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[Mystress]

About once a year I google random phrases from my website to find out who is stealing my content. It is dull work, and sometimes a little heartbreaking to discover my writing is being used as filler for google adwords: or worse, being used to sell something that I would rather warn people away from.

  I have had cases of cybersquatting, where someone registers a similar domain name and steals my content, sometimes even distorting my original artwork for their own profit. This is extremely illegal, not to mention damaging.

  I do not have the time or resources to go after plagiarists and cybersquatters with lawsuits; I can barely make time to search for them, and track down an email address to write and ask the stolen content be taken down.
 
In some cases no address is provided, or you are asked to join a forum or group in order to contact a thief. 

  It occurred to me today to ask for the support of my website users in combatting content theft.  In some ways I would prefer to let it go, but there are reasons why I cannot:

1.) Search engines like google penalize sites for having the same content posted in many places.  Plagiarists negatively affect my search engine listings, unfairly trading on my efforts and making this website resource harder to find by people who would benefit from it.

  2.) There have been cases where plagiarism has resulted in confusion about who owns the original copyrights; even times where a content thief has tried to sue an original author for plagiarism, resulting in the innocent party having to deal with an expense of time and legal issues. 

  3.) People using my writing to pretend to be wiser than they are mislead people who would not be looking to them for advice if they knew it was based on borrowed wisdom.

   Would you want to engage the services of someone whose morality is so tarnished as to stoop to content theft?  I have decided I would prefer to blow the whistle on them and so I have created this new board to post the URLs of content thieves, cybersquatters and copyright violations when I find them, and I hope you will do the same.

  I consider several levels to content theft according to damage and malice:

  1.) The cybersquatter:  Most damaging, they often lift whole sites and repost them with very few changes, on a similar domain name, seeking to profit from the efforts of another.  These sites can do real damage to an authors reputations and livelihood, and prosecuting them is expensive and time consuming.

  2.) The content thief:   I once had someone email me to ask what I thought of an article... I thought it looked very familiar: it was my own essay with someone else's writing added on as a first and last paragraph, making it appear that the writing was all the thief's own.  I find this most often when someone is using my writing to sell a suspect service: in this case it was Shamballa initiations which I most certainly do not recommend.

3.) The fool: In this case someone has reposted my content on a not-for profit site out of good intentions: sometimes the original source is attributed, sometimes it is not.  Either way it disrespects my copyright and damages my search listings.

   4.) Forums, groups and email lists. These are usually a simple case of ignorance of the law, and happens most often. Sometimes the source is attributed, more often it is not. Sometimes it is attributed accidentally, because many of my pages have links to other parts of the site within them and the borrower does not remove them. The link benefits my engine listings but the reposted content damages them and blurs my copyrights.

   While I appreciate that people value my writing enough to want to share and discuss it, it is still damaging to me for the reasons listed above.  Please, offer a link to my website: do not repost my content without my consent.

  Posting a few sentences or a paragraph for the sake of discussion I would consider "fair use" but people usually repost an entire page, and that is damaging. 

  I am sorry to have to take this step, I have avoided it for many years but theft of my content has become epidemic and my writing is being misused to mislead people. I cannot allow that.

  If you find instances of my writing, art or ideas being reprinted elsewhere please report it here. Please also make a screen capture of the page: press "print screen" and paste into a blank image file, save.

   Exceptions would be where I have reposted the same content myself on another site I own. My primary domains are


fire-serpent *dot* com
  fire-serpent *dot* org
  kundalini-gateway *dot* org
  kundalini-teacher *dot* com   (this site)
  domin8rex  *dot* com (My oldest site, not updated since 2001. adults only)

    Thank you for your support.
 

[Steve]

About once a year I google random phrases from my website to find out who is stealing my content. It is dull work, and sometimes a little heartbreaking to discover my writing is being used as filler for google adwords: or worse, being used to sell something that I would rather warn people away from.

You can use copyscape.com instead of google. They scan the web for an entire page(s) instead of phrases. They also have a paid service called copysentry that does everything automatically and emails you whenever any plagiarism is found. It can scan daily, weekly or monthly.
There are also other services like dupefree.com but I have never used any of them so I don't know how they work.