Stolen Stories: My Experience

Disclaimer: This story is posted only on Wattpad. If you are reading it somewhere else it has been posted there without my consent. Kindly seek out the original instead and know that the website you are using may not be safe.

So for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to google my username for kicks today after school. I just kinda wanted to see my Wattpad profile pop up in all its glory, and see if anyone else had the same username as me. It was not a good idea. 

I found not one, but two websites with my books copied and pasted onto them. It is supposed to be impossible to get books off of Wattpad because they have the copy and paste feature disabled, but it is not. You can transcribe the book, or there is other ways, one of which I know, which means if I can do it, certainly someone with actual knowledge of the web can do it too.

I did not expect this, because normally when you hear about this type of thing, it is with well known authors. I have 8 followers and a little over 200 reads on my most popular book. I am not popular. 

Turns out it does not matter though, because both Teenfic.net and NovelHD have some of my works posted. I am going to start by discussing NovelHD, because that is the real can of worms, and then we will get into Teenfic.net.

Warning: Do not visit these websites. They can have viruses (I was on Chromebook and know what not to click, so I am safe) and do have inappropriate ads. 

NovelHD:

Note: all of the information on this website was in Vietnamese, so most quotes have been put through Google Translate. As such, take them with a grain of salt and imagine they all have [sic] at the end.

From what I could find on their own website, NovelHD is a Vietnamese website, primarily for fanfiction, that pirates online works from Wattpad (and maybe other sites) to post. They do not use the term pirate, but do acknowledge that not all the work was published by its owners in the FAQs where they have the question "My stories are already on the system. I want admin rights?" This implies that people often come to them with questions about how to get control over things they did not post on the system, which in turn means they know they are posing stuff that belongs to others without their consent. 

This is illegal. As Wattpad users, we have copyright protection for our stories as long as we do select the right options in the copyright menu on your story. All of mine are set on all rights reserved, meaning no one is allowed to copy anything more than short cited quotes from this material without my consent. Here's proof: