Zen Garden > Your Articles - Passive Income Through Active Article Theft

Writing articles. Scraping is an insidious form of copyright theft.

Mostly you will be pleasantly surprised at the number and quality of sites and ezines that will post a copy of your article AND credit you with a link back to your site through your "resource box."

After all, they are the two golden rules:

1. no changes to the article whatsoever
2. resource box to remain intact with live links.

But there is another category of site - the ROGUE site. Such a site will "scrape" your article, disable your links (ie make them "dead" links) then surround your hard work with Google Adsense advertising. Worse, they may even mangle your article by chopping it down or inserting extra keywords to attract visitors.

Scraping is an insidious form of copyright theft. Professional trollers scrape legitimate sites for popular articles and keyword rich articles that will draw traffic from search engines. By disabling the links any visitor going to their rotten sites cannot hit the link back to your site. They can only "x" out, hit the "back" button or exit via an Adsense advertising link.

Naturally, rogue site operators want visitors to exit via the Adsense ads. Why? Because they make commissions. Unfortunately, rogue sites are becoming more and more popular as unscrupulous article thieves attempt to reap commissions from Google Adsense ads.

Do spot checks by inserting your article titles into the various search engines. Visit some of the sites that carry your articles and see if they are abiding by copyright convention.

If they have disabled your links then email them telling them to rectify the fault or delete the article from their site all together. This is your right as the copyright owner.

If they refuse to do either then email their ISP (Internet Service Provider) and complain about a TOS (Terms of Service) violation.

All ISP's fear this because they, in turn, also have an hierarchal ISP of their own and so on. Nobody wants to have their site or collective sites banned.

These thieves, who are making passive income from the theft of your articles, deserve everything that they get.

Let's stomp on this practice before it reaches epidemic proportions. Passive income from the active theft of articles is wrong!

About the author: Gary Simpson is the author of eight books covering a diverse range of subjects such as self esteem, affirmations, self defense, finance and much more. His articles appear all over the web. Gary's email address is budo@iinet.net.au. Click here to go to his Motivation & Self Esteem for Success website where you can receive his "Zenspirational Thoughts" plus an immediate FREE copy of his highly acclaimed, life-changing e-book "The Power of Choice."

Gary Simpson is a 7th Dan karate master who teaches self defense, motivation, self help and wealth building to students around the world through home study courses. You may reprint this article as you include this author credit and an active link to his web site. Finance - Self Help - Motivation - Self Defense - Personal Growth MotivationSelfEsteem.com