What to do when Your Content is Stolen

  • A friend asked for my advice on this matter not long ago. Well, this isn’t new to me as it happened twice already in the last year. With the popularity of RSS, blogs and growing number of plagiarists, it is almost expected to happen. The good news is that there are many ways to handle this matter.

    1. Look up their whois data and send them an email requesting they remove your content. Be nice but remind them that if they don’t remove your content within 48hours you will report them to their ISP.
    2. If their phone number is included in the whois data, give them a ring. This is what I usually do.
    3. If you get no response, simply email the Google and report the duplicate content. There’s nothing worse than getting removed from the index.

    Here’s the link – http://www.google.com/dmca.html


    March 6th, 2008 | Giovanna | 6 Comments |

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6 Responses and Counting...

  • RJacobsen 03.06.2008

    Thanks for the post and advice… I was just talking to my business partners this morning about what we could do (if anything) about our content being taken and used without our permission. Currently we don’t have the time nor the energy to track everyone down and request they either link back to our site or remove our content from their website.

    I read a post not too long ago on a forum, where the person told a story of her requesting her content to be removed from a website, from the website owner, where her content had been duplicated. When the owner didn’t reply to her request, she contacted the website’s advertisers to report the content theft… not too long later her material was removed from the website!

  • DianeV

    Thanks for the link, Giovanna. Coincidentally, I found a site yesterday that was composed almost solely of our material, including images (well, he did -apparently- write his own privacy policy). I did a nice mod_rewrite to replace the images, sent two emails and called. As of today, he’s password-protected most of the pages.

    But that’s not enough. Normally I’d just send an email and/or call, but using so much of our site … well, I’m just not going away.

  • Giovanna

    DianeV,

    Sorry about that. People are jerks. I would report them or hire a guy with a deep, course voice and give them a quick ring 🙂

  • Jozzua

    Gio, this is one of the best things I’ve seen someone do to content thieves – basically he redirected the IP from the ‘stealing’ website to steal from a porn site. Classic work.

  • Jozzua

    Sorry, meant to send this one – ha.ckers.org/blog/20060712/sometimes-it-sucks-being-a-search-engine-spammer/

  • Mark

    If this happens to you a lot, you’ll quickly learn to skip steps 1 and 2 and just file a DMCA notification. It’s the most time efficient way of handling it.

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