By Carol Tice

Longtime MALW readers know that in general, I have a pretty laid-back attitude about my articles getting ripped off online. Since I have well more than 1,000 articles bouncing around out there, I see it as sort of inevitable that at some point, one or the other of them will end up being reproduced without permission. I aim to breathe and let go. I’m making a good living. In the great scheme, I feel, it’s not worth getting worked up about.

Or at least that’s how I felt until last week.

I do run a Google alert on my name, but I’ve found it only turns up a some of the mentions of me that happen in a day. And I’ve pretty much vowed not to worry about it too much. My energy is better spent writing more articles.

It hasn’t been a huge problem. It does happen occasionally, and I contact the blogger or Web site in question and gently let them know: Hey, this isn’t OK. Thrilled that you like my article, but you’re infringing the copyright. To be legit, you need to introduce it, then use perhaps a paragraph (considered “fair use” under copyright law), then link to the rest of the story back where it was first published.

I find most infringers are simply ignorant of the laws. They just wanted to share this great content! When asked, they are happy to take the article back down or turn it into a link to its publication site.

Then last week I found a mention in my Google alert on a site I didn’t know, clicked the link and…discovered one of the articles I wrote for Yahoo!Hotjobs was being ripped off by a free-article site. Below the article was an HTML-coded version ready to one-click free download the story to other sites, too! With a little quick search, I found it had spread to half a dozen different sites, several of them similar article databases which offered to share it with others free. I found yet other sites that had clearly copied the story from that site.

This pissed me off.

This was not a young, naive blogger who didn’t know the rules. This was a serious ripoff, and it was set to go viral.

I was surprised at how mad this made me. After all, this wasn’t even my copyright! It was Yahoo!’s.

But my name was still on some of the versions that had been mixmastered into junk and then posted on these sites. Some were titled “7 Great Job for Working With Your Hands,” while others had become “7 Great Jobs for Working with Your Hand” (which sounded vaguely porno to me). Some had chopped off the introductory paragraph. Some had no byline, some had someone else’s. I wasn’t sure which made me madder — the sites where I wasn’t credited, or the crappy sites where my name now appeared — places I wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead writing for.

A lot of top bloggers take the attitude that obsessing on who’s plagiarizing from you is unproductive and generates negative energy. Some openly invite people to just rip them off, because they’ve made a decision not to care. And I thought, “Right on.”

Until this. I wanted these ripoff versions of my article taken down so bad!

I began contacting all the sites and asking them to take the post down. Some did. Some sent insulting messages back. Those that didn’t comply, I sent on to my editor. One by one, most of the sites have since taken the article down…though researching to write this, I found one more! This story may ping around the Internet in various permutations forever now. Even Yahoo!, with all the staff at its disposal, may not want to devote the energy required to stamp it out. They’d have to contact the Internet Service Provider of each site and make their case for getting the site shut down, which could be a lot of work in this situation.

So what did I learn? I found what happened deeply disturbing — it showed me the potential the Internet has to rip off writers and mess with their reputations.  It made me hope any business thinking about using article directories for cheap or free content to help drive traffic to their sites will look a little closer at those sites and make sure what they’re downloading is really available for their free reproduction. Do a quick Google search on some key phrases in that story, and see where it might have originated…you may be surprised.

And now, once again, it’s time to breathe and let go. This article may be ripped off 500 times, and there isn’t going to be a lot I can do about it — except go out and write more great articles. So that’s my plan.

Have you been plagiarized, or had your copyright infringed online? If so, how did you handle it? Leave a comment and add your perspective.

If you enjoyed this post, tell a writer friend…and then subscribe so you don’t miss any tips on how to earn more from your writing.

Photo via Flickr user Horia Varlan

So I’m back from my vacation in the San Juan Islands now. As regular readers of this blog know, I believe writers should plan carefully so that they actually get to vacation on their vacation, so I took my own advice and worked ahead. I turned on my ‘out of the office’ notices, carefully managed my schedule, informed clients of my absence, and had nearly all my accounts tied up with a bow.

The problem was my blogs. This one in particular, and another one for a large client. For the client, I get paid in part based on how frequently I post, and found myself needing to do three more posts to make my nut…so that crept into the first three days of my vacation. Missed it by THAT much.

But even worse was this blog. I’d pre-written my posts and they were scheduled to go up twice a week as normal. But the comments have to be moderated. Why didn’t I think of this when I planned my vacation!

If I don’t moderate the comments, no comments go up, and then visitors feel ignored. I made it about three days before sweat beads started to form on my forehead. My blog! What’s happening on my blog? I couldn’t stop wondering what comments might be coming that weren’t posting because I was out. I always think it’s rude when I post a comment and days later, it’s not visible.

