How do you protect yourself? And, what can you do if someone steals your content?
If you have been blogging for any length of time then you have probably come across a site that has blatantly ripped off your material and posted it on their own site without credit in the form of a link to you. This is copyright infringement and has become a common occurrence on the Web.
The first thing you should know is that you don't have to register your material for it to be copyrighted. Virtually anything produced be it written, drawn, photographed or played ala music is protected by copyright law. This doesn't mean you are safe though as many people don't know or worse don't care that copyright applies to the internet as well as the usual mediums.
To protect yourself you can use a service like
copyscape.com.
This service is free for up to 10 pages a month and offers a paid service if you are a frequent victim of content theft.
I ran a couple of my pages this morning and you guessed it... one site is basically stealing most of my content for their site.
see below.
Click image to enlarge.
and another page of mine.
As you can see copyscape is a fast way to find the buggers stealing your content but this isn't a sales pitch for them. I already know who the thieves are by using a couple of my own systems.
I have mentioned before that you should always include a link pointing back to your site in all your content. When morons like the site I've just shown you post your content they rarely remove or change anything. In the two examples above he or she posted my article on their blog with my backlink in it. This does two important things. Technorati keeps track of all blogs linking to me so I found this site as soon as technorati did. Secondly it tells Google that I am the originating site and that this clown is posting duplicate content. Love it.
Another easy way to find people stealing your content is to run a Google search using the exact phrase method ie. use quotes (") on both ends of a phrase that is unique to your post in Google search.
Here is an example from my post on "How to Get Traffic - My System"
Click to enlarge.
Always use text from the beginning of your posts as some sites will only post a small snippet of your work - usually the first paragraph.
Here is the result of the Google search.
Here is the result clicking on the omitted listing.
Some thieves are smart enough to remove your backlink. If you find sites using the Google search method that have removed your links then start hiding your links in the punctuation used on your posts. Click on the last period and see what happens. These hidden links are hard to spot and very effective.
So what do you do once you have found a content stealer?
According to Kelly Sims of Virtually There VA Services you should do the following;
1. Contact the offender. You can usually visit the "contact" page of the offender's website to obtain their contact information. If for some reason you can't find their coordinates that way, you can perform a search for "who is" to find many sites that can provide information about the website owner by simply entering their URL. The website owner's contact information should be posted here, but if not, their website host will be and you should contact them. Keep your first contact civil. Calling or emailing the responsible individual with a stern, yet professional demeanor will be much more effective than yelling or name calling. Remember that the owner of the site isn't necessarily the writer, and if they are, then being nasty may not have the desired effect and in fact may create more problems for you in the long run.
2. Send a cease and desist order. If your initial contact didn't get the desired results, your next step should be to send a cease and desist order. You do not need to hire a lawyer to create one for you. A simple search for "cease and desist order templates" should give you an order that can be altered to meet your needs. Send one copy by email and one copy by registered mail and make it look as official as possible. Include a date by which the material should be removed. You want the offender to know that you mean business.
3. If action is still not taken, send a cease and desist order to the offending party's web host. Again, the host information is available by performing a search for "who is". The majority of hosts will take action by temporarily removing the offender's site until the copied material is removed.
4. The situation should be resolved at step 3, but one more step that can be taken is to notify search engines of the infringement. Performing a search for the "DMCA" or "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" policies for each search engine will provide the information you need to contact each of them in order to request that the offender's website be removed.
Finally, it's always advisable to protect yourself by keeping records of the dates your content was placed on your site. This ensures that the other party can be proven wrong it they claim to have posted their content first.
This is good advice and quite proper.
I have my own methods for dealing with thieves but that is a path best kept to myself.
Oh one last thing... feel free to visit the thief's site as mentioned above and leave as many insulting comments as you can think of.
Till next time,
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