What you can do when your content gets stolen

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Content Stolen They say it happens sooner or later, especially to the Top 100 Make Money Online blogs. My make money online review blog content has been stolen. Ok, I was just trying to console myself with the “Top 100″ bit and deep-linking to pass on PageRank. My blog is definitely nowhere near great but still, someone stole both my articles AND images and posted them as his own on his blogspot sites. I did not find the perpetrator soon enough.

He’d already ripped off over 20 articles from me. He has several blogspot sites and so far I have found 2 of the scraper blogs - a money and a tech blog - containing my articles. My articles were reproduced verbatim, probably using an autoblog plugin via my RSS Feed.

He has several scraper blogs namely:
www.blogoll.com (formerly www.money4online.blogspot.com)
www.funhellen.com (formerly www.showit.blogspot.com)
www.estate360.blogspot.com
www.tearsea.com

He cross-posts stolen articles from around the internet on these sites. Besides Dosh Dosh, he has also stolen articles from Problogger and Hongkiat just to name a few. The funny thing is, he even copied a paragraph from my “About” page and didn’t bother to change the words. Look at the image of his homepage below and note the little blurb on the sidebar I have enlarged. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Stolen Content New

Note that with his updated sites, he has changed his name from “Jeff” to “Tong”. His domain registrar lists his particulars which are no doubt fake, as:
Registrant: hangdian bo, tong
13, Hatton Garden London, NA EC1N8AN GB

On MyBlogLog, “Jeff” is tagged as “content thief”, “plagiarist” and “stole content from doshdosh.com”. I left some messages telling him to remove my content which he promptly deleted. On hindsight, I shoudn’t have bothered being so courteous because it’s like trying to reason with someone who’s busy robbing you.

What To Do When Your Content Is Stolen

Here are some useful tips I’ve gathered from various sites on what you can do when you discover that your content has been stolen.

1. Contact the siteowner. Some advocate contacting the site owner by sending him a cease-and-desist order.

2. Do screencaps. Make physical proof of all the stolen articles with screencaps.

3. Cut off income sources. Since a scraper blog’s motive for stealing content is to profit from it, cutting off his source of income by informing his advertisers, sponsors and affiliates makes sense.

4. Flag blogspot blogs. If it is a blogspot blog, click the FLAG button and report the url here.

Report Stolen Content To Google 5. Inform the web hosting company. To find out who the web host is, search the domain here:
http://www.internic.net/whois.html
http://www.truewhois.com/index.php

6. Report to Google AdSense. If the site runs AdSense, email adsense-abuse@google.com and say that the site is earning revenue off your stolen content hence violating AdSense TOS.

7. Report to Google AdSense anonymously. Click on the Ads by Google header found on all AdSense ad units - it brings you to a page where you can report abuse. It’s not too apparent when you first get to the page but the link is located right at the bottom.

Report Stolen Content To Google

8. Public shaming. Blog about the content thief and expose him to alert others.

9. Notify other authors. If you recognise any of the other stolen articles, notify the rightful authors. This will add more people to the cause. You can copy and paste the first sentence or two of the stolen article into Google search to show where the article is from.

10. File a DCMA report. If the perpetrator is US based, file a DCMA notice.

How To Protect Your Content

To protect your work, make it a habit to deep-link your blog so that you leave your digital fingerprint as a means of proof of ownership. To help you find your stolen content easily, install Digital Fingerprint Wordpress plugin, which when used together with Google Alerts can be an effective tool against scrapers. An alternative is to use Copyscape and CopySentry.

More Information On How To Deal With Content Theft

More information can be found at Loriswebs.com, Quickonlinetips.com, Lorelle On Wordpress. Check out what fellow bloggers, DoshDosh and Mike did when they had their content stolen.

UPDATE: Make stolen content link back to you.

Related posts other people have read:

Stolen Content: What To Do

Find stolen content easily

Protect your web content

Protect your Feedburner content

TechCrunch calls PayPerPost bloggers pathetic

Tags: content stolen

Comments

11 Responses to “What you can do when your content gets stolen”

Wayne Liew on October 20th, 2007 3:52 pm

That dude above me is a leecher as well. Try getting rid of these by using the AntiLeech plugin for Wordpress.

You can change the contents that they have stolen into something like “F**k off you content stealer!”. Cool huh?

Encountered the same problem and have written two posts on it. These people are just making money by splogging.
emigre on October 20th, 2007 5:43 pm

Wayne:

Thanks for the tip..will check out the plugin. Sounds cool.

emigre
Jonathan Bailey on October 21st, 2007 8:51 am

A decent article though I don’t agree with some of the tactics, especially shaming which can backfire and bring about other legal issues.

However, you leave out one important step, filing a DMCA notice with a host. Though your step ten involves filing a notice, you link to Google’s own policy for their search engine. That only gets the work removed from Google, not the Web. If you file a notice with the host, it’s gone from the Web itself.

I would try that well before I contacted the search engines and before I tried shaming. Also, if you’re going to report him to the hosting company, as per step four, you’re going to most likely need a DMCA notice to get any action.

Just my two cents!
emigre on October 21st, 2007 5:33 pm

Jonathan

Thanks for the DMCA notice tip. That’s good to know.

See you again!
emigre
windyridge on November 7th, 2007 2:58 am

Very good advice especially tattling to his advertisers!
Techcrunch calls PayPerPost bloggers pathetic | Some Useless Info on December 5th, 2007 11:49 am

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Stolen Content: What To Do | Some Useless Info on January 22nd, 2008 11:58 am

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4mind4life on March 8th, 2008 8:04 am

Some guy named Ankit ripped off my post “50 Ways To Boost Your Brain Power” and is trying to profit from the article on his blogspot blog. I’ve flagged the blog and reported him to adsense abuse.

Thank you for the helpful article! Do you know how quickly this guy will be dealt with?
emigre on March 8th, 2008 8:07 pm

4mind4life:

I’m not sure if and when google adsense will deal with this guy.

emigre
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