The fine line between syndication and stealing

I am absolutely furious.

One of my articles is on the second page of search results of google. It hasn't had a hit in months. The first page of search results are "syndicated" versions. This shouldn't annoy me, after all it is available through creative commons.

What does annoy me is that the licence the article is available under only allows reprints if it is attributed and backlinked. Half of them don't mention I am the author. The other half do, but don't link to any of my profiles or the original - they link to their own. They copied it, pasted it, killed my links and then couldn't even follow the licence on a free article.

Filing DMCA would be difficult. People like this rely on the fact that if you file DMCA through Google your name and address will promptly be given out publicly online. All the data serious crooks actually need to make someone's life difficult, neatly up there on one downloadable form. The article thieves don't have to do anything - the identity thieves pounce in seconds. (Proof that governments are way behind on online crime)

On the other hand, the article that's been "syndicated" is under licence by the host who initially displayed it. Therefore they can take action, without this issue, and have just been kicked in that direction. Failure to defend your IP is a good way for an article site to die, since no one puts content on places that don't look after it.

And if they don't take action? I'l be rather public and very loud about the fact they don't defend their IP.

The article is here: An Evolution of Diving Games

Valid attribution links are this,
An Evolution of Diving Games written by tirial on bukisa

or this:
Written by tirial

Non valid:
"Written by Tirial" and linked to someone else's profile on your own site!

Here's an example of a site with a valid attribution:
An Evolution of Diving Games on Wizzley

Excuse the frothing. When something is free to share anyway, and you have to go out of your way to breach the licence deliberately, that's someone trying to hurt an author and deceive their readers, not someone after something for free.

So if you are one of the people hosting this, whether you removed the attribution or you didn't know where the original was from, consider this fair warning to add the backlink. One line (that was in the original) is all you have to add to be inside the licence.

But, bloody hell guys, even book pirates usually manage to get the author right!