Content is King! shout the search engines. That’s what the search engines love. We also love the non-reciprocal links that we get for our websites when our articles are published on other peoples’ sites with our resource boxes dutifully appended below them.

To create a well written article takes time and effort. We have to get everything right: it has to be of relevance to the reader in that subject field; it has to be well researched; all spelling, punctuation and grammar must be correct; it has to be a genuine contribution to that particular area of specialization, and so interesting that the editor will jump at the chance of publishing it. And, oh yes, all the right keywords have to be there, of the right density and in the correct proportions.

The well-crafted article must satisfy both the reader and the bot; both the aesthetics of the eye and the strictures of the code. So those of us who try and be at least a little bit serious about things know that a second draft is always necessary, and then a third. Then it’s best to sleep on it. Even after that, we know that we have to forget about it for a few days until we are able to come back to it again with a freshly critical mind. You prune it and nurture it. You take off the sharp edges and you tighten it up. If necessary you know when you have to tear it up and start over again.

Only after we have got it absolutely right – and then after spending many hours submitting to directories, editors of ezines, article announcement sites and individual webmasters – are we rewarded, perhaps, with those hard-won non-reciprocal inbound live hyperlinks.

But wait. There seems to be a problem. It appears that an increasing number of people are quite happy to simply copy and paste our work onto their own sites without a link back. Or they don’t bother to check if the link is ‘live’.

That would be bad enough. But there are other people who print our articles and then don’t even bother to name the person who wrote it.

But there’s far worse: those people who print our article and then announce to the world that they wrote it themselves! Some of those even have the temerity to add the copyright sign next to their name!

I may be being a bit too harsh. Perhaps these people don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong. After all, the Internet was originally conceived as ownerless and based upon free and open source information. And I can think of nothing more Public Domain, in fact or in spirit, than the World Wide Web.

Yet just consider what it is these people are doing. They are stealing other peoples’ work and passing it off as their own. They are effectively also stealing the web traffic that goes with it, the traffic that our labors should be rewarding our websites with, and diverting it to their own. This is blatant plagiarism. It just should not happen. Theft is theft, in whatever medium.

I wrote an article a few months ago on Internet marketing for small businesses. A search for the title of that article on Google now returns 10,800 pages, so at least the title itself has been reproduced that number of times and in that number of different places. A search for a chunk of text from the middle of the article returns 536 pages, which suggests that the article text has been published in its entirety no fewer than 536 times. Great! So now I have 536 inbound links from that one article! Wrong.

I looked at individual entries of the article and in a surprising number of cases there were no backlinks at all. Also surprising – and somewhat sickening – was the number of individuals who wantonly attached their own names to my work.

I recently posted the same article to a fresh source of publishers. I was astonished at the response of one editor of a well-known directory who had rejected the article on the grounds that it was not mine! She had seen the same piece on many other websites under different names, she said, and it was not her policy to publish work that had been produced using “cookie cutter” techniques. I wrote back saying that it really was my own work, citing the URL of SitePro News where it originally aired as that day’s headline feature. She apologized and was even good enough to supply me with a list of names of people and sites who had published it as their own. I’m so tempted to publish their names here (perhaps I will on my blog; so watch out!) but have decided that discretion should rule. For the moment, at least.

But I think there is a clear message here. The fashion for article writing and publishing for content and backlinks is going through the roof at the moment. It’s like a mini Internet boom all of its own. And like any other boom it has attracted its own inevitable pack of rat-racers, chancers, charlatans and cheats; shysters who go for the shortcuts every time, while remaining quite happy for other people to do their work for them.

For the record, the convention is this: distribute and publish the article freely by all means. But it must be published in its entirety and unedited, and MUST include the resource box with a live hyperlink back to the author’s site (or wherever the author wants, for that matter).

Hey, now even my lawyer understands!

Next time I will publish their names gleefully, and be damned.

Internet piracy disrupts economic growth across the continents. How nations react to Internet piracy could well define the future economic health of a nation. Piracy laws and copyright infringement laws have reached global attention – and international treaties continue to grow that seek to give credit to the originator and encourage economic gain while still promoting freedom, progress and education.

Copyright laws have existed for centuries but have been weak in international standards. The swell of Internet Piracy clearly advanced the heightening necessity of developing international standards.
In 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) resulted in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which provided a foundation for standards in copyright infringement laws and regulations. Internet piracy law, copyright infringement, and intellectual law were addressed globally at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a division of the United Nations, in 1996. As a result, 184 nations have now signed the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty – a modern predecessor of the 1883 Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.

WIPO strives to develop “a balanced and accessible international intellectual property (IP) system, which rewards creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development while safeguarding the public interest.” Nations are joining forces to protect the rights of their creative citizens and increase their potential for international economic gain – but not without strife. Many nations still resist the stringent copyright infringement laws of the West. Other nations, such as Canada, develop creative solutions, such as placing a levy on blank CD purchases. However, the US, Japan and the European Union began negotiating towards a tougher Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in 2007 to combat Internet piracy and toughen piracy law.

