What would you do if someone was using your article?

I would send an email over saying something about how you're happy to see that he used your article on his blog and appreciate his enthusiasm for your content.... however, your content is free to be used in an unedited form. Then send him the original with links included and see what that does.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with mr2monster. I think 2 things you said in the OP stand out:

You're getting a backlink and exposure. That's a fair trade for the content right there.

By "important" I'm assuming you mean it's seen as an authority in your niche and gets good traffic. If that's the case, I think you should take the good with the bad and be satisfied. If you approach the owner - even very civilly - you risk the removal of your content. After all, a lot of eyeballs will see your name and many may well follow the remaining link to your blog.

John

Send them an email and ask to kindly remove your article or just put a link to your site

This has happened to me a lot and it is an infringement of copyright, but as you say do you want to do anything about it? You can send him the correct links and he may or may not remove the article, but it is at least a fifty percent chance that it will be removed, because the links were stripped deliberately. Depends what you want the exposure as it is or nothing, it is a simple choice.

Not saying it is correct but it is reality in that case scenario I would accept it, I have had to make that kind of decision before- are you better off now or with it removed? No point in taking the moral high ground if you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.

La dominatrix

You could email them and ask them to remove or include full links however what could we really do? Who could we turn to? I think there is little we could do to stop this kind of theft!!!

If they left your resource box intact, I say let it be. But if you arent satisfied, email the site owner and tell him to remove your article. If he doesnt, you have a few options:

- Contact his sponsors (ebay, Amazon, Adsense, Clickbank, whatever he is promoting) Tell them that their affiliate is using stolen content to promote his site.
- Find his Hosting. You can usually do this by typing a weird extension - something like example.com/dkdkdk.html Some hosts will give you an OOPS page with the Hosting Company's name on it.

I'm still trying to figure out how the content is stolen? It was placed someplace like goarticles or ezine with the intent that it be reprinted along with the resource box. That has happened and the only difference is that some of the internal links didn't transfer.

The publisher has given a by line and a link back to the writer's blog. That doesn't really sound like theft, nor am I sure it is copyright infringement.

Two questions:

First, where did these other links go to? Different blogs, other articles, links to wikipedia?

Second, could they have been lost accidentally by the method the publisher used to cut and paste the article from goarticles to his blog? I seem to recall ezine warning me that such a thing could happen, which I expect is one of the reasons why they allow more than one link.

It depends on the terms of service of the article directory they got the article from. You probably did give your permission for the article to be used like this when you signed up for the service and placed your articles on it. They sound like they probably complied with the re-publishing terms if they're typical of most article directories.

Bottom line, if you want total control over what's done with your content, only post it on sites that you control.

Hi Chris

Some article directories (e.g. helium and article alley) sell links within their articles. For example, if you submitted an article to one of these directories about acne cures, words in your article may be highlighted or underlined and linked out to other sites who have bid on those keywords. EZA doesn't do this. But if your article got syndicated to a lot of directories it is possible that's what happened so the blogger in question may have just republished your article as he saw it with those links in it. Just a possibility.

If the blogger was really trying to scam you he would have probably stripped your resource box out. That happens all the time and worse--it's not uncommon for someone to substitute their resource box in for yours. Now that's a dirty tactic!

Just for fun (it's not a lot of fun) but try copying the first couple lines of your article and pasting them into the Google search box and see what comes up. It might scare you at how many places your article shows up without your resource box intact. It might keep you up at night

Good Luck--Mike

I would email them and ask them if they would like more articles.

I had that happen to me...but didnt do anything...

There are always going to be people that dont play
by the rules...thats life...

Thanks for all the feedback. I am not that concerned that he removed some links. I think what he definitely should not have done is added his own links in the body of the article. But as I said, it is an authority blog with many readers, and I think I would do myself a favor if I just let it be. By the way, the article was taken from Technorati.

I am all for people posting my articles, but it would be nice if my links were left untouched. I guess that's asking too much!