If you write a lot online then you are at risk of someone stealing your work. People steal web posts, blog posts, articles, images. Just about anything they think they can use for their own benefit. It is very annoying if others steal your articles to make money from them.
Breach of copyright is illegal, although copyright laws do vary from country to country the basics are the same. Generally, when writing online, as soon as you create and publish an original piece of writing and publish it online, you will automatically own the copyright. That is easy enough but the hard part is proving that you own the copyright when someone steals your article from you.
Certain copying is considered acceptable. Generally if someone re publishes part of your work, crediting you as the source and adding a link to your original article, this is mostly deemed OK. After all links to your site will benefit you in additional traffic as well as improve your SEO. This is, after all, exactly what you are after when writing to make money, right? I had some such external links to some of my articles on Associated Content and they were very beneficial - in fact, so much so that when I had to move my articles from AC to other websites (due to AC ceasing payments to non-US residents) the page views dropped dramatically. So I personally am happy if someone wishes to do that with my work.
What is generally unacceptable though, is when your work is taken, in part or entirety, and republished elsewhere with no mention of the original author or the source. The work is basically passed as their own. Invariably the guilty party is using your work to make money for themselves. This is in breach of copyright laws.
I myself have suffered such an affront. One of my articles was stolen in one of it's forms when sited on AC. It was used on some blog - and not even a good one! This happened back in October 2009 but I was completely unaware of it. It was after leaving AC in May 2010, when I was redistributing my articles that the problem arose.
Shortly after I had originally written the article in August 2009, I had tried to submit it to Ezine. Ezine rejected it because it contained 2 links to this blog. I decided to resubmit it recently so I removed the links and also did a bit of reworking of the article - adding extra bits etc.
Soon after resubmitting it to Ezine they emailed me stating that they had suspended my account and requested that I explain the source of my article. They informed me that my article was a very similar article to one published elsewhere on the internet, attributed to someone else and reminded me that plagiarism was illegal.
Can you believe it?! I was being accused of stealing my own work from the thief who stole it from me! You couldn't make it up, could you?! I was really annoyed. Not least because if Ezine had bothered to look at the posting date of the offending article they would have seen that it was 2 months AFTER the date I had originally submitted the article to them. The trouble was, I had no idea if they would still have access to my article in the originnal form I submitted it to them. So could I prove the article was mine and the other guy the thief? As I had removed the article from AC I couldn't show how long ago I had put it on there. It had been removed too long for it still to be accessible on googles cached facility. I had it on this blog but there was no posting date. I had a version on Bukisa but I had put it on there after it was put on the thief's blog.
Fortunately, I had also submitted the article to Go Articles back in August 2009 and it was still on there and dated.
However, what could I have done to clear my name if there was no posting date on the stolen version?
What can you do to help prevent someone stealing your posts or articles?
Read my post on preventative measures and action you should take if your work has been stolen - Copyright - Action Against Article Theft
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