As many stories as there are all over the internet, it would be nearly impossible to keep track of them ALL! They're being read by hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people. Traded, linked to, passed around like a flu virus in a crowded subway. No stopping it....it happens.

But what do you do, if you find one of your stories, or one of your favorites, posted on a pay site that you never gave consent to? What do you do if someone just snatches your hard work, takes your name off of it, and throws it onto a computer CD or a website, and is making money off of your emotional investment?

Who do you alert? What do you say to the people in charge? Is any of this 'legal'? 'Illegal'? And what happens if you ask them to take it down, and they say 'Screw you! We're keeping it!'? What, exactly, is the protocol for finding your work or the work of one of your favorite authors being 'pimped' out on another website? Let us know!

When it happened to one of my first stories, I was both flattered and angry. I contacted the admin of the site and we just agreed on a setup.

I think though that site owners should be responsible with this thing. It's stealing and all sorts of bad things.

This has happened before, though not to me. The procedure is, I believe:

1. Contact the site admin. There is usually an email address of webmaster@domainname that you can use if you can't find anything on the site itself. That's not guaranteed, but it should exist for standard websites.

2. If you can't contact them, try any email address associated with the story, such as someone who posted it, etc.

3. If they won't take it down or come to a mutually acceptable arrangement, threaten legal action. Unless the site is located in an obscure country, copyright laws will mean that you have the rights to the story, not them. You may need to be able to prove that wrote the story first (eg. by showing it was posted on the Internet prior to the copy that you found), but there are ways of doing that (The WayBack machine is a good tool to use, unless the time interval between the two was short).

Just remember, that the author owns the rights to the story. If you can establish that you are the author, most courts will find in your favour.