Do a WHOIS lookup and contact their hosting company with a DMCA complaint.

that can turn into your face. How to proove you're the owner?

Will DMCA complaint work for the EU or Russian hoster?

to romaniucc:

You can. Print hard copies of one draft and final version of your aricle, take a shot of them with daily newspaper with your favourite camera. Put a digital copy on the proven blog service without backdate option.

Will DMCA complaint work for the EU or Russian hoster?

DMCA is a U.S. law. However, it is the U.S. implementation of the WIPO treaties. Not sure how this works in terms of making a complaint. I'm sure there's somebody here with relevant experience, though.

I'd guess there's a similar procedure available, as long as the country is a WIPO signee.

Have you distributed the articles in any form (ie to article distribution sites)? In that case you don't have a lot to go on (most of these sites will have the issue covered in the t&c). It's just par for the course that some people use article site content to generate spamsense sites (and kill outbound links in the process).

If they have just lifted content from your site you could try contacting the hosting company, but to be honest as soon as you step out of your own country you face a major pain in the neck (legally).

Depending on what they do with your articles, you could implement some countermeasures to prevent it in the future. If they are passing off the content as their own "information" then simply write all your articles with liberal reference to other articles on your site. Do this to the point that people *need* the links to make full sense of the article. ;) Also, include your site name fairly frequently as well.

Basically just make it too much trouble for them to copy / edit your work so they move onto someone else.

However if they are simply autogenerating a site using your content then all this won't really make much difference because they won't care.

Try to get deep links from other sites to your articles - then at least they won't be the versions that are ditched in the SERPs.

MG

This is likely a good place to start for issues relating the EU copyright:

www.euro-copyrights.org [euro-copyrights.org]

Having said that, what's the issue here? That someone has used your article - but not provided you with backlinks? Or that someone has taken content from your site and is using it without your permission?

Are you insisting that they - the site in question - provide the links, or remove the stolen content?

Syzygy

[edited by: Syzygy at 9:11 am (utc) on Nov. 20, 2006]

If they are outside of the US could he still file DMCA complaints with the search engines and possibly who ever the have advertising ie. adsense? Might not get the content taken down but it sure would make it harder to find.

Thank you all, for the posts.

I do submit my articles to high quality article banks (e.g. Ezinearticles). The latter publish them and in return give me some traffic. I consider this a fair win-win deal.

The others take them from these article banks, keep the author name and either do not reproduce the links or they find ways to disable them.
Initially I considered ignoring them - but this extensive duplication may be harmful.

Moreover I feel that they are unethical and act as parasites. Some of them seem to achieve some pageranking (may be due to the rich content).

K