On April 14th, I publicly exposed some individuals and websites who were stealing copyrighted material from WritersWeekly and publishing it as their own.

One of these was a blogger named Kate Guilford, the owner of Write Living News / writelivingnews.blogspot.com. She would post an entire issue of her periodical every few days, and most of her recent posts contained our copyrighted markets, published without permission and without credit.

I never received a response to the emails and invoice I sent her (which we felt was incredibly rude on her part) and her actions ended up costing her dearly in the end. I even posted comments about her illegal actions to her blog itself. Again, no response was received. Her violation of federal copyright law, and subsequent failure to remove our copyrighted material from her blog, forced me to contact Google, which owns blogspot.com.

I filled out their DMCA Take-Down Notice, which was really quite painless. A week or so later, they confirmed they deleted the posts that included our copyrighted material. No, they didn’t just remove our copyrighted material – they removed the entire issue that contained our material. So, Kate Guilford had lost a considerable amount of work and, honestly, she deserved it!

The letter I received from Blogger confirmed they had also alerted the blogger to their actions but it appeared as though she thumbed her nose at them, too, because she continued to take our material and publish it without permission after they notified her and after they removed some of her issues.

We contacted blogger.com again to report the new infringements (she was now a repeat copyright infringer) and, true to their word, they removed her entire blog from their site because of her repeated violations of federal copyright law. If anybody goes to her blog now, all they see is “The blog you were looking for was not found.”

No word yet on when she plans to pay the $9,750 invoice we sent her.

UPDATE: On 6/2/10, WritersWeekly received an email from a copyright attorney claiming to represent Kate Guilford / Write Living News in her copyright dispute with WritersWeekly. Pshaw!