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It's come to my attention that someone has copied something I wrote on music.SE, without attribution, and posted it to his own website.

I learned of this today when someone posted a new answer to this question, to which I had posted an answer of my own on January 22, 2011 (the same day the question was asked). In the new answer, the poster makes reference to an outside resource and observes that the outside resource contains (on page 4) the same material, verbatim, as my answer—as indeed it does, to my dismay.

Obviously, we're all volunteers here and our contributions aren't copyrighted. But in the interests of preserving my reputation and the reputation of my fellow contributors, I'm wondering whether these kinds of situations have come up before and how we can deal with them, if in fact we can deal with them at all.

Thanks, and here's hoping this isn't too common.

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    Someone did the same to my question and here's his blog a fellow user notified me about it.
    – Lynob
    Commented Apr 8, 2014 at 11:39
  • @Fischer It's especially ironic that right next to (and a little above) the text he lifted wholesale from your post (minus the first eight words, plus one) is a CC notice, including the text "When sharing and/or copying any content, you have to mention the linked source as [this guy]'s Blog. Also, it is forbidden to change and modify any content in this blog."
    – Reinstate Monica -- notmaynard
    Commented Apr 9, 2014 at 20:59
  • A Machevellian "sting" operation comes to mind. Copy some other part of his stuff to several other forum sites. then email him and mention that someone has been taking his stuff without attribution and posting it on several forums. Provide links, etc. Then when he comes out loaded for bear and posts angry comments about attribution and all that, post in all the forums the links that you have posted here, and suggest that he must not really take it seriously since he isn't living by the rules he's attempting to impose. :evil grin:
    – BobRodes
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 15:00
  • 1
    Raise "in need of moderator intervention" flag.
    – user53472
    Commented May 25, 2019 at 9:28

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Obviously, we're all volunteers here and our contributions aren't copyrighted.

Actually, they are. Per the bottom of the page,

site design / logo © 2014 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Given the existence of StackOverflow, I'm SURE StackExchange has a policy for dealing with things like this, but I don't know what it is off the top of my head. I'll check around and report back what I find.

Update:

This post on Meta.SO details the appropriate actions, so I've made the support submission as requested. That's all we can do, I think!

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