What Is This Site About?
This site is dedicated to stopping Dirty Rotten Thieves that steal your web content and post it on their own site as if it was their own.
- How Do I Catch Content Pirates?
- Somebody Stole My Content, What Options Do I Have?
- What is this DMCA thing?
How Do I Catch Content Pirates?
There are a number of ways to catch the worthless scumbags that stole your content.
- Copyscape
This web service is provided at copyscape.com, and can be used to detect people that have copied your articles and posted them on their own sites. They also have a premium service where they will actively monitor for thieves. - Technorati Inbound Links
It's often easy to see that somebody has linked to you, because they've stolen one of your articles that linked back to your own site. - Web Server Logs
You can find image referrals that don't belong to your domain. This means that somewhere, your content has been stolen and they didn't even bother to cache the images on their own server, which means they are stealing your bandwidth as well. - Google Search
It's often very easy to find another article with an identical title to yours by just doing a quick search in Google. After examining the article, you may find that they have stolen your content.
Somebody Stole My Content, What Options Do I Have?
- You can email the worthless scumbag that stole your article. As long as you are nice (but firm) in the email, most of them time they will take it down. Hint: don't call them a worthless scumbag, no matter how true it may be.
- File a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with the search engines to have them remove the stolen pages from their index.
- If the site is using Google Adsense to monetize their thievery, file a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with Google Adsense.
- File a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with their hosting company to get the content removed from the server it is on.
What is this DMCA thing?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law which implements two 1996 WIPO treaties. It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as DRM) and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself. It also heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
What does this mean?
This means that there is a law that covers your copyright, and when somebody infringes on that, you can send a legal notice to their hosting provider or other parties such as search engines, who will normally take it seriously. The dirty rotten thief is given a chance to respond, which usually entails removing your stolen content.