With help from my husband’s smart phone, I learned how to check email on a phone for the first time. It was kind of hellish, but I finally got onto my dashboard and was able to look through all the comments there. It was the usual — about 100 pieces of spam a day (thanks, robots!) and then the handful of actual writer comments and pingbacks.

I was glad I checked email, too — I ended up accepting $1,000 in assignments that I might have lost if I hadn’t responded for a whole week, plus got a lead on another $1,200 assignment I’m hoping to nail down shortly. Really helps pay for the vacation if you don’t lose too much work while you’re gone!

Then, I kept my blog going. I didn’t realize how loyal I felt toward the community that’s built up around Make a Living Writing until I tried to leave it behind.

So what did I learn on my vacation? A quick email check every couple of days is probably smart. Even with the email bouncer on, you may be missing out on some key messages. Some assignments won’t wait a week to get assigned — editors will move on and find another writer. But this sort of thing could be kept down to a few minutes every other day or so. The blog is what sunk my plan to really unplug.

Next time, I’ve decided I’m hiring someone to moderate my blog while I go on vacation. It would have been a lot more relaxing if I’d had this task truly off my plate while I was away.

Have you been on vacation this summer? Got any tips on how writers can really get away? Leave a comment and tell us how you managed it.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to Make a Living Writing — don’t miss any free advice on how to earn more from your writing.

Photo via Flickr user Akuppa

In case you haven’t yet heard, content farm Demand Studios is planning a $125 million initial public offering. This was not unexpected. We’ve already got the drill down — content mills pay freelance writers peanuts, and then go public or get acquired for $100 million-plus.

But there’s a difference here from Associated Content’s recent acquisition by Yahoo! An IPO requires a hefty public filing, in which the company has to disclose tons of facts about their business. (Since Yahoo is so big and AC so relatively small, Yahoo didn’t have to disclose much about the acquisition to its shareholders.) The IPO filing, known as an S-1, is long. But here in brief are a few important things the filing reveals about Demand Studios’ business that writers should know:

DS is losing money. That’s right, they pay you only $15 for an article, and they still haven’t figured out how to make a profit off you! Can you believe it? They’ve got 10,000 writers creating 5,700 pieces of content a day, but that apparently isn’t enough critical mass to make a profitable business model.

If I were staking my income on what DS does, I’d be seriously worried about that. Unprofitable companies eventually go bust, for the most part. Essentially, DS needs the IPO money to stay afloat! After all their executive talk about how they’re the new media model that’s going to flatten traditional media. Yeah, we’ll see about that. A lot of print publications are still making money, you know.

DS’s markup is 260 percent. DS pays you $15, and the filing reveals they make an average of $54 per article. Yet, they are still hemorrhaging cash. The company lost $14.2 million on $170 million of revenue in 2008; in 2009, it was a $22 million loss on nearly $200 million in income. They seem to have improved a bit in the first half this year, only losing $6 million on $114 million. Wow, I bet if you put content up on your own site and sold ads against it, you could figure out how to make a profit…and you could keep all the profit for yourself!

I’d love to know, with what DS pays editors, where the fat is in this business model that’s making it unprofitable. It’s kind of stunning that they’re trying an IPO with this profitability record, but surprisingly, about 40 percent of companies trying the public markets right now aren’t in the black. Sort of a weird return to the dot-com days going on.

DS is in danger of being branded spam by Google. They disclose this in the section on the possible competitive threats to their business. Hmm, if that happens and Google decides to screen DS out, poof! No more Demand! A lot of Internet-watchers believe at some point Google has to find a way to screen out these sites or users are going to turn to other search engines in their search for better-quality content.

DS makes much of its money from domain-selling and domain-squatting. Turns out more than 40 percent of its revenue is from eNom, not even from the content mill. People buy domain names from eNom, and eNom runs Google ads on empty Web sites to get revenue. Weird, huh?

DS’s timing shows it’s desperate. The IPO market has perked up a bit this year from its dead stop last year, but most IPOs aren’t doing very well. The majority have gone down after issue, which is bad news for company founders and backers. The down market means only companies that HAVE to get some money right now are trying an IPO. DS could no doubt get more money if they waited a year or two. But apparently they can’t wait.

The upside here — founders and investors may not end up with much. They have to wait three months after the IPO before they can cash any of their shares, and the way the market’s been going, they may not do very well.

As many people know, I have never written for DS or any of their ilk. But I still think it’ll be pretty sweet if we can watch the folks who perpetrate this crime against fair wages get hosed on their big IPO payday.

The other thing to know is just because a company’s filed an IPO doesn’t mean it’ll go — they still have to get enough big investors interested to price it and make it go. We’ll see, given its unprofitability, if DS can sell investors on the deal.

Ready to move up from content mills? Learn how to grow your writing income in my new community, Freelance Writers Den — get your questions answered by freelance-writing pros, take e-courses, attend live events, and much more.

Photo via Flickr user Tjeerd