Not paid for Articles

As a freelance writer, you normally don’t have to worry too much about not being paid for your work, especially if you are working through a service like Guru.com. The DMCA is simply too effective.

Seologic.com has a great list of contact information and instructions on how to notify the search engines about plagiarism or stolen content. The reason you would start with the search engines is, whoever took your content and didn’t pay for it, will find that the web site they used it on, and just about any other web site they own, will simply disappear from the Internet searches. Adsense accounts and other affiliate program accounts will be closed.

With the DMCA, these things will happen even if there is the slightest hint that your claim to the search engines is true … closed pending investigation… which on the Internet, a few weeks down like that, might as well be a permanent closure. So the risks are usually too great for anyone to attempt to steal your content, especially if you are going through a service like Guru.com.

With a service, your work is posted through their message or file areas, so there is a date stamp on the file. The service will verify that the work is yours, and that the date it was posted is before it was listed on the customer’s web site. So, your claim for the material is absolute. With the service agreeing with you that the content is yours, and has not been paid for, the search engines will enact the DMCA on the spot, removing the web site from the indexes.

Programmers and other freelancing is a bit more difficult to prove and prosecute, but for writers, it is so simple, it rarely happens.  … however… there are those who simply do not believe…