I've recently discovered a blog that has copied all my articles:

• One of my pages
• His copy

Does anyone have experience of dealing with this? I've sent him a message, and I've contacted the host (Yahoo) through two different channels; but so far, no response. Yahoo sent me an auto-reply saying they would respond within 48 hours; it's now been 74 hours.

He's clearly copied an entire source code chunk; even the links go back to my site! He's hot-linking my images; and while I can stop this, I don't want to block small-time fair use, such as when someone links to my images in a forum and asks me a question about it.

As you can imagine, I'm pretty furious. I've poured countless hours of work into my website, and I've developed my content over many months of writing and years of coaching experience. I'm even hoping that, one day, I will be able to make a living from this website. Then this shite comes along and lifts the whole lot!

I've now set up Google Alerts to notify me when their search results change for unique text strings from my articles. That way I can detect content theft rapidly, but I still have to deal with it.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Keep contacting yahoo. They are publishing copyrighted content. As the 48 hours has expired I would send a message to them every 8 hours until they respond.

EDIT: I have also reported the content for you.

Thanks Jason.

I guess I just have to be a little patient.

Yeah, contacting Yahoo is your best option. Getting a response (other than go f***....) from the copier is a lost cause. So just spam Yahoo about the issue. Preventing hotlinking may be a bad choice since someone hotlinks with permission like you said. If you change your mind, here's an article about preventing hotlinking with htaccess

On the plus side, this episode has made me think about how to prove copyright.

I've settled on using Amazon S3 as a method of demonstrating I wrote the content first. Before I publish new writing, I'm going to upload it to Amazon S3, which then creates a (respectable) third-party record that I wrote it first.

I already do this for backup purposes, and probably have enough evidence already for this case; but I shall make it a regular discipline now.

That really sucks Mike! And it's not the only page he's copied ... I guess you know that ... see his sidebar. All those badminton links has your content

Keep bugging Yahoo.

Could you update your site with new image links, but put new pictures in place of the old ones?

Here's what i mean, say the first image is called image1, upload an image called image 1, but have it saying stolen from mike......, and change the name of the orignal image to image to, that might annoy him a bit?

Yeah, I noticed. He's copied all the content from all four of my articles -- all on the same day. Copy&paste, copy&paste, copy&paste.



I could. But I'm not interested in annoying him; I want the content removed.

Besides, that would harm my Google image search results (example ).

This post has been edited by MikeHopley: May 21 2008, 07:14 AM

Man you must be just FUMING!!! I would be so pissed!

You've got that owned havn't you lol

Pity he's hosted with yahoo not his own host, ping bomb....

Yes, I'm sorry to admit this really threw me.

I was supposed to be writing more content the last two days, but I've gotten nowhere because I'm too pissed off to think straight. I need to be in a balanced state of mind to write properly.

Still, it'll blow over. No doubt I'll get used to dealing with this issue; he won't be the last person to steal my work.



I detect a devious thread to your thoughts.

Tempting as it is to act out some revenge fantasy, I don't want to dirty myself.

This is cause for serious sleepless nights! I hate this guy and I don't even know him! If you don't get any response soon, I say we ALL report the abuse.

Maybe that will get their attention.

Link don't work for me.

Every cloud has it's silver lining i suppose, he/she will eventually get caught for doing that, and it also shows how successful your articles have been mike, first the BBC then you've got your first thief, your going up in the world

Oh ho ho!

I think I can guess why that link no longer works. Hurrah!

I await confirmation from Yahoo, but it would be an extraordinary coincidence if his blog went down for some other reason.



Yes, that's a good way to look at it.

This post has been edited by MikeHopley: May 21 2008, 09:20 AM

 sucker.jpg ( 89.63K ) Number of downloads: 19

indeed!

They appear to be in the process of removing pages. The most recent four pages have gone, but the others remain. I presume this is because someone at Yahoo is manually checking each of his pages against mine.

On a different note I love the article level thing you have there Mike.

Thanks. I think it looks a little crude myself, but as with the rest of my simple design, it does the job for now.

All the copied pages have now been removed. Yahoo have been slow to communicate with me -- a quick "we a