Unethical Blogging Practice, Copyright Infringement

Recently I was speaking with a good friend of mine Lori Clark who owns a consulting business called Clark Aviation Consulting. She has started writing articles and found that one of her first articles had been picked up by another website.

Since this is the desired outcome of an article she was happy about it. However when checking out the site that picked up the article she found something that none of us want to see happen with our articles.

The article was picked up from a secondary source which had not included her resources, namely her contact information or the link back to her website. When the article was published on the 2nd site it was linked to the site who did not include Lori’s resources.

There were now 2 instances of her article being picked up with neither of them giving the required credit and link back to Lori’s site.

To make matters worse, the site that is violating numerous authors copyrights has monitized his site using content links. So not only is he stealing copyrighted material, he's making money from it.

She contacted the 2nd person and they rectified the resource issue right away. The original person who posted her article has an entire blog site filled with great content and an excellent PR. The problem is that the excellent content is provided by others who have no idea that their articles are being taken and used without their resources.

This is a blatant copyright infringement and without a doubt the lack of links back to the original author’s has contributed to the high PR for this blog. Sadly this type of thing occurs on a regular basis on the Internet and it’s up to us to be proactive in protecting our copyright material.

When you submit an article for publication as soon as the article is published, you need to set a google alert for the name of the article. A Google alert are a great tool for keeping track of your articles and also provides you the ability to stay on top of any copyright infringements.

There are remedies for this type of infringement. First contact the person that posted your article and ask them to include your resource information. If they don’t comply, your next step is to contact their ISP provider and let them know that this person is violating your copyright. The ISP has it within their power to take these types of sites down.

Another option for you when you find your copyrighted material has been violated is to contact google and let them know. Clearly they can’t take the site down, but if there is any pagerank associated with the site they can and will make adjustments to that pagerank.

It’s important to know that you have to be proactive in protecting your Internet persona as well as protecting your copyright material whether it is your site copy or an article. Doing so will ensure that you will grow your own Internet presense and build your own reputation as an expert in your field.

I will be compiling a list of authors who's work is featured on this site and posting them here on my blog.