MacroMosquito by Wendy on Flickr

Last weekend, on a routine check of our copy productivity, Shari and I were going over analytics and realized that an unusually high number of republishing had occurred on a lesser known article I’d submitted to Ezines before Christmas.

We had been supplying content for our pet project on http://educationalhobbiesblog.com, and bringing awareness to our work through our favorite article directory, EzineArticles.com. One thing we enjoy about that medium is the ability to offer our work publicly, and then retain the credit for researching and writing the piece when it’s republished by another content provider, whether news magazine or blog site. It’s good for our company to have our names associated with our published works, and this is one of the methods we offer our customers who are looking for blog and website traffic building through social media. Many companies don’t have the time to market their expertise through copy the way we can for them.

Some submissions are more effective than others, and we learn from each scenario what better to do next time, and repeat effective strategies. I believe that’s called business marketing! We always walk away with information, one way or another. We sure learned a thing or two this past weekend.

Although several months had passed, and we were well overdue for our quarterly check, we decided to check up on the articles and see if they had been published elsewhere. Not expecting much due to our more pressing projects this first quarter, we were pretty amazed to find it had been republished 238 times. That’s darn good for a pre-Christmas article discussing the buying trends of remote control hobbies! It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t take long to figure out why.

Apparently a guy by the name of Ronald Eapen decided to take my article, slough off the title, use my topic sentence as the new title, and republish my article under his name, taking all the credit for himself. This man then superlinked the material to his easy money making scheme which was totally content unrelated. 238 times he had submitted that article to every known reputable and otherwise article directory and linked back to a page containing otherwise unrelated content and offered yet another link to his easy money scheme.

Every article was heavily endowed with every social bookmarking plugin and affiliate link you could think of. And he’s been making money off my content for the past three months, giving me no credit or kickback for my word-for-word duplication.

People, I clearly copyrighted that work under Zero To Sixty Marketing!

We spent several hours tracking my article from directory to directory, demanding credit and compensation. We also learned who we will consider credible article submission directories for the future! After sending him personal comments on every article that was set up for comments, I remembered we had a friend in the copyright infringement business. Its clearly time to talk to him!

GoArticles promptly removed the content and sent us email confirmation. That was pretty cool. Soon we’ll know who else was willing to comply with copyright law.

Long and short of it, make sure you are being vigilant about protecting your work. It’s not bad to have your work republished all over, that’s pretty much the goal when you’re building you’re reputation. Thing is, you’re reputation is shot when a disreputable person uses it for spamming and the promise of easy money for his customers. If I hadn’t copyrighted my work like this:

Copyright 2009, Zero To Sixty Marketing, LLC, Susan Hamilton
All Rights Reserved

or even just used the word Copyright, the year, and name, I wouldn’t have had the legal right to demand that my name be associated with my work, my work remain unchanged, and compensation for monies earned. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever see a dime. This was small potatoes. But he had everything in place to be well on his way to monetizing my work under his name. Totally uncool.

To recap: beware of bloodsucking plagiarists.

Photo Credit: @N00/266164980/" target="_blank">Wendy on Flickr

Related Article: One Minute With Plagiarism