Thanks, and yes, unfortunately, it has been stolen and continues to be. A company called Ichipro copies and republishes Medium writers, and sometimes entire publications. A bunch of us have gone after then repeatedly, but whenever they get shut down, they just move to a new hosting company and start up again. The last time I checked, one of my stories with this copyright notice and disclaimer was up on their site. It’s small consolation, but at least it’s something.
In general, you don’t need an explicit copyright notice in order to have your work protected (at least in the US where laws can be enforced) but you may want to Google yourself and your stories every now and then to see if they are appearing anywhere else just as a precaution. When I started looking into this, several writers reported issues other than just with Ichipro.
