The Plagiarists Are Arguing That Minor Changes Mean it’s not Plagiarised

Two took my work down, and two more stole it

Two of my stories were plagiarised on websites in Nigeria. So I sent take down notices. The first site complied quickly. The second ignored me.

Slimy bastards

I was trying to get the second website to respond, so I sent three emails over 10 days asking them to take down my story. It was a story about Bedlam that they’d lifted from Medium. My first two emails were ignored.

So after waiting another week, I sent a third email, asking for a licencing fee if they weren’t going to comply. That did the trick, but it was very irritating. This should be simple.

The same day my story was taken down, it appeared on a third website in the same country. Call me paranoid but my instinct was, they owned both sites and had just moved it across.

They didn’t respond to my emails, except once, just to tell me I was stupid.

Virus warnings, dodgy messages

All these sites are massively dodgy, with virus warnings springing up everywhere, and on the third site, I couldn’t even access the contact details, because the screen was blocked by demands to prove that I’m not a robot.

This involved clicking lots of boxes, and I lost my nerve after the screen refreshed twice to a URL named ‘payment’.

The owners of the third plagiarising website had added more pictures to my Bedlam story and deleted the copyright symbol with my name beside it. Clearly an intelligent being had been at work. It wasn’t a bot.

Now they’re arguing

I raised the issue with the editor of the Medium publication from where the stories are being stolen.

He said he’d been in contact with the second and third plagiarising websites, who were arguing that because they’d made these minor changes (deleting the copyright notices and adding new pics) they considered the works were not plagiarised!

I am now waiting to see if the third website removes my Bedlam story. It feels hopeless.

The story is no longer earning for me on Medium, so I’d like to take it off the web altogether so I can offer a revised version to a print publication, knowing it’s not freely available to read online.

But if I delete the original, I’ll have no proof it was ever my story in the first place. So I want to ensure all the copies are taken down before I do that.

It’s very frustrating.

A fourth site!

To add to the debacle, I found a fourth site had plagiarised a different story of mine about Erddig — a historic property in Wales. They’d copied the introduction and pictures, then linked to my story on Vocal Media for further reading.

While this is less objectionable, because they were driving traffic to my story, it’s still annoying because it takes away my exclusive right to publish/unpublish my material online and be in control.

I’d actually removed the story from Vocal Media a week earlier, to review the photos, so it was redirecting to an error page anyway.

The fourth website removed the story without a fuss. I wish they were all that compliant.

The saga continues.

Here’s my first story about the plagiarism problem…

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