OK, so granted, I'm not financially prolific in my writings (have sold a few articles, but no big income), and the few (so far) articles I'm giving away freely to directories (and e-zines) are for quality BLs, and all the usual reasons for submitting articles, BUT folks can take my FREE articles and turn around to sell them?! site-reference.com/articles/General/Cre … st One Day

If I’m doing the work, I don’t want someone else to put my work into a book (e- or not) to profit from it. Sure, the author says to contact authors, but he doesn’t say anything about telling them that he/she will be making money off it. And then, there are those, who will simply skip that part anyway. How do I protect my work from folks, who want to profit by it? Or, better yet, how do I make sure they know that I want some of the income, and then make sure they aren’t trying to cheat me out of some of it? What copyright info should be included with our articles to stop such foolishness?

As for those, who find their work being used for profit, without written permission – it’s just plain illegal, and you can get your deserved money. http://www.underdown.org/electronic-rights.htm

(Oh, and for the record, of course I know article directories and e-zines are indirectly making money off of my articles, and that my articles can be used by third persons, but there is a difference between sharing info for my purposes, and letting someone else sell my writing as part of their book!)

Your right Lynn- using someone else's work without permission is illegal...

however you have to watch out where you submit your articles and what you do with them

when you submit to most article sites you give them permission to do whatever they want with your article as long as they do not change it to a certain extent, that you shall be given credit for it and that your author bio will alwasy be accompanied with it- that’s for MOST places you submit them to

if you want to make sure no one is ripping off your articles do a check using the title, then some key sentences etc and see what comes up

i've found a few people using my content on their sites, etc without permission...usually i don't mind if they link over to me (which is the reason i created that particular content in the first place) but if they don't we have problems

you write articles for BL's and a few for cash...well when you are selling articles make sure you understand what rights you are selling along with the articles...as these may include full master rights (usually given when you "ghostwrite")...and there are many people out there that do that

also there are a lot of private label rights packages you can buy with articles which you can use without giving credit to the author and so on, because the author sold (hopefully knowingly) those rights along with the article- so when you buy those rights you can do what you want with the content

personally i'm not a big fan of all this private label rights stuff and "re-packaging" pieced content but it can be 1) legal and 2) profitable…so some people do find success with it

I've understood that when I sell my articles (or stories), they cease to be mine, although my own byline thrills me to my tootsies!

How do I avoid giving away ownership of the article while still permitting it to be used by other websites, with the understanding that if it gets placed in a book or e-book, I want my piece of the pie? Seems to me, there should be some kind of add-on to the copyright info that would protect our articles.

Well Lynn,

This is something you’ll need to judge on a per case basis I’m afraid. You will have to check the Terms of Service of individual websites you submit to and discuss with the people you sell articles to

However, as mentioned above- the terms of service for almost all reputable articles sites state that

> your content won’t be changed to a certain degree (spelling, grammar, etc is often changed if there are mistakes) 

> your bio will always accompany  your article

So those 2 things alone pretty much prevent anyone from taking your articles off an article site an using them as an ebook legally- otherwise the ebook will look pretty darn silly if it’s just a string of articles, bio, article, bio and so on – if someone wanted to do that though technically they could because you allow people to display your articles (with the conditions above) where they chose to when u submit to most of those sites. Again though no one is going to do that…

…what they may do instead is take pieces of your and other people’s articles and use them to create content. Without permission this is plagiarism and no different than a school kid passing off your content t as their homework

We talked about this in this  thread about that some time back: http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/5185/plagiarism/

As we discussed it can be tough to take action against such people but there are things u can do

What the author of the article was suggesting is using article you do have the rights to and putting pieces of them together to form larger content which is fine

For example I write many articles myself but do get help sometimes when I am really jammed.  The person who helps me understands that all right belong to me. I’ve got so many on the topic of “publishing” that I could very well use them to put a book together. Now I won’t just string them together but I may mix and match a lot of the existing content to get the bulk of the book together. I’m not going to do this (yet at least), but were I inclined to write a book on publishing why not use content I already have access and legal right to? No need to re-write everything I’ve already written.