Has Your Work Been Stolen? Let Support Help!

[Ed]

Authors who find their work stolen or who encounter misuse of work purchased at Constant Content should always involve Support. Support can help to correctly identify the problem. Support will also have greater authority in the eyes of those approached - Support represents an entire business rather than an individual.

Particularly in the case of legitimate customers using work from CC authors, authors should contact Support before taking steps to rectify what they see as a breach of proper use on their own. Constant Content can make sure that both parties understand their obligations and can make sure the author is correctly compensated for work if the situation calls for this measure. There is potential on both the customer's and the author's part to misunderstand the licensing structure. Clearing up misunderstandings about the licensing structure benefits everyone.

One site that has been a source for stolen content is AC. Constant Content has a working relationship with AC. Because articles at Constant Content are not indexed by search engines (which gives customers the assurance that they are purchasing work that will be unique to their websites), AC has little ability to catch those who place content taken from Constant Content on AC. Those who find their content on AC should contact Constant Content Support with links to the original article and to the stolen article so that the articles can be removed from CC and AC can take whatever measures its protocol calls for.

A final note: If you want byline credit upon a customer purchase of unique or usage license of your work, the byline must be included in the file you upload.

Thanks,
Ed

[jak]

I recently emailed support because I found one of my articles that sold for usage on an article ezine with someone else's byline. I know this mistakenly happens from time to time.

Problem for me this time is that I had posted it at Helium after the sale and now they have accused me of plagiarism and deleted it from their site. The upfront payment for that should also have taken me over their payment threshold so I've lost out on that. I think as its on an article ezine, the customer should upgrade to full rights as they won't want to leave it there without their own byline. Of course it may not have been the customer or their client; it could have been stolen.

Support have let me know they are investigating.

Lesson I learnt from that is to Google an article sold for usage before posting on another site. I think I might copy someone else here and set up Google alerts for all my new articles.