Article Marketing Parasites Beware

you might want to contact the person first before contacting their isp, they could have gotten your article from someone passing it off as plr

or they could have misunderstood the terms where they got it from

I don't agree that it's not worth your time. I've had an ebook of mine illegally copied & uploaded twice, both times I complained and it was taken back down.

Contact the website owner and tell them that they are hosting an article that is copyrighted by you, and ask them to take it off their site.

I manage an article directory, and I can't even begin to tell you how many people contact me and say, "Can you please remove this article by so and so, becase they stole my article and added their resource box." It happens way more than people think and it's really very sad.

WOW - just went to ezines and then copied some text and WOW. One of my more popular articles is on over 300 sites.

After going thru the first 3 pages, I found my sig box only 5 or 6 times.

Amazing.

Yes, I have been through that headache only recently. Not much you can
do that would be effective. When you consider all that you'll need to do
it would be easier to collect feathers from a emptied pillow that tracking
down every site owner. I just blogged about the article and hope that
some the the webmaster will be 'shamed' into removing my article or
give the appropriate credit.

-Ray Edwards

This happens all the time. This is one more reason why you should post your articles on your site. You might not get the immediate traffic right away, but in the long run it will pay some dividends.

It's a bad scene out there right now in many places, but not all places! I never have a problem with authors contacting me asking to delete an article from my databases. And when I find one of my articles plagiarized, the site owners will delete the offending page very quickly. I guess it depends on where you submit your articles to.

I recently had some website content (not an article, but actual website content) stolen from a website of mine which is copyrighted. It was posted as a blog post on a relatively popular blog.

I contacted the blog owner and they said it was a "guest post." They asked me to prove it and they would remove it immediately. We are in the process now. Took me all of 30 seconds to write the email.

Perhaps I get special treatment or something, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be too tough to get the pages removed when you find them.

AL

Thanks all! Ya know, in a way it's not a life-shattering event, but even enough little mosquito bites can add up to quite a bit of discomfort.

Today at the bottom of her article my name appears in the link to ezinearticles in the last line. However, her resource box is still at the end of the article. When I click on her profile I see my article listed under her article list. She is getting traffic to her site from my article.

I got an email from her today saying that since she put my link to ezinearticles at the end, it was okay for her to put her resource box at the end.

Wa, wa, wa ... I'm a cryin' baby. Somebody slap me.

I guess I just needed some support from people who I consider my friends and I got it. I thank you all. My Best - Mike

So she admits to using your article but is still putting her resource box after it?

That's unethical if you asked me. I'd still complain.

AL

Let loose with the DMCA takedown notice to her ISP and to the sites posting the material. That site will come down FAST.

Here is a sample letter:

Dear {ISP}

This letter is to inform you that copyrighted materials created and owned by {you} have been posted online at {offending domain}. As this domain is hosted by your ISP, you are hereby served with the following DMCA Takedown Request.

Section 1: Copyright Ownership
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The creator and owner of the copyrighted material is:
/{Your Name Here Between Slashes}/
{Your Name again}

Section 2: Copyright Holder Contact Information
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The holder of the copyright can be contacted at the following address:
{name / address / phone / email / etc}

Section 3: Location of Original Materials
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The original copyrighted material can be found at the following url(s):
{url list}


Section 4: Location of Infringing Materials
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The infringing material can be found at the following url(s):
{url list}


Section 5: Statement of Unauthorized Use
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I, {your name}, am the rightful creator and owner of all of the content listed in section 3 above. I have never given permission to:

{infringer}
{isp}
{anyone else involved}

to copy, publish, change, modify or use my work in any way. Further, I have not given permission for said parties to create, use, distribute or otherwise use any derivative works based on my copyright.

It is my good faith belief that the use of the material specified in the manner in which I have outlined is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agents or assigns or extant copyright law.

Under penalty of perjury, the information I have given is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge. Therefore, under the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, you are given notice to remove the offending materials.

Your prompt attention is appreciated.

{Your Name}

{Your Info}

Wow I just did the same and found a bunch of my stuff was completely ripped off. One guy seems to keep making Squidoo lenses full of MY content. What should I do, contact Squidoo?

Hi Mike:

Sorry for the situation you are facing and thanks for letting the Warriors know about what they can face.

It is sad and common. I told this story once before but if you don't mind want to share it again. It totally shows what people will do with somebody's project.

