In this particular case, there's an even better option. The real author should file a DMCA complaint with Google — specifically Adsense. They might be able to get the Adsense account banned, hitting the site financially (which also hits that site owner on any other site where they use Adsense if they're account is banned). That, and you can have their content de-indexed. Hit them in the wallet and traffic, and they tend to be incredibly responsive about stopping their sh*t.

I recently had to deal with a social media / Internet marketing splog that admitted right on the site that they did nothing but aggregate others' content in full. I outlined exactly what I'd do if they didn't get the material removed, including reporting them for de-indexing, Adsense account ban, and reporting them to their host. They not only removed it, but they've started providing their own original content instead of aggregating full content from others — completely overhauled their business model. Worth a try.

I agree this has nothing to do with being read-at least you hope that's the case with all the complete gibberish.

It certainly is an interesting world. 🙂

I'm sure most of your readers know about it, but here's an excellent resource for those who find themselves duking it out with thieves: Plagiarism Today Jonathan Bailey has created a great site dedicated to this kind of crappola and how to make it go away.

Oh, one other thing… The contact for the domain in question claims to reside in beautiful Valley Cottage, NY. The WhoIs data includes a name, an email address and a phone number. They could all be fake, but it might be worth a phone call if she wanted to try to fix things in a hurry.

If it were just the crap content, we could overlook it. It's not. It's the reputation damage to those who are unaware their names are associated with this garbage.

Great idea, Devon.

Wendy, pop me an email. I've been wanting to ask you something.

What you don't do is ignore it.

Doesn't matter if the person claims "not to understand" — it's still theft and needs to be squashed.

I haven't dug into the this particular article in great detail, but I'm wiling to bet that its author originally distributed it to EzineArticles.com and/or other article directories.

Anyone who plans on using outlets like those as a means of promotion should be aware that those waters are the preferred fishing territory for steal-and-spin types.

In response to Cassie's comment… The problem really isn't that someone else is mangling the article and trying to claim authorship. They're actually spinning the article with the original author's name and link intact, thus making it appear as if the legitimate creator is a moron. The fact that the original writer is still getting a backlink probably isn't enough of a payoff to justify that, either.

That's one interesting thing about this instance, actually. In most cases, the spinning thieves will *strip* the resource box and any/all mention of the original creator. This one is sloppy and icky at the same time.

On the bright side, most of these efforts fail to ever capture a set of human eyeballs. The sites, the spins and everything else is created for the search engines with zero expectation of actual, human traffic.

Which brings this comment back to its start… As long as Google is the champ and as long as Google is unable to differentiate between quality and lunacy, this will continue to happen. All of the C&Ds and DMCA notices in the world won't counteract those motives–especially when only a fraction of the a-holes are noticed and when most who are operate anonymous, disposable, automated sites.

If someone had appropriated my work in this manner, I'd be quite upset. If someone had paraphrased/translated and mangled my work this way in an attempt to pass it off as his own, I'd be livid.

The worst case of theft (plagiarism) I've seen lately was during a copyedit I was performing on a title for a well-respected university press (their law division). During the copyediting, I also was checking facts. In more instances than I can count, I found passages of exact wording lifted from — of all places — Wikipedia! And this, by a professor/attorney!