You know what sucks having your content stolen. And if you’re a blogger, especially a wordpress blogger you need to be monitoring this site! It happened to me for the first time late last November and again this past week. This site is totally made up of stolen content and outside video content wordpress bloggers with free accounts seem to be the favourite target. This site translates it to French, using probably google translate, and then posts it as their own. Sucks right.
I’ve done all the stuff I’m supposed to do to no avail like contact the hosting company and wordpress to no avail but more on that later. I was obviously outraged and as I started poking around with my rusty high school French I realized the entire site infringed on someone’s copyright. I also found about three other bloggers that had posted similar warning to this which made me realize I wasn’t alone pretty fast. Since this is an ongoing issue and the site steals about 100 pieces of content a day here’s my experience, what I’m going to do next and what you can do if the same thing is done to you.
Now these kids are stealing in a big and sloppy way! The reason I noticed is I usually link back to my own content in posts when it makes sense. The owners of the site didn’t even bother to deactivate those links so it send me a message someone was linking to my site on wordpress. Clicking on it was all I had to do to realize what was happening. The MO is the same, add a new picture at the top, plunk it into google translate (the outcome is verbatim on the site), and publish your content AND your pictures along with your links. Add by Equilibreplus as the author and go live.
I’m new to all this but… from what I understand usually you contact the hosting company and they take it down. Sometimes it takes a while and gets complicated if different countries laws are involved but I’m Canadian, the site is Canadian and the host is Canadian too so no excuse there. Here’s what I did and what you can do if this https://equilibreplus.com has stolen from you.
The first recourse I found was this one. A great starting point if you’ve had your content stolen and I followed the instructions.
1.) email the site and tell them politely you know what they did and they have to take it down or pay your re-print fee
2.) File a DCMA complaint
3.) Send an invoice
4.) contact the hosting company
However in this case all that got me no where.
This email is from this week’s incident and I got the same one in December but that first post is still up so thanks for following up exactly never on that in the last two months!
As I started realizing that most of the ‘posts’ were from WordPress bloggers I recorded some of the links as evidence. Then I contacted wordpress through their ask an expert function. Which also led me no where, but ultimately it’s not really their problem I guess. So here are only some… of the instances of copyright infringement I found. Well over 50% of the content on the site is video and often from youtube. When you publish on youtube it’s under a Creative Commons licence and that’s a kettle of fish I didn’t want to dig into legally. If I found the owner of the site but couldn’t contact them before doing this post I didn’t put it on the list. Sometimes I could find the blog but not the exact post those 75 or so aren’t on the list. So here it is author first and stolen link second. Keep in mind I’m only one person so I cut myself off at three hours partially because it was making me so angry! PS all these creators have been contacted.
What can you do if you’re on the list of have been stolen from:
1.) re-blog this, it’s an easy way to spread the message without doing the same hours of work I did.
2.) Contact OVH hosting about this site. Here is the link to the form on their website.
3.) Call OVH to report abuse toll free 1-855-684-5463
Perhaps it’s harder to ignore a herd!
What I’m going to do next
1.) Keep this post updated
2.) call OVH it’s hard to find time during the day…
3.) We’ll See?
Have you been ripped off by Equilibreplus or someone else? What did you do and were you successful in getting it taken down? What else should I do?
Update June 2018: As of now it looks like the site has been removed! Yeah!!!
Sweat Sweetly 
Thank you for sending to me – I have had similar shitty responses from them so far.
Unfortunately I’ve now got 5 articles stolen, including one posted this morning 😦 I have emailed them again today and asked for my content to me removed from the database, I will let you know how I get on
1)
https://helplesswhilstdrying.com/2018/02/13/huda-mauve-obsessions-palette/
https://equilibreplus.com/lifestyle/palette-hudes-mauve-obsessions-sans-effet-pendant-le-sechage/34674/
2)
https://helplesswhilstdrying.com/2018/02/07/ten-empties-2/
https://equilibreplus.com/lifestyle/ten-empties-2-helpless-pendant-le-sechage/33777/
3)
https://helplesswhilstdrying.com/2018/02/14/beauty-bay-barry-m-haul/
https://equilibreplus.com/lifestyle/beauty-bay-barry-m-haul-sans-defense-pendant-le-sechage/34709/
4)
https://helplesswhilstdrying.com/2018/02/05/a-mini-stila-birthday-haul-w7-outlet-springfields/
https://equilibreplus.com/lifestyle/un-mini-anniversaire-stila-haul-w7-outlet-springfields-sans-defense-pendant-le-sechage/33535/
5)
https://equilibreplus.com/lifestyle/sauve-du-declutter-sans-defense-pendant-le-sechage/35613/
https://helplesswhilstdrying.com/2018/02/21/saved-from-the-declutter/
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I called them out here, too: https://lifeinanutshell.blog/2018/02/22/if-i-ever-have-time-to-blog-again/
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So some of my articles have been stolen? I don’t understand.
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It was but the site has since been shut down!
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How do i prevent it?
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there wasn’t a whole lot you could do at the time but the whole site has been taken offline since then. So you don’t have to worry about them in particular anymore.
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