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!

And progress is made slowly...

Over Easter I got two more rejections - one at 1am Easter Sunday. Both were form rejections, so no useful information or advice unfortunately. On the other hand that is the last of the UK ones for that manuscript, so hopefully the genre's not as dead overseas.

I've had the book on the left recommended to me, and when I checked out whether it was good as claimed, I found it was also highlighted on the howpublishingreallyworks blog. Hopefully that's a ringing endorsement.

On the garden front the cress and mustard I grew have gone, and the lettuce is now seriously taking route. I also have seven dwarf bean plants taking over the kitchen.

And on the article front? I've just added another article to Bukisa, and am looking forward to them getting the bugs out of their topic pages, since one of their topics is the GWR. I have also published my first hub on hubpages, but may well not do another one. I'll blog here once I've got my thoughts together on it, but it's another US/non-US issue.

Articles and More

After real life got in the way yesterday, I'm now back to writing articles on Bukisa. Porting my old game reviews is taking longer than I thought - not least because my writing style and voice has changed over the years so instead of a direct port, I am re-writing them. Great for search engine rankings and traffic, but not so good for my schedule!

I've also taken a chance and put one of my short stories up. Originally written for a messageboard writing section I thought I might as well see if anyone liked it. In addition, the first part of "Escape" is up - after all if I can use lulu preview and let people read it for free, I might as well let them read it for free on Bukisa and get paid for the views. If enough people ask I'll put the other two parts up there as well, and leave the e-book version for die-hard fans if I have any. (Let's be honest. The way I'm feeling now "Enough people" would probably be one.)

I am still waiting for any more feedback on the novel, although between the article writing, a few real life complications and gardening work I'm not really thinking about it at the moment.

• A Perfect Set Up - short story on Bukisa

A new article: The Surrey Iron Railway

A new article on Bukisa:
About the Surrey Iron Railway.

I am turning several of my lenses into articles after a number of users requested printable versions. My initial experiments with Lulu and free e-books was interesting, but there were complaints about download speed for the PDFs - and a few users whose security settings would not let them get the download after they requested it. If it wasn't free I'd feel quite bad for them, but fortunately I could send them one directly.

Instead, I'm now going for the best of both worlds. If the articles are on Bukisa online they can be read or printed for free by the user, and I get a penny a view for good causes so the work is still fund-raising.

Updates are likely to be patchy until after christmas though - working in ecommerce this is definitely the silly season!