Copyright Violations: Attention All CC Authors

[CRDonovan]

Hi Celeste, thanks for your response. Yes I think this theft is recent, and with my articles - fairly recent material or material on the first page of any section. I just looked for all my articles on the site - and nothing old unless it was top of the page.

Thanks for your walk thru of JPeg. I just have to wonder what you do in your spare time? ; )

And thanks to you too David, for being right on top of this.

[Gail Kavanagh]

I have been notified by Hayley that my Frida Kahlo movie review is on this site (thanks, Hayley!). I found i and posted this comment:

****Ths article is copyright to me, Gail Kavanagh, and should not appear without permission or payment. Please remove it immediately.
You have taken this article from Constant Content without permission. I know this because the text above is incomplete - what you have published is the sample version for prospective buyers. You have not bought this article. Please remove it immediately, and all and any other articles at this site copyrighted to my name.
Readers, protest.This site uses plagiarised material from other websites for which the site owner does not have the copyright.***

I don't know if here are any others, it's a big site and will take time to search - and as was pointed out in this thread, it contains spyware. But I will send you the details on the movie review, David.

Unfortunately this will keep happening - the web is as lawless as the Wild West when it comes to plagiarism.

Gail

[Celeste Stewart]

CR, spare time? What's that? And yes, I spend some of it fiddling with things you can do with computers and MS Word. I admit it, I'm a geek.

[Lor]

Son of a b........

Thanks for bringing this to our attention Barry.
And thank you Hayley for letting me know I go hit too. Checking now.

Urgh!

[Word Gypsy]

Thanks for the heads up! I'll be sending support a list of my own- old and new stuff. Oh well.

[Lor]

Out of the 107 articles I have with CC, at least 50 have been stolen. There are literally 100's and 100's of articles on this site and as I looked for mine, I saw many I recognize from bconrad and others. I'm on dial-up, so I stopped looking after going through this ba%$&rd's "article" section. He or she obviously likes it here, but how the heck did he copy?

Anyway, may I suggest CC send out bulletin to all writers, so they can add their hits to CC's list? Not everyone comes into the forums.

Lor

[Amy W]

I've had one stolen, just sent my message off to support.

If I wasn't so mad, I would actually find this funny, just for the sheer stupidity of the person who owns the site. Not only did he/she post articles that were clearly incomplete (they had "continued" and "more" posted at the bottom), but he/she actually kept the author names on some of the articles!

I searched through the articles section only. Does anyone know if articles are posted anywhere else on the site?

[HayleyWriter]

Hi all,

I just got mad and notified as many authors as I could remember articles were from. As Lor said, there are hundreds on this site so there is no way I could remember them all. I think we authors need to get paid a usage licence for those articles not yet sold that this has happened to, because I can't sell these articles for full rights or unique now! I also want to know how it happened and what steps CC is taking to prevent it happening again! I know there is copyscape and I thought we were safe but obviously these creeps got into the system somehow! I know David is working on getting the website shut down, and I am sure we will get some answers soon. Thanks for responding so quickly too, David. I have some more articles to submit, but feel uncomfortable submitting more articles that could be stolen, so I'm going to wait until this gets resolved. Hopefully, it won't take the legal eagles too long to get it resolved and shut down.

I agree Amy the person was stupid! They left my byline on, "...more" where I had deleted paragraphs from the summary, and even left the comment I put on the bottom of my articles "For the full article, please purchase the rights!" I mean how stupid is that? Showing that they have stolen the article, even to the reader!

However, I am far from finding this funny and I know the people at CC don't either. This is the sort of thing that could destroy credibility with both authors and customers, and we all risk losing the best content site around for everyone.

I posted a reply / comment on some of mine - not so professionally worded as yours Gail, but saying that the information had been stolen from the Constant Content website and that the website were copyright theives. I don't want to go through the lengthy process Barry mentioned for each one of my articles though! Hopefully, CC will save the day and get it all removed.

Hayley

[solo]

Thanks for the tip-off Hayley! I've found 28 of my articles so far, most (but not all) unsold. And I only got as far as pg 65 before I boiled over! Close them down? Why shouldn't they cough up?

[BarryDavidson]

From the "whois" search I did on the site, there's not much chance of any type of monetary compensation. The site's owner/administrator used a middle school as their "company" and they're located in China. The hosting company of the site, because they do business inside the US, will be the ones to have to take the site down.

Our best course of action is to provide CC with the information they requested, and keep a copy on hand.

Don't get scared off about submitting here either. No matter where you post or submit at, this can happen. The only way to stop it would be to completely password protect the site (only users who are registered members), and that would lead to less traffic in the form of customers. Or, it would lead to CC having to take more in order to launch massive marketing campaigns. Even then, the only way to ensure that people looking to steal didn't join would be to charge a fee to become a member.

All we can do is to keep searching for our work online from time to time, and to keep working.

[dsletten]

Hayley,

As far as I can tell the stolen articles do not appear on web searches yet and if you use Copyscape to search for them it comes up as "No Results Found". So I am sure you will still be able to sell Full Rights and Unique for these articles once the site is taken down (hopefully). It must be fairly new to not appear on Yahoo or Google yet. I've had articles stolen before that Constant was able to get taken off of sites and was still able to sell Full Rights to them. And I also wouldn't be afraid to submit new - CC is really very safe compared to many other sites out there.

[Lor]

Hey Barry, I know you're right, but a lot of us are still pi%%ed.
They cleaned me out! I'm sure of it. After finding 50% of my work stolen, crying in frustration and anger, I stopped looking in disgust. This represents months of work for me.

The only hope is that CC can shut the site down before the articles get picked up in the searches. Otherwise, CC should be sending them one big mother of an invoice -- especially if they now have their "personal address?"

I also think this has to be a "closed" site with full articles only available to "logged-in" members. And those logged in members will be "paypal verified." CC can easily track theft then and go after the theives for our payment. They'll know who looked at what and when etc. Titles and subject matter could still be openly visible for all. I don't see how this will affect sales. Those who buy have to be registered and paypal verified already.

I'd also like to add, I'd never have known any of this if Hayley didn't message me and it came in my email. Not fair. Extremely disappointed with it all, but I'm sure I'll get over it.



Lorraine

[Celeste Stewart]

It will get cleaned up and your articles will be fine once again, I'm confident of that. This problem isn't new, nor is it unique to CC. Unfortunately, the problem as a whole is not going to go away. It is infuriating, but try not to get too worked up over it. CC has a lot of clout and I have no doubt that the site will be shutdown. In the meantime, we can either not submit, and not make any money, out of fear of someone else coming along and stealing content, or we can move forward and not let these creeps stop us from writing.

[brucegreat]

For a violation of your rights, I am very sorry, because robots with us acquisition of network resources only to the Web site includes articles, I have to delete all your published articles, apologized again!

[jak]

Phew. Was I glad when I thought the CC section stopped in the page 70s. It took ages just to get that far with scrolling. I only found three of mine so I reckon I got off lightly. I hit some random pages after that and it looks like they've also copied from sites like Mylot and other forums as well. What a nightmare and what stupidity. But as Celeste said, I'm sure this will be sorted out soon and we'll all be back to normal.