More About Your Copyright
Continuation of Lesson 19 from You Can Make
Money Writing
To continue our lesson, here are two basic types of copyright
violations...
1. Mistakes
Many webmasters take articles by copying them and pasting
them into their page-making program. They may not know how to
make an HTML link, so they don't activate your link. They may
not understand that they are required to. If you find these kinds
of violations, search the website for a contact address and email
the owner to let them know that they need to activate that link
or take down your article. This is usually all it takes.
2. Theft
I have had my articles used without my name or resource box,
as material for a blog. My articles are especially susceptible
to this kind of illegal use because they are fairly well keyword-optimized,
meaning they are likely to bring in new search engine traffic
for the user. I have also had others use my articles with their
own name as author, and their own resource box linking to their
site.
An email threatening legal action will usually resolve this.
These thieves didn't think it would be noticed, and they will
usually take the article down once they are caught. If the copyright
violation is in an article at an article directory, let the article
directory know that someone stole your article, and they will
usually take it down immediately, or put your resource box and
name on it if you prefer. If they do not respond, let them know
you may take legal action and make a note to never use that directory.
Evidence of authorship, such as your submission of the article
to another directory at an earlier date, may be asked for. Usually
your word is enough to get the article removed though. The directory
won't want to take any chances with being involved in a copyright
violation.
If your article is under someone else's name on another website,
the owner may have honestly taken it from a directory. If that
is the case, ask him to remove it, or put your name and resource
box on it, but be sure to ask where he found it. Go to that directory
and correct the problem there too, and go to the website of the
thief to deal with him as well.
By the way, in the course of researching this lesson, I just
checked on my own articles (I explain how to do this below).
The first three articles I checked yielded six violations. I
have over nine hundred articles out there, so I will be busy
if I decide to pursue all these violators.
There is some good news here. Most of these stolen or unlinked
articles are on pages that few people visit. The laziest online
entrepreneurs try to get something for nothing, and so steal
articles, but they are also lazy in their other marketing efforts,
so their websites and blogs are usually failures that are rarely
viewed. In other words, little damage is done. Of course, the
likelihood of a couple thousand copyright violations out there
is still a bit discouraging.
My Own Solution
First, I don't worry too much about this. Unfortunately, it
is far more trouble than it is worth to track down and deal with
every violation. The internet is still in its "wild west"
phase, and we have to accept that.
I do have a standard "threat" letter that I can
copy and paste (just inserting the name of the article) into
an email to send to the owners of the websites. I send that out
when I find violations. You'll find an copy of it below (next
page).
How do you find the owners of the websites? Look for contact
information on the website itself. This is often at the bottom
of the homepage, or on a contact page which is linked to from
the home page. You can check the site map as well.
If you can't find anything, or if the email address you get
doesn't work, try a "whois" service. You can type "whois"
into a search engine and try one of the free ones. For example,
http://www.whois.net/ costs nothing to use, and it even gave
me the phone number of the owner when I just now typed in the
name of a violating website. I might just give him a call later.
How to Find Copyright Violations
There are millions of websites out there, so how do you find
those that have your articles without your name and resource
box, or without an active link? Use search engines. If you have
an article that has a title like "Ways To Save Money,"
searching by title alone won't work. There will be too many results.
The title may have been changed as well (but they are generally
too lazy to change more than that).
Instead, put a sentence fragment (four to seven words) or
subheading from the article in quotation marks and search that
way to zero in on just your articles. Try it a couple different
ways, since the thief may rewrite it slightly.
If you find your article in a dozen places this way, but they
are all using it properly, does that mean no one has stolen it?
No, but if you can't find a stolen version, the page it's on
probably isn't indexed in the search engine, and as a result
no one sees it. In other words, as ugly as the theft is, little
harm has been done.
You can use Google Alerts to find your articles as well. Go
sign up here:
http://www.google.com/alerts.
This is a free service that notifies you every time your selected
search term appears on a new page on the internet (or at least
any they find). Enter your name (unless it is too common), or
a phrase from your most popular articles. Often you'll find unlinked
articles this way. The ones that steal and rewrite slightly (usually
just a title change) are harder to find.
In the end, don't worry about it too much. Do what you can
to prevent copyright violations, like making sure that the article
directories you submit to have clear rules of use for publishers.
Do what you can to correct obvious violations, like at least
sending an email. Then let it go. Don't let a few thieves scare
you away from using articles to generate loads of traffic for
your website. Eventually the law will come to the wild wild west
of the internet world.
Continues here... What
to Do About Copyright Violators
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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