In checking my stats, I discovered that yes, my posts have now been officially stolen. Well, half of one of my posts. It is attributed back to me, but I’m still a little angered by the whole thing.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
Of course, the only reason I know about it is because the post did link back to me – I wonder how many of my posts have been swiped that I have no clue about.
And another interesting thing – I noticed that an entire edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance was swiped and reposted in multiple places. I suppose it spreads the link, but after all the work Nicole did on that edition, she deserves the credit and the traffic, not some thief.
Welcome to the internet, folks.
You may want to consider adding “Reprint Rights” to all your post’s:
“You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit this article in any way, and give the author name credit”.
won’t stop a real thief – but of someone with a conscience uses it..
you may just get credit
So just one question Megan, how do you figure out that someone is doing this?
Nicole, the only reason I caught it is because the person did sort of cite back to this original site. At the very bottom, in small print, were the words “Originally posted at M0.” What that means, I don’t know, but it linked back here. So I saw a strange site in my referral logs (both on Sitemeter and Google Analytics) and went to find out what that site was.
Oddly, in that case, they only took a chunk of the post, stopping mid-sentence.
I discovered that someone had stolen entire copies of the Carnival in the same way – weird looking links back to my site in Google Analytics, and checking them out revealed that a number of sites (probably all run by the same person) had swiped a copy of the Carnival. I knew only because someone had clicked through. I’m sure there are many that I don’t know about.
Ooooh that really sucks, i’m sorry
Have you ever checked out the MBN (Money Blog Network) forums? There was a few posts on something similar and the community helped figure out how to stop it. Might be worth a look 