What do you do if your article is copied to a foriegn website?

1. 60

   Wesley Meachamposted 12 years ago

   What do you do if your article is copied to a foriegn website?
   
   I've found 2 of my hubs copied to a Chinese website. The site is actually built around copying articles from English sites and republishing the orriginal articles with Chinese translations inserted in between paragraphs. They provide a URL (not a link) for my hub and they give my name so they're attributing the article to me.
   
   I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this yet. Has anyone else had this happen to them? Is there anything that I can (or should) do about this? If there is nothing that I can do how will this effect me (will it effect the article as far as google is concerned...)?

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2. 71

   Kaili Bissonposted 12 years ago

   Hi Wesley...I found that a couple of my recipe hubs of all things had been copied to a recipe site, and they attribute them to me and provide a URL...one of them has turned out to be the hub I get the most traffic from - way more than any of my other hubs - so I am not as outraged as I was when I first discovered it :-)

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      AlexK2009posted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Getting it translated for free sounds like a bonus.  Getting the traffic is a bigger bonus.  The bottom line is if YOU are making money from it then don't complain.

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      Wesley Meachamposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for your input Kaili.

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3. 78

   AlexK2009posted 12 years ago

   If, as Kaili says, the copied site attributes to you and brings you more traffic and money perhaps you should ask the owners for a more formal syndication agreement.  Just make sure the articles will not fall foul of Hub Pages non duplication policy.
   
   Personally I think that having your work copied indicates its market potential better than anything HP would say.
   
   If however the site just copies your work and does not attribute it to you then go for them, tell HP and let them fight it out.

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      Wesley Meachamposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Thank you Alex, the non duplication policy is actually one of my bigger concern. My traffic does appear to be trending upward for no reason that I can explain so maybe this is the cause.

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4. 78

   aravindb1982posted 12 years ago

   Wow! You are getting some free publicity done for you. See if there is any way to contact the admin of that site. If you can, contact and request for a hyperlink. Even if that is not possible, there is nothing to worry because the URL is being mentioned. I have had this happening to me on many occasions. Once, an article of mine was de-listed by HubPages for that. But I found out later, it happened only because the site did not put the url. ONce the url was placed, my hub went out of the blacklist.
   
   Honestly speaking, if I were you, I would celebrate!

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      Wesley Meachamposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Thank you aravinb1982, I've about decided that this is a good thing.

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5. 45

   DDEposted 12 years ago

   Sounds like you are gaining traffic I too have seen some of my articles on other  sites

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   starstreamposted 12 years ago

   I would certainly celebrate after reading several answers already given here.  Your question is much appreciated as I learned something that is new to me.  It seems like a congratulations is perhaps the best answer in your case.

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7. 86

   sparksterposted 12 years ago

   Hi, I have also found some of my work on other websites although not foreign ones. Upon contacting them they were really impressed with the article and wanted to keep it on their website. However, they had actually credited the writer as being Sam Vaknin and not me!!
   
   First of all they ignored my requests to take the article down so eventually I sent a DMCA complaint to them and between us we agreed that they would leave the article published but would credit me as the writer and provide a link to my work here at Hubpages.

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8. 70

   postsposted 12 years ago

   If you want your article to be valued properly by google, it should be unique and refreshing. And there is also the fact that we can't stop the copy cats by any means. As far as your case is concerned, if I would be in your place and if the link back to my original article be do follow also, I would not allow that. I respect originality and genuine work. So, i always bookmark my work in freecopyright.net after publishing. This may not stop people from copying my work but if needed i can provide proof to DMCA or complain to google for deindexing them from search results.
   But, if you dont have any problem for duplication penalties both by hubpages and google and getting reasonable amount of traffic, you may allow for betterment and try to convert that traffic to money!!
   Regards!!

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9. 78

   wheelinalloverposted 12 years ago

   Copyright laws are international. If your hub is published in its entirety in English you have every right to contact the webhost and have it removed. Google is good at working with people so you might contact them and ask them if it is going to affect your page rank. They know who was the first to publish so this shouldn't be a problem.

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10. 81

    Maria Ceciliaposted 12 years ago

    Lucky you they still attributed your article to you, my two hubs were copied too, the first one was copied by someone I met in one forum but she copied portion of my hub to their site in Vietnam, my next  hub was copied by Malaysian site and one english site.  Because of hectic schedule I can't find time to do the step by step instruction or at least tell google about it.  Well you need to contact the  hubpages team and tell them that your copied hubs were your original.  I don't think our hub will be penalized as stated in our warning, but you still need to clear that up with them.  Aside from that I didn't do anything yet, I still have the copied hub signs, but as far as earnings are concerned, I don't think it the copied hubs will affect it.

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11. 60

    Shawn May Scottposted 12 years ago

    This has happened to many of us on HP. Check with lord de cross, he was intrigule in helping us out with strolen Hub in the past.

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12. 48

    Ericdierkerposted 12 years ago

    I think you need to look at what traffic is being driven by the copied work. It is not about whether it hurts or helps you, it is about how much they make off of it. Each of these types of infringments damages the writing community. This is the stealing of a man's creativity and ingenuity. This is even a higher concern because it goes from one country to another. This is one of those issues, where if we do not stand up for what is right, our rights begin to crumble. Perhaps in China they still do not honor the individual, I hope in this country we do. But that legacy requires diligence and perseverence even if we do not make money from it. Perhaps even more so when we do not.

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    LillyGrillzitposted 12 years ago

    
    
    I read many of the answers to this question, and if I am not mistaken you indicated that they did not link back, but copied your url. That is not cool.
    
    Another thing you may want to consider when getting new traffic from places like Malaysia, Indonesia and China, is they can use your traffic grabbing article to promote pornograpy, and worse; child pornography.
    
    It is not okay to just let these matters lie, unless you do not publish unique content, and do not care to give your life work away.
    
    There are hundreds of good Hubs on what to do if someone steals your work. The best way to learn how to navigate the world wide web, and publishing would be read Hubbers who have gone before you, and find out how to file a DMCA and stop this.
    
    It makes me angry when these theives find new terminology to call theft; harvesting, cloning etc.
    
    It is not okay.

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14. 0

    twinlyposted 12 years ago

    I agree with most of the answers on here. There are a few questions I ask myself when I see my hub on someones website.
    
    Is there at least an attribution for my work?
    Is the fact that my work is duplicated affecting my ranking in anyway for the hub? For example is it doing poorly in Google.
    And also is the copier ranked poorly? Which is usually the case. Because these are not helping the copier in any gains.So that is fine by me.

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    TIMETRAVELER2posted 12 years ago

    This happened to me when I was writing for another site.  I contacted the site owner and let him know I was unhappy about what he'd done and told him how to link to my articles if he wanted to use them.  Fortunately for me, he was nice about it and followed my advice...but the truth is we have absolutely no control over sites like this other than to report them to Google.  Foreign websites do not have to follow American copyright laws, unfortunately!

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