by Yesterday, we shared the story of catching a Copyright Infringer red handed. Today, we share the result of that contact with the content thief in an everlasting and ongoing fight against the stealing of our written property by complete and utter dullards.
Yesterday, we sent a standard cease-and-desist letter. Usually that results in an immediate response that out stolen content has been removed from their website.
Not so yesterday. The content thief said he’d get around to removing our content when he felt like it and that led us to inform him that we were documenting the theft and writing about it online.
The thief then asked us if we wanted him to leave the stolen article online for you to read. I guess he was trying to be indignant and funny. He was neither.
We told him he could keep our content on his site if he paid us.
He then accused us of being rude and that we should be nicer to him.
Eh? He stole our material and we’re being rude?
He then went on to tell us how overwhelmed he was and how he didn’t really have time to deal with these sorts of Copyright issues.
We were underwhelmed with his precious, but lame, excuses.
Later in the day, he finally said our stolen material had been removed from his site — and he closed the conversation with another lesson about how we need to be so much kinder and gentler in our cease-and-desist letters.
We were left stupefied, but not stupid, and we wondered how these content thieves are clever enough in the first place to copy, paste and republish our writing without remorse and then, in the end, claim to be wronged by their own thievery merely because they were caught with their grubby fingers in our content jar.
That’s similar to someone who bumps into you, spilling your coffee onto them, and then gets angry with you for what you did to them.
It’s funny that they repeatedly took the time to write you but couldn’t find the time to do a two minute ftp delete and link removal. Shame, shame, shame.
That’s precisely what it is, Gordon! Blame the accuser. Point at my tie, and when I look down, thwack me in the nose. I think at one time he was claiming he didn’t know how to remove the article and had to have someone else do it for him — I find that extremely curious because someone on his side knew precisely how to copy and paste and publish my article without any hesitation whatsoever.