[cromag]

So, I was doing one of my regular sweeps through the internet and discovered a website that was carrying two of my stories. I didn't recognize the name and, sure enough, they don't have any kind of permission to carry my work.

I only have three stories online right now -- two for free, one that I'm trying to sell. The two stories they're carrying are the free ones. They kept the introductory blurb about the stories being my Smashwords editions and "please don't copy" them. They even pirated a couple of the nice reviews I've gotten.

Now, since these are stories that I'm giving away the argument can be made that they haven't really cost me any money. On the other hand, my purpose in offering them for free is to get people to buy my third story. At the unauthorized site even if the reader falls completely in love with my work they might never know I have a third story for sale.

And there's the whole "taking my work without permission" thing, which does tick me off a bit.

If you search the site thoroughly enough they do provide a gmail address for authors to request that their stories be removed. Assuming they honor those requests I'd still be wary about providing my email address to someone with such a convenient sense of honesty -- I don't really need more spam in my inbox.

So, has anyone else faced this problem? What did you do? Or what would you do?