I have recently started a poker blog and I am writing my own articles, i recently noticed a track back to my blog and went and had a look at it, to find that the person had copied and pasted my entire article and then placed a small text link to my site at the bottom of his article. I requested he remove the article and contact me if he required paid new poker articles. However I was wondering what legal options I have in regards to this it seems that every article on this site is just copied and pasted from another. I am guessing this is a problem that most people have been through before it does annoy me a great deal as now I am wondering if he is going to poach every article I write.
You could file a DMCA takedown notice with his host if he continues to use your copyrighted material. There's a free DMCA notice formatter in my signature line. You could also complain to the ad services he runs on his website. For example, if he uses AdSense, you can click on the little icon in the corner of the ad and report him for using your copyrighted content. They might ban his account.
Send official DMCA notices to him, his hosting, his domain registrar, any ad companies he uses on his site, and the popular search engines.
It sounds like you have RSS feeds activated on your site. Perhaps try turning them off, if you do not want your articles "syndicated"
Or just offer limited content in the RSS feed. That won't stop people from manually copying your content though.
Thanks for the help guys I am going to edit my rss feeds to try and avoid future problems and do the DMCA takedown notices.
For $99 you can have DMCA.com take care of this issue quickly and professionally. If you're interested more in prevention then you can put a button/logo on your page to help scare off the thieves. Link to buttons