing it and reselling it. Every single title of his that I searched for on Constant Content, I found, so he is definitely getting them from here.

This is the link to his articles for sale. I was able to get to this list without logging in.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/search.p ... id=5014784

He is peddling them all as Copyscape passed, 100% unique, and written by a US writer. Sheesh. From his ads:

"These articles are original, well researched, unique, grammatically correct and have Passed Copyscape Premium. Articles will be sold only once with full exclusive rights to the buyer."

[maryaz]

Yikes! I'm glad you caught this, and jadedragon, your response on the forum was excellent. I hope they force him to remove his posts.

[carpenjoyce]

A whole lot of those investing articles are mine. I'm just so disgusted.

Add to that the fact that our content is now invisible in internet explorer, at least my version. CC says they're working on it, but my sales have gone down in the meantime, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[Lor]

This has happened before, and I vaguely remember CC buying a set of articles to out the thief. I could be wrong, but that's my memory. If you have articles in there, you should out him right away, and drop a p-mail to the mod. I think you'll find the associated mod in a thread at the top of the topic page. DP has a bad rep for this sort of thing. It's full of rogues. And DP is enabling them. If they don't ban the thief, they are just as much at fault. Can't see anything of mine, but I feel your frustration and disgust, and I'll show my support with a little outage.

ETA
Has anyone seen a sample? I"m not seeing the same word counts, and we don't show the whole article our listings. Some word counts in the titles are higher (just looked at his wedding group, which sold yesterday). Similar titles, different word counts. I'm thinking he stole the ideas (sadly no copyright on ideas). Then he probably rewrote our partial long summaries and finished them. Until we see a sample, we can't prove theft. We can only know it is. Sucks.

[Constant]

We are working on this as I write, and we are going to get this content taken down from sale. I've bought a few of his offers but as of yet he hasn't replied to any messages.

I've also been in touch with Digital Point and we're trying to get them to ban this user to take away his avenue to sell stolen content. If you do spot any of your content in his listings, be sure to report the post to that forum's moderator and consider filing a DMCA notice - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php? ... &match=all Generally the more complaints a party receives, the faster they are to respond so taking these actions will help expedite the process.

We'll be updating you as soon as we hear more.

[jak]

Looks like CC have bought one pack at least. I have at least one of mine in there and can't be bothered to check through them all.

[Constant]

Okay, Digital Point has banned his account and all of his offers have been deleted.

[TamathaCampbell]

Thanks. It's good to know you're on this.

[Sharion]

Awesome job, Constant! That had to be the speediest take down in history!

Credit to Google alerts as well. Before I submit an article to CC, I choose two or three random phrases from the visible portion and set up Google alerts. That's how I found this guy.

alerts.google.com

Again, super duper job, CC!

[Sharion]

I found one of the people who purchased the stolen content, and he doesn't want to take my article down as he "purchased" it. I am in the process of straightening it out but thought other authors might like to look for their articles.

http://www.pc-geeks.org

[Sharion]

Update: the fellow at pc-geeks.org is very nice and is working with me, so if you find one of your articles, don't blast the fellow. Just contact him.

[Lysis]

There's a guy on Google webmaster support who bought a bunch of PLR articles on Digital Point and got his website DMCA'd. lol Digital Pointless is almost as bad as blackhat world.