Lawsuit? How To Deal With People Who Steal My Content…

Let’s take a behind-the-scenes look at Live And Let’s Fly today and strategize together how I can go after folks who are stealing my content. Sadly, it happens more often than you might think.

People Are Stealing My Content. Time For Lawsuit?

Theft is as old as the human race and therefore, it comes as no surprise when lazy and crooked people steal the work of others and misappropriate it as their own. As a blogger who has been at this for 15 years and published over 10,000 articles and 160,000 pictures, there has been a LOT of theft, though it seems to ebb and flow.

A reader just alerted me that my trip reports have been copied, verbatim, and images taken, then posted on Facebook under the handle Steff Ben.

There are dozens of flight reviews and thousands of photos stolen…

I’ve screenshotted everything and filed a take-down request.

This guy, if he is a real person at all, is quite active in stealing content online:

Then there’s the Taboola ad. Hundreds of you (no exaggeration) have let me know that an ad has popped up of my dad and me (stolen from my blog) promising, “Seniors Can Now Fly Business Class for the Price of Economy Using This Hack.” There’s another version that just has my mug on it taken on a JAL flight last spring. Sometimes, both appear at once:

Clicking on the ad opens up an article written by “Olivia James – Thrifty World Traveler” that seems linked to Capital One:

I’ve already had a forensic expert examine the photo and we can see that it was stolen from my blog and the date it was stolen.

Another image (of me) has also been taken in a “flight attendant shows how to fly business class for the price of economy” ad…

And I’m sure there are many, many more instances (feel free to bring them to my attention in the comments section below).

My Legal Options

This is not my area of legal expertise, though I’m willing to familiarize myself with this area of the law to explore my rights and remedies.

However, the LALF audience is diverse, deep, and smart…so I figured, why not ask you first?

It’s easy enough to eliminate the stolen content “whack-a-mole” style, but these Facebook posts, for example, have enjoyed some serious eyeballs…revenue that I won’t see.

I’m wondering what my practical options are to pursue damages…

The Taboola ad is more interesting. The Online Shopping Tools app uses the Capital One logo…which makes Capital One potentially liable as well.

The contact information for this website/app is 3525 Piedmont Rd. N Atlanta, GA 30305, an apartment according to a Google Street View image:

CONCLUSION

I’m tired of the near-daily emails or texts from folks wondering if I know that my dad and I are in an “ad” online. I’m tired of content I spend countless hours writing and photographs I line up way too early for (like an idiot) so that I can get unobstructed cabin photos are taken by others without my permission.

Any thoughts on how I can best handle this are welcome…