WritersWeekly.com is frequently the victim of copyright thieves, companies and individuals who blatantly copy and paste our original paying markets (and more) to their own websites, zines and print publications, without permission and without credit.
WritersWeekly.com’s paying markets are original market listings, created after interviewing editors at each publication. We pay our managing editor to conduct this exhausting work. We do this for OUR readers, not for our competitors’ readers. When someone steals our markets, it hurts OUR readers because YOU then have to compete with the copyright thieves’ readers for these writing assignments. Theft of our copyrighted material lessens the value of our content and makes it more difficult for OUR readers to get work. The less work our readers obtain, the less readers we have for WritersWeekly.com. This results in financial harm to WritersWeekly.com (damages).
Last night, I performed my periodic online search for copyright thieves. While I’ve emailed each website below and demanded immediate action, I am also going to list them here. If they didn’t want to be shamed, they shouldn’t have stolen copyrighted material from others. If you have a spare moment, please contact these people to let them know that professional writers do not send business to firms that violate federal law.
In addition, I, personally, spend more than two hours every Tuesday finding the very best freelance job listings that have been posted online in the past week. We don’t steal that material from other websites. We send our readers directly to those sites, increasing the value of their businesses. The first violator below has not only been stealing our markets on a regular basis (more markets than we can count!), but has also been copying our weekly list of new jobs and links, word-for-word! Rather than do his own homework, he simply copies and pastes our material into his website each week and passes it off to his readers as his own. He’s been stealing from us, and lying to his readers. The amount of material he has stolen is so immense that we are considering legal action against him and his company.
HERE ARE THE COMPANIES that have stolen WritersWeekly.com’s copyrighted material, word-for-word, without credit or permission, in violation of federal copyright laws:
Brandt Media Works / brandtmediaworks.com
Owner: James Brandt – Phoenix, AZ
jbrandt@brandtmediaworks.com
As of this morning, this website was down. Smart move, James. Interestingly, James recently wrote a letter to the editor at WritersWeekly, which was published last week. We’ve replaced it with a note about his copyright infringement activities.
UPDATE: Rather than apologize immediately and admit wrongdoing, James Brandt blamed someone else for the stolen markets (we’re not buying that excuse), and then blamed it on a misunderstanding of advice from his attorney, and then stated he didn’t realize the information we publish “is not to be shared”. I followed up by reminding him of our copyright statement, which appears in every issue and on all our webpages. I also asked him how a published writer, author and writing instructor doesn’t understand that you can’t copy material. He did apologize and promised to remove the offending material from his site. An immediately apology with no excuses would have been much better.
Creative-Women.com
Owner: Becky Harpold – Cleveland, OH
founder@creative-women.com
UPDATE: Becky Harpold has apologized and offered to remove the offending material or credit the markets to WritersWeekly.com.
Wordsmith Shoppe News – wssnewsonline.com
Owner: Margaret Phifer – Las Vegas, NV
Editor@wordsmithshoppe.com
UPDATE: Peggy Phifer has apologized, accepted full responsibility, and removed the material from her website.
Regio-Europe / regio-europe.com
Registered by: LarsGoran Bostrom – Svangsta, Nil, SE
espirit@work.utfors.se
UPDATE: Regio-Europe has apologized and will be removing the stolen material from their site. This was the nicest apology we received…no excuses and they didn’t blame anyone else. They just thanked us for bringing it to their attention and agreed to fix the problem.
There are many more firms, currently in violation of our copyrights, that we have not yet had time to contact. In the future, we will be posting them here as well.
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UPDATE: Many readers (people who run websites and ezines for writers) have written in this morning asking how they can share our markets with their readers without violating our copyrights. Easy breezy.
You can feature the name of the market along with the payment information and then link those to the appropriate page at WritersWeekly. Here’s an example:
For example, you could publish the following:
Air Line Pilot
Pays: Flat fees from $150 – $500.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
Alaska Magazine
Pays: $0.38/word for main features from 1200 – 3000 words.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
American Cheerleader Magazine
Pays: Flat fee of $100 per column to $300 for features.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
Aquaculture Magazine
Pays: $0.10/word for 1500 word max on headliner; 3000 words maximum on feature.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
Billiards Digest
Pays: $150 – $500. Submit query, bio and writing sample by mail with SASE or by email.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
Black Warrior Review
Pays: $50 – $75 per poem; $150 for prose.”
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
City Slab: Urban Tales of the Grotesque
Pays: $0.01-$0.05/word for a maximum of 5000 words.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
CPA Online
Payment: Is “flexible” and depends on difficulty of article and experience of writer.
( link to: http://www.writersweekly.com/markets/091003-04.html )
That’s only the current issue. You can find gobs of paying markets in our archives and also in our markets forum. See the following two links:
http://www.writersweekly.com/archives/past.html
and
http://www.writersweekly.com/phpBB2/
(click on freelance jobs and paying markets)
As long as you send people to the WritersWeekly.com site to view the actual market listing, we’re happy to allow others to post the market names and payment info.