I Got Robbed on the Web

The person who stole from me didn’t do it in a way you might expect. Money did not directly change hands. This theft was indirect.

While researching a topic on the Web, I stumbled across an article published by someone else 11 August 2010 that began with the first few paragraphs of an article I published 11 September 2009. I have trusted readers by publishing some of my articles at EzineArticles.com, granting permission for re-use of the complete article with attribution. I am delighted whenever someone republishes one of those articles so long as they follow the rules. Most readers honor my trust, but not all.

As you might hear from any professor whose students must turn in essays, there are websites where a written work can be checked to see whether it is a copy of a published work. Webmasters can tell you that there are also engines to check for duplicate web pages.

Google watches for duplication. Its search results penalize sites found to contain duplicate pages, but it cannot be sure which site is the original. By causing downgrades in search engine results, copycats can do a lot of harm to a website owner whose site gets copied. Lower rankings lead to less traffic, which in turns reduces sales.

The infringing article was not a complete lift of mine. It lifted the introductory paragraphs. The way it read, I suspect it was composed by an article writing robot software program that linked lifted material from multiple existing articles.

Through such robots, copyright infringement will happen repeatedly to my articles and books (and this blog) at a much faster pace than it would if human beings had to do it themselves. The stolen material will be credited to someone other than me. It will divert web traffic from my originals to the thief’s site. To the extent that I might get revenue from my originals, such as sales of my books, copyright infringement will steal money from my pocket–indirectly, but it is still a theft.

Checking for infringement manually is a tedious hit-or-miss proposition. I’m sure most of my readers use my materials ethically, but it’s time to be more assertive about protecting my work against an occasional rotten apple. I will set up routine automatic scans that catch infringements of my work, even partial ones like this. For most of my readers, this will have no effect. But for any who are thinking of copying my work without proper attribution or permission, be warned. I’ll be watching more closely from now on, and I will pursue rule-breakers.