And it’s not just here, within Medium, but how much work from here is “published” elsewhere. Or stolen work from elsewhere being published here.

Dishonest people are here, and have been for some time. One of the first stories I read ages ago was reported as stolen on some Medium writers self hosted blog. As the platform grows and people see it as a way to build business, the shady and illegal practices will grow as they have and do on every other platform. First step: deal with the person who stole it. Then the platform (if posted on a third part site) or host/server (if self hosted site). Then next steps if warranted, they can vary.

My poorly worded point: the jerk thieves are everywhere, the process needs to be in place to fairly deal with the problem as much as possible. It’s the responsibility of the site hosting the intellectual property.

The ball is 100% in Mediums court to quickly and expediently protect their site. They *do* have a policy as I included in my response on the now gone original post about this issue (https://medium.com/policy/mediums-copyright-and-dmca-policy-d126f73695), perhaps it’s a staffing or communication issue. But as every platform that posts third part IP — gotta be on top of this.

Creatives with stolen content might also try this https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice.

Really sad it came to removing a bunch of great writing. Hopefully the process will improve as a result.