Freelancing at Home

eHow is claiming they've fixed all the problems with stolen traffic and earnings on the UK site. Here's Rich, the community manager's, post on the matter.

"Hi eHow Peeps,

As promised, we finally removed all US member articles from the UK site as of yesterday. However, some are still claiming that they are seeing their articles show up on the UK site, which is somewhat correct, but please make note of the URL structure of those articles before jumping to any conclusions. If you click on the US member article on the UK site, you'll see that it will be re-directed to the US version of the article. Our tech team made sure that all traffic will go to your US article and there should be no possibility of traffic going to a UK version of your article. We will need to wait until Google or any other search engines re-index those article pages as well as the UK site map, so once that happens, they shouldn't show up on the site search results as well as search engine results as UK articles. Until then, you may see your articles in the search results as UK articles, but when readers click on the link, it will take them to the US version of your article.

Example:

An article that may show up as this: http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_5099146_write-letters-stop-copyright-infringement.html on the search engines or on eHow UK will be redirected to here: http://www.ehow.com/how_5099146_write-letters-stop-copyright-infringement.html. Basically, any indication of a UK article created by a US member will be re-directed to the US version of that article.

Once the search engines re-index those article pages, you will gradually see your UK articles removed from the search results. Just know that all traffic to your articles from here on out will be going to your US article and won't be going to a UK version of your article.

Thanks!

Best,
The eHow Team"

This is all good and well. It lifts a huge worry off of me and I can now begin to think about publishing again - though I would have liked to start publishing last month before I returned to college - but what is eHow going to do about compensation for the six months they used member created content for free? Well they'll side step that little misadventure and pretend they don't owe anything.

Nevermind that they say they feel it's inappropriate to use our articles anymore without compensating us (wouldn't this imply they feel it's inappropriate to have already used our articles without compensating us?). And if anyone is going for a lawsuit, may I suggest you go small claims and use that as your argument? The company, through Rich their community manager (mouthpiece to the writers) stated they felt it was wrong to use our content without compensation in his first post on the matter.

Just saying. They shot themselves in the foot with that wording. I'm sure there was some legal issue involved with international copyrights in the UK, but I don't know about it. I know what they admitted to though.