What to do when you're screaming "SOMEONE ON BLOGSPOT HAS STOLEN MY ARTICLE!"

Date: Wed Feb 05 2014 Blogging »»»» Blogspot »»»» Copyright
Say you've written an article that's getting a lot of attention. Say that someone running a blog on blogspot.com has copied the content of your article, word for word, posting it on their blog. It's a case of outright theft of your work. Maybe you spent the weekend traveling and staying in a hotel to get the information for that article, and they're directly stealing your hard work. It's a case of copyright infringement and obviously going to violate the terms of service for blogspot.com Who do you call?

This happened to me... with an article I posted yesterday on examiner.com, Brammo, Volt wins in TTXGP season opener at Infineon Raceway. I'd spent the weekend at the race track talking with people, taking pictures, observing the race, then spent about three hours crafting the article. It got a lot of traffic on Sunday, then on Monday I stumbled onto the article hosted elsewhere. Same article, same picture, and not even a link back to my article.

Further the blog looks like the owner routinely copies other peoples' articles. There are legitimate ways to be a blog aggregator, and this is not one of them. The legitimate way is to copy a teaser and to provide a link back to the original blog. This is outright theft. And because smelled like a theiving blog owner I felt like it was my duty to notify the authorities and get this addressed properly.

My first thought was a bit of a dead end. Because I have a couple under-used blogs hosted on blogspot.com I have a dashboard there. It includes a link to their Help Center and Help Group. The blogspot support area includes a link to report "abuse", but that abuse is only spam and hate speech. This is neither, but is copyright theft.

A question elsewhere instead lead me to: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76316

There's a distinction between someone stealing content you posted on blogspot. In that case Google can't help you because it's up to the terms of service of the other service.

But, in the case of someone on Blogspot stealing YOUR content, that's where Google can help because that action is against their terms of service. The page has a link to a form for reporting this kind of theft. There's some careful legalese you have to read because apparently if you make a false claim you can be responsible for damages. In this case I have a rock solid claim.