Today I discovered that my post “Brunch at Griffins - Fairmont Hotel Vancouver” which I wrote on May 4th, had been taken and posted on another website, word for word, without my permission or any credits given. The website which took my post is called “The Luxury Hotels Specials”. I also found my post appearing on Live Journal by a user named koodoo_traveler. As you can see, the post is exactly the same as mine but the posting date is today, May 9th at 5:20pm. The photos are still being hosted on my server so it’s using my bandwidth.
I’m sure there are other bloggers who have their work plagiarized. This is the first something like this happened to me and I not sure what actions I can take. Hopefully someone can give me some advice.
Update on May 11 - My materials on the above mentioned websites have been removed. Thank you for all the advice and support.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Hi Janice,
I have never had the misfortune of having my writing plagiarized (maybe I have, but truth be told, it would be REALLY hard as my blog is fairly decently well read, so my friends would catch on to it really fast).
I am sorry to hear about this. Off the top of my head I would suggest first to contact the supplier (LiveJournal and the other one). Don’t let this go any further, and threaten to take action.
My contact details are on my blog if you want some more advice, or @ me on Twitter.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
First off, I am very sorry that this has happened to you, however, it appears that both of the posts involved are down at this time so that is good news at least.
If this happens in the future, please do not hesitate to write me and I’ll do what I can to help. The first appears to be a spam blog and the latter is likely one as well, these sites just automatically scrape content from RSS feeds and post them to new sites in hopes of fooling the search engines.
On that note, I don’t encourage people to link to such sites. There are ways to get this kind of content removed without giving them extra help in the search engines.
Just let me know if it happens again and I will help you take care of it.
I hope that you’re doing well and congratulations on getting these two cases shut down!