I have this tendency to get a bit obsessed when someone prods me <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I spent months and months researching the Mass 3rd Infantry (a civil war unit) because my son's ancestor was in it. I then put a summary of all my research (lots of driving around etc) up on the web and was really happy when people wrote me thanking me for my hard work and for putting it on line free.
Tonight I was searching for Austrian rifles to get more info on them - it's what that unit used - and I found to my surprise that another website had stolen my entire history content and posted it as their own, complete with their own copywrite statement! Not only that, but he stole content from SEVERAL other websites of other units. I searched the web and none of this content was anywhere else. The only place he could have gotten it from was our site.
I wrote him and asked him to remove it. If he'd at least credited me I wouldn't have minded as much. But he was claiming HE did all that work.
He wrote back and said in essence "everybody steals, it's not a big deal" and was upset that I said he'd stolen it! He said, what if he got it with permission from another webpage and not mine? Well, there weren't any other webpages on the entire web that had my content, and when I pressed him for this other website so I could go talk to them, I never got an answer. He said he runs a web hosting company and he finds his clients' stuff stolen all the time. So if he's upset about his clients' material being stolen, shouldn't he think twice about then turning around and putting stolen content on his site?
It just really riled me first that he did it, and then second that he could tell me that 'stealing is normal' and that *I* was wrong for accusing him! He said he'd be sure to mention on his webpage that I was unpleasant and not allowing him to show my content.
I ghost wrote this article on the topic, on how to track down stolen content -
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art5940.asp I know in actuality it happens VERY rarely, because I do look occasionally for my content, and I have thousands of pages on the web. Only rarely do I find it elsewhere and usually it's a kid's site where they want a "cool page" and don't know how to write it themselves. That at least I can understand. But a grown adult making a page about "my civil war ancestors" stealing content instead of saying "go here to learn more about this unit" baffles me.
And it wasn't just a paragraph, it was pages and pages.
What are your experiences in this area?