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How To Stop Content Theft & File a DMCA Take Down Notice

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:

    1. Plagiarism scanning
    2. Image watermarking
    3. DMCA Takedown Generator
    4. 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.

Whois Lookup - Domain Names Search, Registration, & Availability - Whois.net

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

  • Trademark Concerns about Search Results
  • Copyright/DMCA Concerns about Search Results

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.

  1. Include a copyright notice at the end of all your content
  2. Show post summaries only in your RSS feed
  3. Use watermarks on images
  4. Add your URL or site name to images
  5. Install a ‘no right click’ or ‘no copy’ plugin
  6. Add a Copyscape protection banner to your site

Website Protection Pro

Website Protection Pro™
Combat copyright infringement with the ultimate tool-set from DMCA.com | Get Started Now for Just $10 / month!

Have any other suggestions on how to stop or prevent content theft please add them in the comments. Thanks

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Lia says

    November 24, 2014 at 1:30 pm

    Hi Brad,

    Please contact me in private on my email address below. I would like to ask your advise.

    Regards
    Lia

    Log in to Reply
    • Brad Dalton says

      November 24, 2014 at 10:50 pm

      You will need membership for advise. Support information. http://wpsites.net/registration/

      Log in to Reply
  2. Seth says

    April 1, 2014 at 2:28 am

    Hi, I was wondering if you could provide information on the other side of this?
    I had my Android apps and developer account suspended due to fake copyright claims. The DMCA takedown is a tool that is often abused by petty competition and serious trolls.

    I would like to find out who made the takedown request so I can face my accuser, but it seems to be completely anonymous. Where can I find that information? Chilling effects is unsearchable and limited and Google transparency refuses to show results for apps.

    Where can I find my accuser?! I want to take them to court.

    These fake claims are destroying the lives of families that rely on that income, and nobody can even talk to a person at Google about it or even get specifics about what was the supposed violation to fight the accusation.

    Log in to Reply
    • Brad Dalton says

      April 1, 2014 at 2:44 am

      Happy to help Seth but who are you?

      Please send me a direct email identifying yourself. Thanks

      Log in to Reply
  3. Caroline says

    September 24, 2013 at 12:51 pm

    This is a great source of info! Thanks so much. I’m bookmarking it. Unfortunately, I seem to need more and more of this lately. Having content stolen makes me want to stop blogging…seriously.

    Log in to Reply
    • Brad Dalton says

      September 24, 2013 at 1:40 pm

      I’m submitting DMCA take down notices on a regular basis which only takes a couple of minutes.

      Log in to Reply

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