Was my writing stolen?

Posted by amabaie under Legal
From http://www.seo-writer.com 4643 days ago
Made Hot by: clickfire on August 3, 2011 3:36 am

I invited Briana Myricks to write this guest post. When I heard her story, I knew that all writers – not just blog writers – will relate to what she experienced. I am curious to hear your comments once you have read her post.

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Comments

Written by globalcopywrite
4641 days ago

I'll weigh in with the comment I left on the post:

I share your pain, I really do. I’ve been scraped and ripped off too many times to count. I’ve even had whole blog posts sold by other copywriters to unsuspecting clients which is plain illegal any way you look at it.

Any reputable author should credit inspiration, not only as a common courtesy but also as best practice.

However, I disagree with your comments about Social Media Today. I, too, have some of my blog posts published on the site. Like you, the posts garner far more traffic and social media activity than I ever get on my own blog. But here’s the thing; you imported your feed to Social Media Today and, by doing so, gave them explicit permission to republish anything they want from your blog. They’re an aggregator site and make no bones about it. They always give writer credit and always provide a link back to the original post. You can’t play the game then complain you were mistreated. You weren’t. People will discover your blog and more of your posts if the content is compelling enough. Frankly, getting published on Social Media Today isn’t easy and their editorial process is tough. You should be grateful for the opportunity they’ve provided. If you’re not, remove your feed and you won’t have to deal with them anymore.

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Written by m4bmarketing
4642 days ago

Regarding Social Media today you elect to have your blog syndicated. I had one post recently picked up and actually got quite a lot of traffic.Stealing content unfortunately will continue and you are right David about making sure your content ranks first.

Good article and congratulations on being the BizSugar Contributor of the week.

Susan

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Written by yoni67
4642 days ago

David,

BizSugar Confession:

You are a cool guy and I have come to love you!

If we lived in the same town, we would probably have a "Bromance," which to my understanding is a purely platonic relationship between two guys punctuated mostly by watching Rambo-style movies on cable in one of our basements while drinking beer, bowling and catching a baseball or football game together from time to time. We would not speak of our feelings however, that is not manly!

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Written by tomshark
4642 days ago

I know how frustrating getting copied is but there are some easy solutions. If you haven't tried Tynt, it's designed specifically for people who copy any part of your content and paste it any where. It automatically creates a snippet citing the source with a link back to the original post.

There's also the WP plugin RSS Footer Links which was designed for scrapper blogs who pipe in your RSS feed.

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Written by Mintcorp
4642 days ago

This is the downside to the "information age" and to the openness of the Internet. It's just so easy to use someone else's work, and there is not so much anyone can do about it.

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Written by saraib820
4643 days ago

David,

As the editorial services manager of a company, we frequently get projetcs to compose entries for online encyclopedias and databases. We price according to our research and generation of original content. From time to time we have clients asking for a much lower price. Their reason is that we could easily copy from other sources and change a few words here and there. They tell us it's done all the time. Just cut and paste they say, the research, the hard part has already been done, why spend our time and money reinventing the wheel? We always so no. Original content is original, the work of the original author and its integrity must be respected!

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Written by kvereecke
4643 days ago

Adam is right, it is somewhat unavoidable online. Though it is crushing to see your work under someone else's name. I ran a Google search of the headline of one of the earliest posts to my blog and it returned TWO full pages of exact, or near exact matches for the article and headline. My post ranked at the bottom of the second page. Maybe Panda will fix this, but in my opinion it can't happen soon enough.

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Written by amabaie
4642 days ago

The key is to make sure your original version ranks first. Don't wait for Google; make it happen yourself.

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Written by Adam_Gottlieb
4643 days ago

Though it can certainly be disheartening and discouraging (to say the least) to realize that your work has been stolen, it's an expected and to a certain extent unavoidable part of writing online.

As a writer/blogger myself, I think it's important to take any safe gaurds, such as signing up for a copywrite service and contacting any people or authoritative sites that have used your content without permission. But at the same time, as hard as it is, you have to let go a bit. As long as there will be writers on the Internet, there will be people who will try to capitalize on other people's hardwork.

Adam

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