Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening? Looks like a guy called Vlatko Zdrale is copying articles from blogs left and right, posing as the author of those articles. There is a tiny link at bottom of the entire, verbatim article he copied from my web site onto his web site that states the article came from my web site, but a) that does not do me any good, b) it is unauthorized, and c) makes other companies & ad sponsors think I'm spamming my articles across the web (which I am not). At the very least, he could have fixed the typos! (I edited my post later on, but I guess he didn't notice that.) My original content posted on June 21, 2007: http://www.webgyver.info/?p=86 His unauthorized, stolen content, posted on June 22, 2007: http://tinyurl.com/yt8ept Please, if anyone has any experience with something like this, let me kow what I can do. Thank you everyone!
and plus he is saying that he is the auther by claiming "By: His name" If i where you i would threaten him with a citation. I hate people like him and if anything i think you should have clearly stated that your work is not to be distributed without permission or edited.
Send him an email and tell him to stop this practice at once, to remove the content as well. Contact his web host and tell them to shut down the site. Contact Google to have them intervene too. Take action! Stop this guy in his tracks or else you'll find your material plastered everywhere.
You can sue him but it will cost you money and he has to be in the same country. The best thing to do is to contact him and his host to try to get him to take it down or his host to remove the site. This is the crappy part of the Internet, you have copyright protection but you have to sue to enforce anything. I commented behind you on his blog to let him know that others know he is stealing.
You wouldn't just happen to have an RSS feed on your blog would you? I think you should in addition to all the above write about the incident on your blogs ,a lot. Mention the original url. State that if the readers are viewing the present article on a different url that it is proof positive that the site is plagurizing the material. See if he posts that too...
You guys are great! Thank you very much for all your suggestions and support. I'm following through on a few of the suggestions (such as making it obvious that this is my original content, contacting the guy and his hosting company (again and again) and whatever else I can do without having to hire an attorney — which I just simply can't afford at this time). The sad thing is, this kind of thing is probably happening on a much wider scale than I will ever know. Not just to me, of course. There are a lot of people out there, spending a great deal of time and energy on coming up with helpful and informative content. And I certainly wouldn't mind sharing bits and pieces of my information with others...as long as a) they ask me about it and b) make it clear that the information is not their own. Again, thanks to everyone who has helped me out on this. I owe you BIG time.
This is so true, this is a case of lazy people trying to make a quick buck at someone else's expense. I wish that there was a easier way to stop these people.
There are millions of blogs taking RSS feeds and reposting out there. Don't feel bad, most of this is automated so he's not exactly targetting you, it just happened that you had the keywords he wanted. One thing you need to know is that he is not just going to stop so trying to make him quit is useless. One thing you can do is send them an email but or if US a DMCA takedown notice. Unfortunately the news laws regarding copyright favor the person looting your posts as you have to follow the rules to request they remove it. You could always sue but it's honestly going to be a waste of time and money. I'd ask them to kill it and move on. Unless you want to kill your RSS feeds this will happen from time to time.
Man what an idiot that guy is, please update us on this topic if anything new comes up...I'd love to hear about this. Please PM me if anything comes up (link to this thread) Thx man.
Delist his site if the DMCA notice is filed properly, no google traffic means the blog becomes useless for him.
I disagree with the opinion that you cannot stop this guy. You can. He may persist by going after other people's stuff, but if he sees that you are putting up a fight, you can count on him looking elsewhere for lifted content. Your thread inspired me to write about this topic, but in a slightly different light -- content creation via DP. You can read that article here. Best wishes to you!