What to do When Someone Takes My Work?
I have recently seen a lot of things that I have put online magically appear in other places. When this happens, what can we do except laugh it off. Take it as a compliment that someone took the time to copy you, it’s greatest form of flattery, right?
There are other options. You can ask the copier to remove what is yours; they probably won’t.
You can report them to the Search engines (or their Mommy and Daddy) but that is slow.
You can figure out their IP address and contact the host. This is my favorite because I saw the results when I worked for Disney back in 94 – 95. People would make porn images out of the Disney characters and our lawyers would write a letter to their host explaining that legal actions will be taken. I did like this enough to copy a letter (wish I had kept a copy) and instead of going through the slow process of contacting legal I did the letters myself.
If your work is on a blogger.com or wordpress.com site you can contact those sites.
What works best is to comment thanking the thief for republishing your work on their site, and you link back to your original copy. Still take the other actions above, but when you find your republished work you may as well do something.
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I have this problem too. In fact, one offshore company scrapes all of my content and posts it as their own.
I’ve contacted Google and used the DCMA to hopefully get results. But I haven’t as of yet.
This seems to be a problem for a lot of people. I guess people figure that plagiarism doesn’t matter since the internet is open to everyone.
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I am really not happy with google. I rank #1 for live and yahoo but google is pushing me behind. Wonder what went wrong. How else can I do SEO?