My Work’s Been Plagiarised! Two Stories Stolen…
Here’s what I think Medium should do about it

Two of my stories have been stolen and published on sites in Nigeria, where the owners are clearly making money from extensive advertising on the pages where my stories are displayed.
This is part of a bigger problem — a huge number of stories from a history publication have been copied and pasted onto these websites, often with the writers’ own photographs!
The owner of the publication is working to have the pirate site taken down. And I’ve written to the sites individually telling them to remove my content and expressing my annoyance.
Remarkably, while I didn’t expect them to comply, one has removed my stories, but the stories they plagiarised from other people remain. Even if the sites are taken down by the host, I expect some stories will crop up on another illegal site later.
What can be done to stop this?
I’ve written to Medium with a suggestion. Why not take measures to protect writers and make Medium a website that cannot be copied?
Some websites, when you try to copy text, you can’t. It’s like trying to copy text from a jpeg. It doesn’t work. Medium could do that. I suspect that would eliminate 99.9% of the problem.
This would muck up the highlighting, but what the hell, too much highlighting makes text harder to read anyway. And some people complain about it. So compulsive highlighters would have to leave comments instead, which would suit me just fine! 🤣
I wait to hear what Medium staff think of my suggestion. They probably hate it.
What do you think? Isn’t it time we made life more difficult for people to plagiarise our stories?
I’ve taken precautions
I’ve since removed some other stories from Medium because I may want to use them elsewhere. Once someone has stolen your work, it’s harder to place your work in a paying market and to prove that you own the copyright.
The stories I removed had died a death on Medium anyway, so I felt it was better to cut and run before they were plagiarised too!
How do you feel about all this?

Here’s Simon Whaley’s story about the problem. He was the one who alerted me to it.
More from me…
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