With permission from a couple of bands I uploaded several years ago videos to YouTube. A person not only took my videos and uploading them to their own account but never asked permission from myself or the groups and never credited the bands or myself.

Think for a moment if it were something I was monetizing. All the views they received could have been potentially mine.

All they had to do was send a simple E-mail for permission.

Have a great night.

The first time that this happened to me I was upset too.

After the fifth time I saw it, my thought was "hey not a bad header graphic on this scraper site" lol.

But your right, this is a perfectly logical justifiable futility, just like the record industry fighting p2p.

It is really not worth your time. They is not so much you can do with article piracy these days.

Wow this is an eye opening thread ... I don't even want to go and look at my ezine articles now lol All I can say is there is a lot of really sad people out there that are to lazy to write their own content. And in the time it took them to look for content to steal, they could have written their own.

I agree with you Mike. I would email the article directories in question and tell them that this member has taken YOUR article in its entirety and republished it as her work.

gxd5 & AllenGraves -- I want to thank you for your posts. They are very helpful.
I guess I'm too new to get a "thank you" button to click on...

Cheers!

Angie Rammer,
Word Demon

Some say go after the person, some say don't waste your time. You know which way works best for you. Sometimes it's about doing what we do, just because it makes us feel better.

There was a person who posted an ad in the Warriors classifieds a few months ago advertising 100,000+ PLR articles for (i think) $27. The articles were all scrapped from ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Scrapped with the Author resource box conveniently missing.

James

I don't want to beat this thing to death, but I got an email this morning that was interesting. I will not include her name--as mad as she mad me, that wouldn't be right, but below is the last email I sent her yesterday--and following that is her response I got back today. I have redacted my email address and her name and address.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 1:56 AM, Mike McMillan <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You have misunderstood the terms of service of Articlesbase. Yes, there is a link to my profile at ezinearticles at the end of the article. However, my author resource box does not appear and it should at the end of the article. You have violated the terms of service at ezinearticles as well by doing this.

When I click on your profile, my article is listed as one of yours you have submitted. You cannot submit other people's articles and claim them as yours. That is my article, not yours! You cannot substitute your resource box for those of the original authors. This is copyright infringement my dear--plain and simple.

If you have done this with other articles you are going to get yourself in some very serious trouble. Unless you are the original author of an article you cannot insert your resource box at the end--end of story.

Remove my article from Articlesbase and from your profile page immediately. Send me a very, very nice apology for what you have done. Remove any other articles you have done this with as well. If you fail to do these things I will contact your ISP and hosting company--copyright violation is a very serious matter. Check out Title 17 of the U.S. Code. There are substantial penalties.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Today I received this reply...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OK Mike

I dont want to make an issue out of this. I am sorry for whatever happened. I have removed it from the Articlesbase.

Wish you all good luck.

Regards
xxxxxxx
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay, the savage beast within me has been calmed somewhat.

Again, I thank all of you, my WF friends for support, sympathy, and for the therapy session. You're all great!

I found the program HyperVRE (by Matt Callen) is real good at ripping off peoples content from article directories, and placing links in the body and easily replace the resource box. Newbies get duped into buying this 'scraping' program and think it is okay to steal content without using your resource, simply because the developers did not tell them they SHOULD NOT replace the resource or insert spammy links. (even the free trial puts loads of Matt Callen's spam links in the articles). I own an article directory and when we get a credible complaint like this, we delete the author. I have also found that sending an email to the perpetrator usually gets action especially when you explain that they are violating the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

Can anyone please tell me who the web host is for sitebestinfo<dot>com? Is it GoDaddy?

AL

I would complain to articlesbase and show to them that the article is yours. I would have no problem removing the article and the member from my article directory that blatantly stole someone elses work...

At the same time this is something that has gone on for years in many different internet sectors and it is not going to stop anytime soon... I would still take the 2 minutes to complain to ArticlesBase though.

James

The question is, how do we figure out who the host is? Any easy way?

I got an email back from Articlesbase this morning . . .

Dear Michael,

We have promptly removed the article from our directory and banned the author.

I hope you will consider publishing your articles on articlesbase.com as well, as I'm sure you will enjoy the huge exposure and publicity your articles will get. Let me know if I can assist you on this matter.

