How to find out if someone is stealing your content and how to stop content thieves.”
To find out if someone else is using your site content, you’ll need to do a bit of homework. It doesn’t take too long, but there are a few steps to it. Remember that it might not be an entire page that has been stolen. It could be an article, or even just a paragraph or a picture. So looking for your page title won’t always do the trick.
Try doing searches for lines from your text. You can also use services such as Copyscape which will search the web for texts that have suspiciously similar patterns of text, such as matching phrases or almost matching sentences, paragraphs, or whole text. You should actually do that regularly, not just once. Every few weeks or every month should do the trick.
If you find that someone out there is using your material, your next step is to find out who owns the site with the stolen material. Use whois, whois Godaddy, or Internic Domain Name Search or a similar service to locate the webhost and find that individual’s contact details.
When you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to send out two very polite, yet stern emails. The first email will be to the owner of the website; the second will be to the web host company. These emails should inform them that the website has infringed on your copyrights, and request that either the material be removed, or you be provided with proper accreditation/linking/money or whatever you desire to make the use of your material fair.
Give the recipients of your emails 48 hours to read them and act on them, and then check the website again (don’t forget to hit “refresh” to be sure that your browser isn’t displaying old material. It’s easy to forget to do that when we’re on a mission to save our web copy!).
If that doesn’t work, send another email to both recipients notifying them that they have 24 hours before you report the website to all major search engines to have it banned, stating that the website has broken the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA).
The majority of the time, this will actually resolve the issue. However, if this doesn’t work, you should follow-through on your threat to have the site banned. Notify each of the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, etc – of the theft, and eventually you will find that they will take down the bad sites.
If all else fails, you may have to think about pursuing it legally – though you truly need to balance whether it’s worth the time, effort, frustration, and money. If you are going to be taking this kind of action, you will need to gather the right information to present your case. This includes:
– All of the information you used in the search to identify the person who has used your site content. Put all of it together in a file in your computer. This should also include any and all correspondence that you’ve had with the owner/web host company. Make sure that you back up all of these files – just in case.
– As you save all of the “evidence”, you are creating a paper trail (even if you haven’t printed anything off, yet). As you create files, your computer will save the date that they were made. You should, however, be sure to print things off sooner or later, so that you’ll be able to show people even without a computer present. This should also include screen caps of the programs using your content, with file dates, samples, and examples.
One important thing that you need to remember is not to try to get revenge. Vengeance won’t help you at all, so forget efforts to spam, publicize, or abuse the thief. Remain professional. By spamming or defacing someone else’s website, you may find that the legal problems are your own if that person decides to take legal action.
Don’t forget that you can always contact the advertisers of the copying site. If they are an affiliate site, if there are banner ads, or any other kind of advertising on the site (which is likely if they’re so desperate to use your material and attract visitors), then you should notify those advertisers that an illegal site is among those using their name. If the advertiser is a legitimate business that cares about its reputation, it will most certainly take action to contact the site owner and put some pressure on.
If you use these techniques, you should see some results – though you should be prepared to meet resistance, even if it’s just at first.
Itay