eHow UK Debacle

As most of you probably know, there has been a huge issue with eHow recently using user-submitted content and posting it on the new eHow UK site without compensating the writers.  eHow redirected the articles so that the articles on the UK site now redirect to the US site. Somehow, because of all this, many articles dropped out of Google search, even the articles hosted on the UK site (which, by the way, were also ranked better than the US versions of the exact same articles). After months of user's complaining on eHow's forums about the mess, the Powers That Be at eHow decided to compensate the writers for using the articles for so long without compensation. 

The compensation I received was about what I would make on eHow on a better-than-average day, or a day when the earnings update the previous day was skipped.  When I discovered the amount of compensation given to me, I was livid.  I was under the impression I would be paid the difference between the earnings I had made over the past 6 months and what I had lost.  I was totally wrong.  How can a site like eHow clone their site and not pay users for the earnings on their articles?  Apparently the compensation was due to the usefulness and popularity of the articles hosted on the UK site.  I'm still scratching my head at that one.  Funny how the articles I wrote garnered so much pay on the US site, and when the articles I wrote were hosted on the UK site, they were not useful or popular on that platform.  Of the articles I have written, I would think they would have an appeal to a UK audience.  Hmm...

To further complicate matters, several of the articles I wrote months ago which were top-ranked in Google search are now totally gone from Google.  At least, when I searched, the articles were not in the first 30 pages of Google for their keywords.  When this issue was brought up in the forums to the community liason at eHow, he said, basically, that we should learn how to write better articles.  I have almost 300 links to my public profile.  Seems to me that would mean 300 or so different people find my articles at least worthy of a back link.  So now, I and all the other writers on eHow who dropped out of Google have to do the work ourselves of re-indexing on Google, when it is my contention that the UK fiasco caused the articles to drop out of search in the first place.

Your thoughts on the issue?