Best Regards,

xxxxxxxxxx,
ArticlesBase Support Team

Takedown notice sent to Wild West Domains - thanks. I will update when I hear something.

What an enthusiastic guy! I do get the feeling once in awhile "It's time to buy a gun..." but that is probably one of the things it's better to put off until tomorrow. Enjoyed the thread so far.

happened to me a few times as well. I found out the guy was sekf-hosting in Russia....so uh oh...I am up *&^ creek. But, it turns out he emailed me back and took it down.
The DMCA does work well for me.

Think about it, what black hat unethical gutter swine wants their webhost to shut their site down or get delisted/de-indexed from the search engines?

In addition,these lazy acts put more manhours on EZA & other article directory staff as they investigate. They waste their time telling us our content is copied somewhere else under a different author.
I am sure this will get corrected some day just as the gobbly-gook unreadable English articles out there will too.
So, now we deal with spam & copied content.
Maybe the fine for scrapers should be equivalent to spammer fines or even worse.
With all of Google's money you'd think they have a software program to detect the copied content on he article directory or offending website and de-list the site; like Hubpages has which notifies you right away to take it down. I only know this b/c Hubpages didn't allow us to post content (3 sentences) from our site to a hub on the same topic.

Thanks, and glad to see your stuff worked out as well. Ya know, that's why I call them parasites. They come down on you like locusts and eat the fruits of your labors. Life must continue. AJ, I see you're relatively new here--welcome!

You can't stress about it every time it happens. The more exposure you have, the more your stuff gets stolen. I have had my pitch page in it's entirety re-posted like 100 times including the font, color, graphics, etc. One scam bag stole my book, installed my pitch page on freewebs and sells it at a discounted price through PayPal.

You just gotta move on. How much time are you going to spend on this? Is you time not valuable enough to chase copycats?

On a side note it is true that the person may have bought the article as PLR and has no idea it's yours

Simply contact them. Be civil as most webmasters and article writers do.

Allen & Mike,

I recently went through this with a site that stole content from me. It was hosted by Godaddy, and after making the complaint the offending site was completely blocked from the internet.

It only took them 2 hours after I provided proof in the format they wanted.

The easiest why I found to prove infringement was to use archive.org links showing when my content was published on the internet.

Keep at it and you will have the desired results.

Cheers!

PS: Just for laughs go to my blog and try to right click on the content for a special message.
http://www.atlantaroofingrepair.com

Just another reason to keep your content on your own site.

The days of AM are nearing their end.

Always has been blown out of proportion anyway.

Cheers,
Zac
P.S. Nice to see you got your situation resolved BTW

I disagree with all of that. I don't want to argue, but your sources ar either skewed, indirect (through the grapevine), complete guesses or they don't know what article marketing is. I've researched this for years with sources that couldn't be any better and I find that things are going just swell.

I guess the whole idea depends on what you think article marketing is. Times change, rules change...article marketing changes. If you are thinking of article marketing from years past, then you are right...in fact, THAT article marketing has already died.

Article marketing of today is different than what I think your sources think it is. Even the top IM gurus are mistaken...or at least way far behind in what's really going on.

AL

Make sure you get an alert from Google Alerts for your name as well as article titles. It will save you time and effort in finding out who is nicking your articles.

It takes me about 5 mins a week to check what is happening.

People post them on associated articles as well, and they are one directory who are only interested in money. They never respond to any complaints and normally keeps the article there even when given proof.

I feel sorry for you mike. I can only imagine the lost. traffic.

I myself picks up selected article from articlesbase and because I'm capable in SEO and social marketing, I know I send good traffic to those authors.

As to whether I'm sending the traffic to the right author..I can only hope so.

oMar

One thing I just wanted to chirp in on. I think most people use articles to drive traffic to their sites in order to sell something. But there is another thing to consider as well. A friend who has done some mailings with me has over 10,000 articles in the EZA database. He outsources a lot of them, but has thousands he has written himself.

The URL in every single of one his articles does not go to a sales or pre-sell page--but rather to a squeeze page with a very cool bonus. Sure, he wants to sell his stuff, but before that--he focuses entirely on building his list--and his list is enormous.

It's really a matter of immediate gratification vs delayed gratification. Remember, driving someone to your sales page is pretty much a one-time shot at selling them a product. But getting them on your list means that you can market to them a hundred times a year. Just a thought.

