Let me start out by saying HOORAY!!

After reading a training (https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/share_zone/view/1094) here at WA (OEP) about how to deal with people stealing your prized content, I decided to act. Actually, I had already acted before. I contacted the owners of the infringing websites, and was met with a resounding silence.

So I was keen to follow the advice in the training and report each and every one of the sites to Google. There were about 30 sites that had either word for word stolen my article from eZine Articles (and removing my author bio and links and replacing it with their own) or doing some ugly article spinning. Fortunately I had used the Google friendly bulleted lists so it was very easy to identify when my work had been taken.

I just now got a response from Google as follows:

"Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed
processing your infringement complaint. The following webpages will be
removed from Google in a few hours:

[23 URLs here]

Please note the remaining URLs in your request have been forwarded to the
appropriate team for processing. You will be contacted with updates
shortly.

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Regards,

The Google Team"

I had submitted either 27 or 29 URLS (forgot) originally, so that is a great success so far! What good comes of it is yet to be seen, but at least I know the big G will make good on DMCA.

I should note that the article was my best performing one and got me some good business. I figure that these sites cost me several hundred dollars in sales as they were coming up with my article title ahead of my original content. Maybe things will pick up again.

UPDATE: The remaining URLs I had submitted were at Blogger, which Google owns. After a couple days more Google emailed me again to say that the offending material wasn't just removed from the search results but it was TOTALLY removed from existence on the web. They just removed it from their Blogger site. There is power available to the little guy!