A 6 Step System To Stop People From Stealing Your Website Content
Stealing website content is no laughing matter – if your content is reproduced on other sites, not only are your competitors gaining from your work, but your site could be penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.
Here are ways that you can prevent people from stealing your content, and also ways to prosecute people who have stolen your content.
Step 1: Discourage People From Stealing Your Website Content
The best thing you can do to discourage people from stealing your content is to put a copyright notice on each page of your site. It could be something simple like “Copyright my Company, 2007†or it could be more complex, like “All content on this site is Copyrighted by My Company, 2007. You may not use, distribute, or reproduce anything from this website without written permission.â€
Step Two: Detect People Who Have Stolen Your Content
The best way to find websites that are using content stolen from your site is CopyScape. Just enter your site url and it will show you sites that may have stolen text from your site. You may want to consider using their paid service CopySentry, which is a great help.
Step Three: Contact The Site Owner
Once you have found a site that has clearly stolen content from your site,. You can just contact the site owner. (You can get their contact details by going to http://www.whois.sc and entering in the domain). Politely inform them that you believe that their site is using your copyrighted content, and ask them to take it down from their site.
Step Four: Send Them A Formal Letter
If you can’t contact them directly, or they do not comply, you can send them a legal cease and desist letter. You can find a form letter you can use at http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/contract/cease.htm Include a print out of their website with your content highlighted so they know what content to remove from their site.
Step Five: Send Their Webhost A DMCA/Copyright Infringement Notice
If the offending website owner has not removed your copyrighted content after the period allowed in the letter, you can notify their webhost. Each web hosting company has a different procedure for copyright infringement claims – try to find out what their host’s policy is and follow it. (If you don’t know what their webhost provider is, you can find out via http://www.whois.sc)
Basically the way this works is that you notify the webhost that the domain in question is hosting content that infringes on your copyrights. The webhost will either remove the content, disable the domain’s hosting account, or demand that the site owner remove the content or justify their actions.
Step5b: You can also file notices with Google, Yahoo, and MSN requesting that they remove the site with your content from their indexes.
Step 6: Initiate Legal Proceedings
If for some reason filing a infringement notice with their webhost did not work, you have one option left – take the website owner to court. This can be very expensive and you may not want to proceed with this step. If you do decide to take the website owner to court, consult with a lawyer skilled in copyright issues first.
Conclusion:
Website copyright infringement / content stealing is a serious issue and you should fight it relentlessly. I have successful fought dozens on infringement cases, and I’ve never had to proceed past step 5a.
Posted in Legal Stuff
July 12th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Great post Adam! Copyscape is bookmarked for me.
July 13th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Excellent post…. you should also have said about creative commons, a great tool for licensing authors creative work.
July 16th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I hate when I find people copying my articles from EzineArticles but stripping out the links at the bottom. I create that specific content so it can be reproduced, but I do expect a little credit in return!
August 5th, 2007 at 12:44 am
Great post - I hope I never need to use it! But I’m filing away the url just in case.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Great solutions!
would you allow me quote from your blog.?
http://www.adulu.com/showthread.php?p=505
thank you
October 30th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
I’ve tried some of this stuff. Yet 30+ are stealing my content.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Mark, apparently you have good content.
You just have to keep fighting the thieves…the battle never ends.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:16 am
very interesting. i’m adding in RSS Reader
December 20th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Thanks for the tips. I’m in step 3 now. I hope I don’t want to go through the rest of the steps. It is really kind of waste of time.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
@Adam: Yeah, it’s getting crazy lately.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
No anything on the internet shsould be freely accessed by anyone.
March 24th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
@ Dreadfrost, I don’t think anyone would argue that things on the internet should be freely accessed by anyone, but stealing people’s content and passing it off as your own is something different.
Copyright law does not stop you accessing things on the internet (well, a technical interpretation says it does, but in reality no website will sue you for accessing their site), just from copying it.
Great practical tips though!
March 24th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Adam - I have a question - Have you tried Gabbly.com? I would like to know if there is a copyright infringement when Gabbly opens other URLs? (Note: that the 3rd party URL content is NOT routed through Gabbly. Rather it directly comes to the user’s browser)
March 24th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
@Arul - Looks like they are using frames to display the sites. I’m not sure, but if my memory serves me correctly, that’s OK as long as the sites you are linking to don’t complain.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Oh ok. Thanks Adam
May 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am
This is a great article. I have used Copyscape a lot and have caught people who have stolen my content. Luckily I knew the people off a forum so they quickly changed their sites.
John
June 19th, 2008 at 7:14 am
The best solution is to prevent plagiarism before it happens. That should be step one - at http://donotcopy.org anyone can download free active content protection .
July 18th, 2008 at 5:19 am
I had an issue with someone stealing my content and my images. They did not save the images to there own server and so i made the images into broken links.
Served the guy right.
August 11th, 2008 at 4:07 am
Hello, ive been reading through your advice here & its been helping me a lot. Thankyou. We have numerous sites now hosting our mods/work & we are not sure if can prevent it from happening. Please can you check out our site & see if we can prevent sites from hosting our work. Thnakyou
December 4th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I just found a website (retail one) that sells different types of products. They copied just about everything (excluding the products)as their own. They even slipped and left something with my website name in it.
If i wanted to proceed forward providing that they don’t cooperate, what type of lawyer would I contact?
December 29th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I appreciate this information! Thank you!
March 11th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Wow you must be a good writer to have so many cases against you. Perhaps many of us are victims and we don’t check for stolen content, so we don’t know.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Thanks so much. Sometimes it takes me days to figure out a good article for my website. Sometimes I spice them up with a youtube video I find but everything else is original and written by me. I am thinking about submitting articles to generate more traffic but of course this will attract thieves also. I will also be book marking copyscape.