Of course you can still have an opt-in pop-up on your sales page if you drive traffic there, but I get a better conversion rate if I send people to a squeeze page by itself.

Hi mike,

Thank for the tip re: opt-in list. Tsk, Tsk, haven't implemented one yet. Missed hundred hits already..

oMar

Hi Mike

maybe the person used some of the last services that pop around, where they automatically grab articles from ezinearticles and use it directly; it became common practice with lots of advanced tools. I won't mention the tools as some belong to fellow warriors

by the way the time you spent on it would have been enough to write another articles

just my 2 cents

Mary

A number of people have cautioned me not to get obsessed with the thing and to get on with life. I do know what you mean. Actually, I found the person stealing my article one day, emailed her and the article directory owner, and the matter was resolved.

And, I know there are a hundred others just like her out there doing the same thing to me--and to you, and while I'm not of a mind to chase them all down--I got one of the little buggers and in a small way it felt good. But thank you for your concern!

One other thing I wanted to pop in here related to what articles can do for us. Whether it's EZA or Allen's great Website-Articles, posting an article and getting it to show on the front page of Google, YaHoo, or MSN also bumps one of your competitors off from the front page.

Suppose you are promoting some kind of high-tech electronic gizmo and you have a pre-sell page at #4 on the front page of Google. Then one of your articles shows the next day at #6 on the front page of Google. Cool as well. But aside from getting you a bit more traffic, you have also succeeded in knocking one of your competitors off from the front page. Throw in a Squidoo lens, Blogger blog, Hubpage, Quizilla posting, a Weebly page . . . well, the more pages you get to rank on the front page, the more of your competitors get pushed back into the hinterlands of the SERPs.

There are only 10 front page listings. The more you own, the less competition you have, and articles are a fast and easy way to take up some valuable real estate in the SERPs.

I came on the forum to post about EZA but found this thread through search first.

The same thing has happened to me but with a twist.

I have had my EZA account suspended because someone stole my 100% original article, without the bio!

I submitted it to Goarticles and Articlesbase BEFORE I submitted it to EZA, obviously, shouldn't do it that way round, I now know.

I believe it's a scraper site that's taken it and I'll be contacting them, not so much because they took the article but because my account is suspended and at the moment EZA don't look like they want to talk about it.

Moral: always post to EZA first and wait until the article's accepted. It'll slow down your submissions though.

I know we are just talking about articles here, but the problem goes much deeper than that. Consider the X-Men movie that was pirated last month and released on the Internet. The studio spent many tens-of-millions of dollars to create it and within a few days millions of copies had been distributed. That could cost the studio tens of millions of dollars in box-office sales.

I was in NYC last summer. I was down on Canal Street where you can get virtually any knocked-off product you can imagine. There are guys selling any movie or music CD you can imagine for $2 a whack. Titles were just written on CDs with sharpie markers. And money was changing hands so fast it would make your head spin.

And every 5 seconds you would see a guy whistling by with a two-wheeled cart filled with beer cartons containing thousands of CDs to be distributed to vendors on the streets. (And this is not to mention the knocks-offs of jewelry, designer jeans, purses, watches, etc.)

Whether it's Gucci bags, music CDs, movies, or articles--we live in a society where people make a business out of stealing products and profiting. It's a fact of life. Whether it's an article, an ebook, or a web site--a certain number of people simply have no qualms about pirating other people's products.

At least here on the WF I know that most members appreciate the work that goes into creating and marketing products. Every time one of you goes to the market and buys some bread, eggs, milk, or steak--I'm sure you have said something like--this isn't just money I'm spending--it represents a number of ebooks I had to sell. Your digital products, whether ebooks, articles, videos, etc. represent a fungible currency and you depend on that currency to survive.

It's too bad every ebook author or affiliate marketer doesn't wear a cap in public to identify themselves as such. If you did, I would look at you and say--there is a person of substance who appreciates the value of creativity and hard work.

I know a lot of people out there think that folks like us who sit at a computer all day somehow are cheating the system. They think if you don't punch a time clock that you don't have a real job--but you do! You're special and you should take pride in what you do.

I think if someone copies your article mostly word-for-word and expects google to index your homepage based on that, it wont work. Usually the spyders already know of the previous article as "unique" and will not do anything with the copied one.

Also: Ezinearticles software should block such copied articles upon submission.