John Cow dot COM - Latest Comments in How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Chilli Flakes — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 04:07:41 -0000

Thanks for information. Its real to deal with such people and ball gets dropped due to intracacies involved. The system should be more robust and foolproof.

Chilli Flakess last blog post..National Phone Registry- A must for your Information needs

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Nicki D. Harper — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:05:30 -0000

Freelance writers typically use a work-for-hire agreement, which should state that all rights go to the buyer, once the price is paid.

In the United States, a person who writes anything automatically has a copyright to it--no one else may use it without permission. This is not true in all countries.

As far as I know, you can simply state your name, the copyright symbol and the year on the page to assert copyright. To prove originality, many people send themselves a copy of what they've written via registered mail and don't open the letter. Just file it with a plain old printed copy and you have proof of the date on which (or before which) you wrote the piece. You can also formally register your copyright for a fee.

As a freelance writer working through Elance, I can testify to the amount of scraping going on. It's very hard to stop. Worse, there are article "spinning" programs that change the content of an article just enough to fool plagiarism checkers such as Copyscape. IMHO, this is illegal, unless the person who holds the copyright on the paper gives permission to use it in this way.

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Mark — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:30:52 -0000

Forget that list. Just file a DMCA notification immediately with the ISP (Google isn't necessary). Problem solved. If the ISP is non-U.S., they still usually will get rid of the content because it violates their TOS.

Just make sure you own your content, i.e., you are the copyright owner. If you commission content from freelancers, they own it, not you, even if you've paid them (you just have an implicit license to use it). You cannot file the DMCA notification unless you own it or have a limited power of attorney or agency appointment for copyright matters from the owner. The easiest thing is to just own it. So always have a written contract transferring copyright in exchange for valuable consideration (the payment).

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

xyberk the biz bum — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:22:38 -0000

I totally agree with Bryan Bliss. Write boring and unoriginal crap er stuff and so you'd go untouched. Wish I learned that when I was just starting. :cry:

xyberk the biz bums last blog post..Oolah Hot Making Money Web Sites

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Kevin Puls — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:11:40 -0000

Tim Knox posted a blog for this same topic this week, but his focused more on info products, like ebooks. To discourage plagurism of his info products, he recommends using eBook Pro as well as copyright all pages.

You can find his blog post at: www.timknox.com

-Kevin

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Jeff — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:29:43 -0000

I find this a little trickier in my genre (gadgets). The discovery of the gadget and reporting on it first is most important. Often I'll find a new gadget, write it up with a link to the manufacturer or a retailer's page and then find another blog has 'scooped' the gadget without listing my site as a source when it's pretty obvious they took the idea from me. Even a tiny "via" or "source" at the bottom linking to me is fine but many sites don't do this.

I find a lot of the content scrapers actually link back to me, which is not ideal but acceptable. As long as they link, Google should hopefully (or eventually) get it right.

Jeffs last blog post..Candlestick Flashlight Combines Two Great Weapons

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Deepak — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:37:22 -0000

That was a great chunk of information. I was looking forward to gain knowledge about content issues and got right on time :grin:

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Owen — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:45:33 -0000

I have a content thief that is taking my posts, and removing all references to my site. Since my content is under a creative commons license, I do not mind them using it for non-commercial use with attribution, but they do not attribute it. I contacted the Google spam team since they are just replicating my posts. I'm hoping that I can find the IP of the webhost & give them a different RSS feed with some fabricated content in it.

Owens last blog post..SSH Escape

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Robert C - The Wholesale Produ — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:07:20 -0000

I had the advertising copy from my website copied about five times. I could see taking it from someone who is a legend in copywriting, but, from me, not much going on in terms of legend, or copywriting genius for that matter! (LOL!).

Luckily, I have Copyrights on both my advertising and my ebook. Most of the people that copied it - just did a simple copy and paste and made no attempt to even rewrite it.

They even included the testimonials. Most of time, they were using the copy to resell my ebook (which they don't have the resale or affiliate rights to) on Ebay and IOffer.com.

Ebay has been great about taking the auctions down and don't allow digital product sales anymore. IOffer.com has been speedy with my complaints as well.

But, recently, I had it copied again. I could not get a hold of the owner. His/Her e-mail was undeliverable which is not a surprise. I found out who the host was and lodged my first DMCA complaint.

I sent it by regular mail, which, mysteriously, never got delivered. Strike one. I then tried faxing my complaint, and the matter was resolved within a day.

I guess the point of this post is this. While you can't copyright every post, or prevent scraping entirely, you can make sure that advertising or ebooks that you sell are throughly protected.

Yes, I know that some of you assume that you can get a Google cache on your work, and that your Domain registration can help you create a timeline as to when your site was established.

Anything that you create for your site or blog is assumed to be copyrighted automatically. But, for concrete proof, you would be best served by using the TX Short Form from the copyright office
Copyright Office.

