Content theft is a problem. Ever had your blog scraped and republished on a spam blog illegally? It does happen however there are steps you can take to help prevent content theft and have it removed from the offenders website as well as the search engine results.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act Services
DMCA offers professional website protection services which include the following:
- Plagiarism scanning
- Image watermarking
- DMCA Takedown Generator
- Comprehensive Website Detective Tool
If you do find your articles republished on the net without your consent you can do something about it. File a DMCA take down notice with the offenders web host.
Whats is takedown notice?
DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is a U.S Copyright Law covering intellectual property (Your blog posts). You can file a DMCA take down notice with the offenders web host as well as notify Google they have indexed illegally copied content.
Step 1 Firstly, try and contact the website owner directly using the contact form on there site and ask them to take down the copied content or acknowledge you are the author and link back to the original post on your site.
Step 2 Secondly, you’ll need to complete some basic research and find out which web host the offender uses as well as the correct contact information for the right department. Normally this will be the web hosts abuse department and may be abuse@theirwebhost etc.
There’s many internet tools which offer whois so you can easily find out who the offenders web host is.
http://www.whois.net/
http://whois.domaintools.com/
Simply enter the offenders website URL or I.P address to lookup the details.
Google also offer a link which you can use to request take down of content from the search results, Adsense infringements and Blogger spam blogs.
Report copyright infringement: AdSense
How to submit a notice of alleged copyright infringement to Google.
Blogger copyright infringement
Report copyright infringement: Blogger
Web Search
Infringement Notification for Web Search
Yahoo/Bing Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy
You need to be very careful when filing a complaint with Google for alleged infringement of copyright as some site owners have been abusing the process and trying to get their competitors taken out of the search results (SERPS).
Try and resolve the problem with the offender first and use the above links if all else fails.
How To Check for Plagiarism & Prevent Duplicate Content
There’s several tools you can use to check to see if your content has been copied. All you need to do is enter your site URL’s to scan the net for copied content.
Copyscape offers both a free & premium services for checking original content against the web for copies. All you need to do is enter the URL’s of your web pages and the program scans the net for content which may include part of all of your web pages content.
Copysentry is another service which checks the internet automatically for copies of your content and emails you if they find anything.
How To Prevent Content Theft
There are a few methods which you can use to make it hard for offenders to copy your content.
- Include a copyright notice at the end of all your content
- Show post summaries only in your RSS feed
- Use watermarks on images
- Add your URL or site name to images
- Install a ‘no right click’ or ‘no copy’ plugin
- Add a Copyscape protection banner to your site
Have any other suggestions on how to stop or prevent content theft please add them in the comments. Thanks