The US has substantial financial interest in combating Internet piracy. The RIAA, one America’s largest advocates for overhauling the current state of Internet Piracy and Piracy Law, has given the US valid concerns over stifled economic growth due to Internet piracy and copyright infringement – and statistics to support it. The RIAA invested substantial resources to support their strong stance on religious adherences to piracy law. A verified report by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPA) declared that Internet piracy accounts for a .7 billion loss in workers’ earnings and a 1 million in lost corporate income and production taxes – not to mention a loss of 1 million in personal income tax that the US could surely use to offset its deficit.

Internet piracy laws and the definitions of copyright infringement are at the top of international trade agendas across the continents. Piracy law will continue to undergo substantial review as the Internet and other forms of technology progress. The United Nations has already developed task force groups to analyze the Internet-driven economy of the future – and the potential for new and stronger surges of Internet piracy and copyright infringement that will come with it. When the nations can peacefully recognize both state and international copyright protections that give credit to the originator and promote a healthy economy, while still retaining the freedoms of the Internet, then perhaps global trade agreements might run as smoothly as a website visit to a country that’s just an ocean away. Until then, the transitioning copyright infringement and intellectual property agreements will continue to determine the future state of our Internet-driven economy.

No matter how free we are, there will always be laws with regards to ownership and copyrighting, even on the World Wide Web that we can’t avoid.  We cannot deny that with the internet, people from all over the world have the ability and the skills to post, distribute, or redistribute works to others all over without the slightest bit of sweat, which is why these laws are created and enacted to prevent such infringement from happening.  But despite the creation of these copyright laws internet, there are still those that are able to outwit and evade the consequences of stealing other people’s work on the internet.  If this is what’s happening to you, this article is going to give you simple tips and a general idea of what you can do to protect your rights even while online.

First things first, anything that is posted on the World Wide Web is still considered as “published work”.  This could be anything from actual e-books, essays, articles, and written works to visuals like photos, videos, games, and the like.  One these works have been published online, the author, artist, photographer, etc have the right to claim ownership and copyright their works to protect them from unauthorized usage from other internet users.  They have the right to take action whenever their works have been infringed and redistributed without proper permission.  Once this internet law has been violated, then here’s what you can do:

• As of today, the best and most effective way to enforce copyright laws internet is through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.  This act was created and enacted for two main reasons:

o To protect the rights of internet users in terms of copyrighted works and ownership over the World Wide Web. 

o To provide immunization to internet service providers for liabilities that could be used against them due to violations and copyright infringements, which have occurred in their systems and networks.
• After locating the website where your work was re-posted or redistributed again without your permission, you can take down the name of the culprit, the URL of the website, and all other important information that could help track where the violation was done. 

• You can then file a complaint or a DMCA letter to the internet user’s ISP or internet service provider as well as major search engines such as Yahoo and Google.  Usually they have the authority to impose consequences in order to be able to warn or eventually prohibit the violator’s use of the ISP’s network.

This is just one of the many ways to enforce your copyright laws and practice your rights to ownership both offline and online.  If you think that more information is required to solve the problem, you can search through Google or Yahoo for websites that can provide more information, step-by-step instructions, and the like with regards to copyright infringement and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.  If you have been violated already, then you must take action to be able to enforce your rights as author, artist, photographer, and the like against violators all over the world.   

No matter how free we are, there will always be laws with regards to ownership and copyrighting, even on the World Wide Web that we can’t avoid. We cannot deny that with the internet, people from all over the world have the ability and the skills to post, distribute, or redistribute works to others all over without the slightest bit of sweat, which is why these laws are created and enacted to prevent such infringement from happening. But despite the creation of these copyright laws internet, there are still those that are able to outwit and evade the consequences of stealing other people’s work on the internet. If this is what’s happening to you, this article is going to give you simple tips and a general idea of what you can do to protect your rights even while online.

First things first, anything that is posted on the World Wide Web is still considered as “published work”. This could be anything from actual e-books, essays, articles, and written works to visuals like photos, videos, games, and the like. One these works have been published online, the author, artist, photographer, etc have the right to claim ownership and copyright their works to protect them from unauthorized usage from other internet users. They have the right to take action whenever their works have been infringed and redistributed without proper permission. Once this internet law has been violated, then here’s what you can do:

? As of today, the best and most effective way to enforce copyright laws internet is through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. This act was created and enacted for two main reasons:

o To protect the rights of internet users in terms of copyrighted works and ownership over the World Wide Web.

o To provide immunization to internet service providers for liabilities that could be used against them due to violations and copyright infringements, which have occurred in their systems and networks.
? After locating the website where your work was re-posted or redistributed again without your permission, you can take down the name of the culprit, the URL of the website, and all other important information that could help track where the violation was done.

? You can then file a complaint or a DMCA letter to the internet user’s ISP or internet service provider as well as major search engines such as Yahoo and Google. Usually they have the authority to impose consequences in order to be able to warn or eventually prohibit the violator’s use of the ISP’s network.

This is just one of the many ways to enforce your copyright laws and practice your rights to ownership both offline and online. If you think that more information is required to solve the problem, you can search through Google or Yahoo for websites that can provide more information, step-by-step instructions, and the like with regards to copyright infringement and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you. If you have been violated already, then you must take action to be able to enforce your rights as author, artist, photographer, and the like against violators all over the world.