How Thiagi helped me catch a thief

A few weeks ago I was excited about an upcoming dinner date with Thiagi (to know him is to love him, to not know him is a shame- Google him). I wanted to look back in my blog to a couple of entries I had made about him- one from an interview he granted the first time I met him and the second from a webinar I attended of his. Rather than tediously looking through each post and to narrow from the general search term “Thiagi”, I decided to Google a phrase I remembered writing in one of my blog posts “good results can come from barely listening to Thiagi.”

Turns out I had never Googled an exact quote from my blog before, and my search results were surprising. I found my blog post. But I also found another blog post EXACTLY like it. So I followed the link to a blog that had reproduced every single one of my blog posts for the last 7 years. The blog had a different title, different format and 4 additional posts that were not mine, but otherwise, a complete reproduction of my blog.

 My first step was to ask about the problem on a Blogger discussion board. A helpful community member posted links about how to handle copyright infringement on Blogger within minutes. I followed the steps I found on the link and asked that the other blog be disabled. After several e-mails back and forth, and a tedious process of providing every single url of my original content and the infringing content, MOST of the infringing content is no longer accessible. I appreciate this quick action.

But will I ever get to fill in the blanks? Who did this? When? Why? Can I sue for damages? What would those damages be?

Do you have any experience with this type of situation you can share with me?