What Can You Do to Stop the Pirates When You Write for Ezine or When You Blog

We were having a discussion about whether or not it's a good idea to publish your articles into an article directory, such as Ezine Articles. I've published my articles sometimes on Ezine, so I was attracted to join the discussion. I personally think Ezine is the best of the bunch, having a high Page Rank (6), and a fair amount of traffic.

Someone asked, what can you do if you find that people are lifting your articles from Ezine and re-publishing them without giving you any credit as the author? The answer is not really an encouraging one. It really seems like there is nothing you can do about it.

Regrettably, theft is part and parcel of the internet. It's ironic really that all these amazing advances in technology that have occurred in recent decades have created a situation in which writers have even less copyright protection than they had in medieval times.

When I re-publish other people's work, I always carefully give them credit and backlinks. Not because of fear of the law, since in effect there isn't one, but only because I prefer to treat others as I would like them to treat me.

When I first noticed my own articles being re-published without credit, I was outraged. I would go to the site and, if there was a comment space, I would write "I am the author of this article, and I assert my right to be named as the author etc. etc." but of course it didn't make any difference!

There are, however, two consolations. First, these people are stealing from everyone, not just you. And you have the God-given talent to produce more, whereas they don't, they can only copy. So you will win out eventually (but it may take a while.)

Second, when the Google Search Robots see duplicates of the same material, they will show on the search results listing the occurrence of the material on the higher Page Rank site. This means that traffic will tend to go to your Ezine article (with its backlink to your site) rather than the pirated version, since pirates generally do not have high Page Rank. In fact, if you have copied the article on to your own blog, the search will STILL usually point to the Ezine article.