Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Or that’s the theory, at least.  Last night an intrepid reader alerted me to the fact that one of my articles had been copied verbatim and attributed to another person, Ashleigh Rhodes, who’s a Content Producer for www.AssociatedContent.com. It wouldn’t be as bad if she at least put it in her own words.  But she was too lazy to do even that, which is pretty sad.  What is sadder is that the person who alerted me to this problem had one of her articles stolen by this woman as well.

I wrote to the company to alert them to the problem and to request the removal of my article.  They complied, but failed to say if they were going to take my recommendation to remove this woman as Content Producer, despite the fact she’s outright stolen 2 of her articles.

So, I guess it’s time for me to get some protection…sigh.  Therefore, I signed up for a basic account at Copy Sentry.  For a monthly fee, Copy Sentry scans the web weekly to see if there are copies of your website pages on other sites and alerts you to those locations.  There’s a premium service, as well, which will check and compare your site daily.  That level of protection I thought was a bit much, so I choose the weekly check with the basic account.

This is my second brush with an article stealer.  The first was a guy who submitted one article to EzineArticles.com, a site at which I happen to be an Expert Author. This article was the only one he had submitted, although it’s been published a few places.  EzineArticles.com removed the article quickly.

I’ll just add this fee to the $100 plus in monthly service fees I already pay……