What do you do when someone steals your work?

THIS is why I'm going into print publishing! It's also why, as of now, all the writing I've been paid for has been transferred rights i.e. I do what the customer wants rather than write to my own specs. What gets my goat, is that the people doing this are usually living in some tinpot country where they can't even speak the language they've stolen! GAF is forever offering 'writing' jobs at 50 cents per 500 words to 'rewrite' articles for blogs. The customers, I'm sorry to say, most often DO live in English speaking countries and use the hard work of people like us to get rich on - whilst openly breaking the law and passing the buck to a third party. THEN they complain because the person they - ahem - 'paid' decided to copy and paste rather than rewrite. To which my answer is, "Well, steal the money yourself then, you busterd." Two ways forward - contact the blog company admin(blogger, bloggit etc) or try running the blog address through an engine like Whosit (the one MyLot tasks uses to track down email addresses)Perhaps you could post a snotty note on the blog, but I doubt the person who stole your work even goes there. Blogs like that are a scam in themselves. I'm presently tidying up some stuff for Constant Content

I am also a Helium member. I know that there is a no plagiarizing rule in the guidelines for the site. I am not sure who you could ask. I would look on the message boards and search under plagiarism for starters? I don't know if this helped.

You can find out who owns the blog. Go to who is and put in the web site address. From there you should be able to find out a contact link. If not, shoot an email to Helium at help@helium.com. Also contact the channel stewards. You can find their contact info in the forums. Specifically put in the subject plagiarism. The administrators should be able to help you track down the culprit and get it off the blog. Make sure you give them the link. This isn't the first time the admin has had to deal with plagiarism.

This happened to me earlier this year. Someone decided to copy every post off my blog and put it on their own. I left a message on the plagiarist's blog, but his response was nothing but abuse. So I contacted the company that hosted his blog (wordpress) and told them what he'd done. They deleted his blog and suspended his account. He abused me further. I posted his full name, the address of the blog AND his email-abuse to me on my blog for all to see. Plagiarism should not be tolerated.

Can you leave a comment on the persons blog and can you prove that you wrote it first...

if some budy steals your work you need to caontact him directly and ask for reasons you can file a compalaint to cop or may be beatup him and last options you can steal his work

I do not know what I would do, I do not know what recourse you have. I am registered at both sites, but have never put up anything at AC. Would it work better to put it there first and then at Helium? Can you rework the part that is left, and add the first couple of paragraphs back in in the middle and retry AC?

I would send them a original file in word to prove when it was written. Computer files creation data is always save and hard to change.

This has happened to me with some articles I wrote for Xomba.com (and to some other users). But this was a few months ago and hasn't happened again. Someone with a blog apparently went to Xomba and copied and pasted articles on a bunch of different topics and put them on his blog. The blog was based in Albania or someplace, so U.S. law couldn't do anything about it. After a while there were no new stolen articles on the blog, which later disappeared.

You could look at it this way, they thought it was good enough to steal. AC might reconsider when you get to working with them, I have had troubles like this before, non one has stolen my work but I have posted things on Helium and other places and AC thought it was stolen from myself. They are pretty understanding.

tell them that you published it first and that person stole it

I would leave a comment on that person's blog...and there has to be something that you can do. What did AC tell you that you had to do? Did you explain to AC that the person stole your work because you have the whole article and they took only a part of it?

It's good that AC is checking work for plagiarism. You would never have known about this otherwise. If the blog is hosted, you should definitely go to the blog host. If the blogger does this once, s/he is probably stealing from others too. There has been a recent spate of thefts from Constant Content with their authors' work appearing at AC, so they may be feeling a little sensitive about it at the moment.

If i be you,i will contact the crazy person who steal my work or tell other people about their cheating work.I think they will afraid to do it again after get the bad lesson.Thank you.

I had almost the same thing happen with a college paper I did. The guy borrowed my notes on a major report I was doing and copied the notes word for word! He turned it in as his work, and almost got me expelled. I was furious and told the guy off big time. He of course flunked the class (I got an A ). I have always made sure that my notes weren't made available to ANYONE, and as much as I would love to join Helium and some of the other sites, I have tended not to for that reason. I would definitely publish an article about plagerism and put it on both sites as rapidly as possible. I know it won't change the damage that has been done to you, but at least you can inform the idiots about the fact that when you publish a work on a site, it is copyrighted and that if they do plagerize the work you can and will sue the person for lost income and compensitory damages.

If you have visited the blog you should report it to the host site if you can, and the whole blog will be deleted. You hold the copyright to anything published at Helium and this person is using your work wihout permission and has plaigiarized your writing. Plaigiarism is a violation of conditions of use the blogger agreed to when registering on a blogging site or webhosting site. Terms usually state that any illegal use of copyright material is not permitted and will result in removal of a blog if it is reported to the host.

yeah leave a comment at the site.. and try to get in touch with the admin of tht site and report this incident to them. Even show them a link of your very first post. I know how annoying it is when someone copies my work.. People have become to shameless these days!!

You can prove when you submitted the article on helium and the blog post will have a time stamp as well. It is hardly coincidental for two articles to have the identical wording and other posts are likely to be questionable as well. There may not be an email contact on the site but there are ways to track everything online. I'm guessing that you have come up with something by now.

Sue them for copyrighting!!

i guess you need to feel proud of yourself that you wrote something worthy enough for someone else to take it. what else can youdo?