Several sploggers have been harvesting posts from Funny about Money. Most recently, a site called “The Retired Millionaire” has been reproducing passages from Funny and monetizing them. I have contacted Adsense to let them know that if they don’t bring a stop to the use of their service to steal money from me by using my work as an advertising base, they soon will be hearing from my lawyer and from the U.S. Attorney General, and to instruct them to remit all revenues generated from my content to me.
You’ll notice a new addition to the blogroll atFunnyand atThe Copyeditor’s Desk:Exposing Sploggersis a group of WordPress bloggers who are banding together to fight back. They propose to track down the owners of offending groups and to develop various ways to force them to remove members’ copyrighted material from their sites and to stop the wholesale theft. Exposing Sploggers also lists several other sites with information and resources, which you should know about.
It is against the law to use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, and profiting off that material is actionable. I am not above filing lawsuits against anyone I can catch in the act. No © symbol or copyright notice is required to establish your rights in your work, nor is it necessary to register your work with the Library of Congress to establish rights. Copyright applies to all reproducible hard-copy, film, and electronic material, and the law protects such material from the instant it is created. If you would like to know more about this, my chapters on copyright and on libel in The Essential Feature were vetted by an internationally prominent publishing lawyer, who pronounced them the best summaries in layman’s language that she had seen.
If you’re a blogger, I urge you to join Exposing Sploggers and work actively to bring a stop to theft of your work. In some cases, copy pirates have ripped off entire blogs, so that Google searches go to the thief’s site instead of to the real blog. Obviously, if you are trying to monetize your site, these crooks are stealing from your pocketbook. Even if all the slimeball steals is your ideas and your creativity, you should care. You should care very much.