Taking control of my content.

Before I start this, can I suggest that you go to your dashboard, press settings and press site feed. Once you've done that have a look at the top section entitled Allow Blog Feeds and make sure that you have clicked short. This means that a short excerpt of your blog can be used for google searches but that a whole blog post cannot be syndicated.

Done? Great!

Yesterday morning I made the decision to stop blogging. It just felt too disgusting to think of my stories and pictures being posted out there on a foreign blog as if they belonged to somebody else.

A little while later I came and read some of your wonderful comments and decided I didn't want to stop. This is my community and I love it.

Not long after, I decided to open up a new blog with a new name and start all over again. I couldn't decide whether I should keep it completely separate and secret, or if I should leave the new details on my other blog or in my comments or somewhere else.

Then I started thinking up new names for my new blog.

But then I got angry. This is my blog, these are my words and my photos and my stories and nobody has the right to take them and use them without my permission.

And then I started googling and found out that I was right. Just because it is on the internet does not mean that it is free for the taking. What that blogger did to me is called website hijacking and is a copyright infringement.

I spent ages searching and reading and I found out that this happens often and that there is a lot of information out there about what to do if it happens to you.

These are some of the sites that I found helpful

• What-to-do-when-your-blog-content-is-copied.
• What to do when someone steals your content.
• The Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
• Domain Based Research Services.

In the end my situation was resolved quite easily.

I left several comments on the offending blog asking them to remove my posts immediately, and when they were ignored I wrote a polite but firm email explaining the situation and asking that the posts be removed. I sent the email to the website administrator and the website host.

A few hours later I received an email with an apology letting me know that my posts had been taken down.

I think I was really lucky to have had a conclusion so quickly but I am still a bit freaked out that this must have been going on for quite some time without my knowledge.

If you want to know if anyone is using any part of your content, put your URL in here; http://www.copyscape.com/.

So peeps, my advice to you is to be very careful what you put on your blog because you have no idea who is reading it and what is being done with it.

A huge thank you to those who left supportive comments, emails, suggestions of ways to deal with it and who commented on the offending blog. I appreciate it beyond words. Thanks also to my Farmer Boy, you are so ace. You are calm and sensible and balance my over emotionality so well. It scares me to think of how badly I could have dealt with this without you.

Gotta fly, we've got wet wool laid out and its time to go and paint it.

Have fun out there.

Love Kate (http://foxslane.blogspot.com/)