Top Five Ways to Stop Content Theft

Copying Content without the permission of the original author and using it for either commercial or personal purpose is considered as a crime in digital world. Recently I faced the problem of content theft by other blogger and I took some steps which will result in removal or even banning of the site. When I faced this problem few months back, as per my complaint the site was banned for questioning and never came up.Most of us don’t know in case of this scenario what we have to do. Its easy actually. Here are my top five ways of stopping content theft.

1. Contact the person who copied:

Dont be surprised, This is the first step you should take. The reason being many people are not aware of this law. They might be trying to promote you or many be they just don’t know. Ask him ( through contact page or email id ) “kindly” ( Yes, anger is of no use I have more points coming up) to remove the post. It works in case the person is genuine and had made a mistake.

2.Contact Hosting:

Every Hosting ( i.e where a site is hosted) follows some law. Under which they can ban the site in case of content theft or any illegal activity done by the same. All you need is to find out who is the host of the site who copied content. Then find output the abuse email or contact email of the hosting. Mail them with original and copied url with some valid proof which could be date of the post. They will bring down the site. Thanks to Darren Rowse (Problogger.Net ) who tipped me for this and it worked. ( No I am not trying to influence to get the prize. lol )

3. Contact The Advertiser Services:

Content theft is done fore mainly for two reasons, Money and traffic. So 99% chance are they must be using some kind of advertising service. Even the advertising services are binded by the same law. They don’t want to advertise on “splog” like site. Here is an example from Adsnese team who replied my mail on the same scenario.

Hello Ashish,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I have forwarded your
finding to our team of specialists for further investigation.

To uphold the quality and reputation of Google AdSense, all AdSense
participants are held to our program policies and Terms and Conditions

If is found to be in violation of any of these policies, we will take the
appropriate action on the account.

We appreciate your taking the time to offer us feedback about this website
and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google
AdSense.

Please note that Google respects the rights of copyright holders and
publishers. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged
infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the
text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website and other applicable intellectual property laws.

If you believe that another site is illegally copying the contents of your
copyrighted material, you may send a notice of alleged infringement by
following the procedure at http://www.google.com/adsense_dmca.html. When
you have sent the notice, please notify us at adsense-support@google.com,
and we will take appropriate action.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center
for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on
the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Sincerely,

Disha
The Google AdSense Team

4. Contact Google:

Google has declared that if somebody has copied your content without your permission, just inform them and they will take care of it. That like is more than enough to tell you what they can do, Make that site out of indexing of Google Search Engine. If you read the above sample mail , there is a term called as DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act). In brief, you can send a signed complaint to Google with complete detail and If found guilty that site can be banned from Google search engine. Follow the DMCA link and you will know what I mean. Its little tedious but can be the most effective way.

5. Make a Copyright Regulation Page:

Make a copyright regulation page in which you can declare about the policy you follow about your content who is author and what steps you can do when somebody does. Put it at some visible location on your page. This can be a good warning for a splogger and will make him think twice before he does.

You can use any of the ways or in combination to make it effective. They are not steps but different ways you can select any of them as per your need.

Do you have any more ideas? Do share in comments!!

This topic is a participation in Darrens Top Five Group Writing Project.

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About The Author of this article:
Ashish is one of the co-author of this blog and writes on various interesting softwares, PC tips and more. You can read more of his articles here.

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Tags: content_theft, copyright, dmca

60 Comments and Link-Backs to “Top Five Ways to Stop Content Theft”

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21 Comments from Friends and Readers

Rishi, May 8, 2007:

Hmm… I guess the title you gave is wrong, it is the guide to stop content theft, instead it is how to tackle content theft!

Anyways, great tip. How to find which host the owner is using????
Ashish Mohta, May 8, 2007:

@Rishi: Thanks for your comment. I would explain on your comment. Any of these methods can be used to avoid theft content or may be 2 in combination…So I would say its not a guide. A guide would be stepwise flow but in this You can follow any method and that can make the splogger stop copying

To find the hosting there are tools like Ip to Dns or who is tools which can be used.
Vijeesh, May 8, 2007:

Hi Ashish,

I Guess there is a typo in point 4.
“Google has declared that if somebody has copied your content WITH YOUR PERMISSION, just inform them and they will take care of it”

Btw, informative article. The idea of informing the culprit website to its advertisers never really occurend to me.
Ashish Mohta, May 8, 2007:

@Vijeesh: Thanks for telling me. That was a big typo

Telling the advertisers really works. You can just get the idea from the Adsense mail
Shankar Ganesh, May 9, 2007:

Good article. Anybody steals my content, I can refer this one. Thanks
Mjuboy, May 9, 2007:

Finally, now I know how to deal with those content thieves.

Thanks for the great article!
Karlo Licudine, May 9, 2007:

Am i seeing this right? There are only 3 ways on how to stop content theft.

Content theft is pretty common. Especially because it is sometimes hard to track down who has copied your content.

It is a little reassuring that there are some ways to stop this kind of content theft. Like on Google Adsense and on their hosting site. I never thought that they would even help you.

Nice set of information ^_^

Thanks for your post.

