This week, I had to displeasure of dealing with one foolish Word Press user who decided it would be a good idea to copy and paste one of my more popular blog posts onto several of his pathetic blogs. I was not amused. The user was promptly contacted, wherein I pointed out that this was blatant copyright infringement and demanded that the content be removed from his blog immediately. Got no response of course, so I promptly notified Word Press support as this is a violation of terms of service.Within less than 2 hours, I was notified that this was a case of a spammer and that his entire blog/account was terminated. Hah – take that spam blogger!
So today, I get yet another notification that this same blog post was copied and pasted onto other blogs on Word Press. Again, I contacted support and reported this. Swift action was once again taken by support to remove this unsavory blogger’s accounts and blogs. I will protect my content from criminals like this until my dying breath.Why? Because I wrote it based on my ideas and no one else has the right to steal it for their purposes!!!!
What’s my point about this entire experience? As a blogger, everything you publish online can become victim to scammers like the one I encountered. That’s why you have to be smart and find ways of protecting your copyrighted work. By the way, in case you are wondering. Anything you publish online, be it a poem, story, image or article – is 100 % copyrighted to YOU and no one else (unless you have agreed to ghostwrite on behalf of someone else). NO ONE else is allowed to copy and paste it for their own use without YOUR permission. Got it scammers? GOOD.
So here’s a little trick I learnt from a well-respected web developer in my town, on how to prevent content theft (and catch scammers in the act)! Whenever you publish anything under your name, set up an alert under Google Alerts using a random paragraph from your work. Set it to do an exact match of your submission. If someone decides to publish it on their website or otherwise, you will get an immediate alert and can report them to the proper authorities.
Incidences of copyright infringement are serious business folks. If you can prove that someone has committed copyright infringement against you, and they do not respond to your request to take it down (also know as a cease and desist letter) you can sue them for monetary damages of $7,000 USD per incident. That’s right scammer – go ahead and keep trying to steal my posts on here and you’ll find out soon enough how American justice works for copy writers!
Moral of the story – protect yourself and your content from Internet thieves by outsmarting them at their own game!
A Journey of Words 
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