I spent the 33 dollars for both my advertising and my ebook, for a grand total of 66 dollars. The copyright office is like clockwork. Within six months almost to the day, they sent me my certificate. Probably one of the most effiicent government agencies I have dealt with!

For the future, and with more research, I am going to look into disabling the cut & paste feature with some Javascript. However, I am not sure if that will inhibit the ability of spiders from crawling my front page as well.

Personal anecdotes aside, if you can afford to do it, get Uncle Sam's protection on anything that is a constant "workhorse" for your site, i.e., advertising, printed, or digital publications..

Thats my rant..

Robert The Wholesale Products Guy

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Victor Teixeira — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:22:36 -0000

Actually you can find the webhost of a specific site just by going to whoishostingthis.com.

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Kill The Scrapers! — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:26:50 -0000

:shock: I've had content stolen from various sites of mine, including photos from a website dedicated to stupid cat pictures, and back when I ran my daily Jigsaw Puzzles via JavaScript (to rotate a new one in everyday) I actually had two sites (that I know of) hijack the scripts so the puzzles were shown on their websites, but using my bandwidth for people to download them. Contacting the website owners was nearly useless, so I embedded a watermark in the photos with the site name, and added some text to my Javascript (with the font color set to be invisible on my site, but show up great on his) saying this content on his site was stolen. Within a few days they both quit using them.
Sometimes you just have to use a bigger stick!

Kill The Scrapers!s last blog post..Wednesday’s Jigsaw Puzzle - Jardines

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

sean — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:22:18 -0000

Informative post, what is the general concensus on rewrites ie 6o/40 new content

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

John Cow — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:59:44 -0000

hmmm great strategy lol

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

pinoyconsole — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:34:33 -0000

This is very interesting topic and give me idea how to deal it properly, I think this is the case of my site being penalized by Google after seeing most of my post pinging back to me from other site, some with my name and some have not. I was so lazy to deal with them and let them go, so what happen was even I got a lot of hits, lots of legal linkbacks and twice PR update I still don't get any PR score now. How about next post is how to regain back your lost PR due to content stealer? :wink:

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Bryan Bliss — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:19:20 -0000

maybe these are better than My strategy for dealing with stolen content.

I simply wrote stuff so boring and unoriginal that noone would ever want to steal it,
unfortunately my article " the letter w typed 23,48 times" never really went viral like I hoped,

so my traffic still sucks
thanks and take care
bryan

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

K-IntheHouse — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:15:20 -0000

You couldn't have timed this better. My content is being scraped along with other popular iPhone blogs and I have resorted to the same tactics you mention. Politely asking them to remove my feed or use an excerpt. If not, I will be filing a DMCA report. Then contact their host. As like most instances, there is no contact info in the site. But, they were kind enough send me a dozen pings in one day to alert me! :evil:

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Noobpreneur — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:14:48 -0000

Hi,

I thought about it as a 'free promotional method' - but since you put it that way, I start to feel uneasy about it!

Great tips and will put it into practice if scraping happened!

Thanks :)

Noobpreneurs last blog post..Web Directories as Web Investment - Well Worth the Trouble?

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Bruno Auger — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:12:51 -0000

I've seen my content on a couple of other sites by thats because I did not put my nae on it whichwas my fault. I still think people will always scrap others content because they are not intelligent enough to make themselves legit like that rest of the bloggers who have orginal content.

Bruno Augers last blog post..Customer Support: Knowing, Educating and Selling

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Ryan McLean — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:33:11 -0000

Wouldn't it be funny if everyone stole the content of this article and posted it :lol:

Ryan McLeans last blog post..Finding The Confidence in Yourself

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Ryan McLean — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:32:38 -0000

To my shame in my early days of blogging I used an A-Lists bloggers content and tried to palm it off as my own. They contacted me and I removed the content.
I learnt my lesson and now write all of my content 100% original and I steal nothing. Haven't had any problems with people stealing my content yet. But thanks for the advice

Ryan McLeans last blog post..Finding The Confidence in Yourself

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Dr.oracle — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:53:54 -0000

This post is amazing, real good for stopping content thieves like me.. LOL!!

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Big Ben Patton — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:35:31 -0000

This is good stuff, as my blog has grown I see more and more of those "spam" pingbacks hosting my content. Thanks for the tips Cow.

Big Ben Pattons last blog post..Case Study: Newbie Site Flip Part 1

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Dot Com Dud — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:40:52 -0000

This is some good information, content stealing is becoming a bigger problem every day. Any chance of a post on what to include in a good copyright notice?

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Andre Thomas — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:18:38 -0000

I've never quite had content stolen from me... or maybe it's because I don't know it.

Andre Thomass last blog post..Special Announcement… QuickFix Copywriting Tips now Equipped with Commentluv

Re: How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

asithi — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:52:10 -0000

Yep, that is why I stopped providing full text feeds. I know I probably lost some readers that way, but I am willing to have less readers as long as my content remains on my blog.