If you have time, why don’t you drop by my post:
http://mobileko.blogspot.com/2007/05/snatch-top-5-tips-on-how-to-be.html

It’s also an entry for the problogger top 5- group writing project. ^^ Goodluck to us all!
This Eclectic Life, May 9, 2007:

I had never thought about what to do in case of content theft. I’m not even sure how I would know if someone stole content from my page. How did you find out?
Ashish Mohta, May 9, 2007:

@Eclectic: Generally Sploggers will copy the whole content, luckily I keep some links pointing to my own blog in every post. So f they don’t realize that I get a ping back. Other ways if somebody notifies you…There is no sniper method but if you are lucky You will know about it.

@Karlo: They are exact five ways. But you an always combine any of them. Its more effective

@Mujo and @Shankar: Thanks a lot for the comment
This Eclectic Life, May 9, 2007:

Thanks for responding! I do use a few links to my own posts, but never realized that it was a good way to prevent the theft. I’ll do it more often thanks to your advice! I appreciate it.
Ashish Mohta, May 9, 2007:

@Eclectic: Great it can work for you. You have a great blog. Hope to see u soon in comments.
JoLynn Braley, May 10, 2007:

Hi Ashish,

Good post, but I only see 3 points instead of 5. (?)

I’m dealing with 2 cases of this already, and my blog is less than 3 months old. I contacted both of the blog and splog owners first, no response, and moved on to the hosts. If they don’t take action I’ll go to Google.

What if the sites aren’t using Adsense? How do you contact Google??

Can’t wait to see who wins the draw on Problogger Friday, good luck!

JoLynn
ww-success, May 10, 2007:

This is very useful information. Thank you.
Atul, May 10, 2007:

Nice post ashish , I have learned many thing now , first we should contact that post before taking any action .
Ashish Mohta, May 10, 2007:

@Jolyn: If you are skipping the first and last point…Then thats the biggest mistake. That makes 5 I guess.

Google Contact is same as adsense adsense-support@google.com,

Check the sample mail.

@Atul: Thanks!! Buddy
Ekalavya, May 11, 2007:

You yourself have been highly inspired by Amit Agarwal’s similar post on content theft!
Ashley, May 13, 2007:

Great tips. I included you in my top five list on my site. You cna see your link here:
http://beasavvywriter.blogspot.com/2007/05/top-five-top-five-lists-on-writing.html
Ashish Mohta, May 13, 2007:

@Ashley: Thanks a lot
Steve Parker, July 2, 2007:

1) and 2) Fine; good advice. 3), okay, if it is clear that your content has been ripped off.

5) This should be #1. If you have posted some content on the internet, and not explicitly laid claim to your copyright, you are in a pretty weak position.

So then we get to 4):
This is the first time I’ve seen a real fanboy post in favour of the DMCA. And it’s almost totally incoherent.

Copyright law in most countries (and certainly in the USA, which is where the DMCA has power) will prohibit others from claiming your content as their own. The DMCA basically adds to this (IANAL), that - if you add some technological protection in an attempt to stop others from copying your content - that it is illegal for others to circumvent that, or even for them to know how to circumvent it.

So - for example, if you use ROT13 encryption:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM

Such that “A” becomes “N”, “P” becomes “C”, and so on, it would be illegal for anyone else to know about that “encryption” - however obvious it may be. The DMCA was brought in to protect Hollywood and the RIAA from the threats to their business that the internet, in particular, posed to their business model. As the business model (sell VHS, DVDs, Vinyl, tapes, CDs, etc, and accept that some people will give copies to friends) was f*cked by the internet (hey, I can give copies to the entire planet), and they didn’t even see it coming, let alone adjust their business model to provide on-demand digital delivery as an option for (otherwise willing, paying) customers, they lost out. So the lobbied for the DMCA, because they realised that (a) it is impossible to stop all copying, and (b) they actually benefit from the word-of-mouth promotion of their content.

The DMCA is not your friend; it makes you a criminal for watching a DVD on your PC, if you don’t happen to use Windows or MacOS. It makes you a criminal if you burn CDs to your MP3 player. It makes you a criminal if you even know how to do these things, even if you never do it.

I am speaking as someone who puts content online (http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml - gets about 2,000 visitors per day, online, all for free) and sells it at the same time (a few people per month decide that the PDF version is worth paying for (with all the sample scripts in plain text files, too). It’s all possible with “wget” type scripts, but I’m happy with that; there’s nothing I can do to ensure that nobody could possibly get the benefit of buying the PDF and scripts, without paying me, but I charge a reasonable enough price ($4.99) to make it not worth bothering ripping it off. I’m sure that some people do; not enough to be significant in my logs, though.

Traditional copyright, and particularly the copyright behemoths (MPAA, RIAA, etc) are f*cked by the internet, because they were too slow to see it coming, and are too stupid to understand how to deal with it.
cyberst0rm, November 1, 2007:

Great post. Thanks. I really should take some time out and read and familiarize myself with AdSense TOS.

It does pay in the long run!
United Voices, July 26, 2008:

I wan’t aware that there was anything called Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This should stop copycats quite much. But still if anyone copies then one cannot stop it, but we should take preventive measures.