Copyright and Your Writing

When you make your living by selling your writing, it's important that your clients know they're getting unique material. They pay you for the right to receive words that haven't been reproduced hundreds of times all over the internet.

While most freelance writers understand this basic principle, there are a few low-lives out there determined to spoil this industry for all those other writers who try hard to do the right thing.

If you're a freelance writer and you regularly write and sell original work, then I urge you to run a simple check on Google or Copyscape to be sure your work hasn't been stolen or copied by one an unscrupulous thief.

There are numerous reports of writers creating good quality, unique content and offering it for sale on Constant Content . The buyers there are willing to pay slightly higher prices for articles because they believe the articles are unique and haven't been posted everywhere else.

Unfortunately there are are a few bad writers in the crowd determined to skim the sample articles offered by other writers and post those samples on Associated Content so they can earn a measly couple of dollars through the hard work of someone else.

The pages at Constant Content aren't indexed on Google because they are supposed to be private sales and representing unique, unpublished content. Because it's not indexed, the internal software at Associated Content doesn't catch that it's a copied article. So they accept it and pay the loser who stole it a couple of lousy dollars and the rightful owner loses out.

If you're a Constant Content writer, I urge you to copy a sentence or two out of your own articles, paste it into a Google search or enter the URL of the site where the article is posted into Copyscape.

In fact, you should make it a habit to do this with anything you've written to be sure it hasn't been 'borrowed'.

If you find that your work has been plagiarized, I urge you to contact the person directly and ask for the stolen writing to be removed. If they don't comply - report them to the site owner or web host. These people need to learn that it's NOT okay to steal another writer's work.

You might remember a previous post (http://ravens-writing.blogspot.com/2009/04/plagiarism-is-theft.html) about an unscrupulous thief who stole every single post off my blog and posted it as his own elsewhere. The same person/thief/liar/scum, Harshajyoti Das, a.k.a jr_sci, is back to his thieving ways again. While the article isn't mine this time, it does belong to someone I know and it's still plagiarism.

Stand up for your rights and protect your writing.