Another DMCA Violation - My Site Was Scraped Again
Well it was bound to happen. I ran across yet another site that appears to have scraped over 10,000 pages of my content. Luckily for me, their search scripts were not very secure and they allowed me to alter the query string parameters to pull up all the pages I needed to send to both Google and Yahoo in my DMCA violation report.
These guys were even dumb enough to use the exact same page title, and they loaded all the stolen content on the same day! Made it easy for me to track down the URLs... =)
If you find yourself in a similar situation, your best bet is to follow these steps:
1. Try contacting the site first. In some cases the site will take down the copyright infringing content to avoid legal problems.
2. If that does not work, your next best bet is to send a DMCA infringement violation to their hosting company. Most hosting companies don't want the burden of pending legal action against them for hosting known copyright infringed content. They have the power to take the site offline. This of course does not stop the theives from re-launching under a new hosting company.
3. To further put a kink in their site, be sure to properly file a DMCA infringement violation with both Google and Yahoo.
http://www.google.com/dmca.html
http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/details.html
You must send over a signed statement of the infringement either via snail-mail or fax. In my case, I also sent an email to them including a list of about 10,000 URLs where they copied my content. I used a nifty little program called "Link Suite". It is available for free evaluation download (1 week). Worked like a charm for pulling all the links from their site that I wanted to report.
4. Next go after their revenue partners. Most sites use Google Adsense. If you report the infringement to the Adsense team, they can also remove the site from the program if the the violation is extreme. In this case, I am hoping they get the boot completely. Copying 100 pages is one thing... copying 10,000 pages is quite another!
5. Sit back and wait. You've done your job. Let Google and the others do their job.
You should hear back from the parties involved regarding the outcome. It is important to verify that your copyrights have been infringed upon BEFORE you file a DMCA violation. As Google will point out, you can be held liable for false accusations, or even inaccurate accusations that you were not fully educated on. It may be best to consult with your attorney if you are unsure if your rights have been violated.
A lot of folks ask the question, what can I do to stop them before it happens. This is a topic of great debate. Scraping is one of those things you can't really put a stop to 100%. If you require sign-in to view your content, then you are shooting yourself in the foot with the search engines. If you block crawlers except for the big search engines, you are losing out on the small search market. Not to mention someone can manually copy your content without the use of a scraper program.
We just try to stay on top of search results and do some occassional searches in Google to see if we can find any scrapers. Google is a great tool for digging through the net to find any potential scraper site. If you find one, don't kill yourself stressing out about it. Simply follow the procedures above and move on. In many cases the search engines like Google are able to tell the scrapers from the original and they don't end up hurting your rankings too much anyway.
If you have any questions, drop me a line!
These guys were even dumb enough to use the exact same page title, and they loaded all the stolen content on the same day! Made it easy for me to track down the URLs... =)
If you find yourself in a similar situation, your best bet is to follow these steps:
1. Try contacting the site first. In some cases the site will take down the copyright infringing content to avoid legal problems.
2. If that does not work, your next best bet is to send a DMCA infringement violation to their hosting company. Most hosting companies don't want the burden of pending legal action against them for hosting known copyright infringed content. They have the power to take the site offline. This of course does not stop the theives from re-launching under a new hosting company.
3. To further put a kink in their site, be sure to properly file a DMCA infringement violation with both Google and Yahoo.
http://www.google.com/dmca.html
http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/details.html
You must send over a signed statement of the infringement either via snail-mail or fax. In my case, I also sent an email to them including a list of about 10,000 URLs where they copied my content. I used a nifty little program called "Link Suite". It is available for free evaluation download (1 week). Worked like a charm for pulling all the links from their site that I wanted to report.
4. Next go after their revenue partners. Most sites use Google Adsense. If you report the infringement to the Adsense team, they can also remove the site from the program if the the violation is extreme. In this case, I am hoping they get the boot completely. Copying 100 pages is one thing... copying 10,000 pages is quite another!
5. Sit back and wait. You've done your job. Let Google and the others do their job.
You should hear back from the parties involved regarding the outcome. It is important to verify that your copyrights have been infringed upon BEFORE you file a DMCA violation. As Google will point out, you can be held liable for false accusations, or even inaccurate accusations that you were not fully educated on. It may be best to consult with your attorney if you are unsure if your rights have been violated.
A lot of folks ask the question, what can I do to stop them before it happens. This is a topic of great debate. Scraping is one of those things you can't really put a stop to 100%. If you require sign-in to view your content, then you are shooting yourself in the foot with the search engines. If you block crawlers except for the big search engines, you are losing out on the small search market. Not to mention someone can manually copy your content without the use of a scraper program.
We just try to stay on top of search results and do some occassional searches in Google to see if we can find any scrapers. Google is a great tool for digging through the net to find any potential scraper site. If you find one, don't kill yourself stressing out about it. Simply follow the procedures above and move on. In many cases the search engines like Google are able to tell the scrapers from the original and they don't end up hurting your rankings too much anyway.
If you have any questions, drop me a line!
1 comment:
That's great information. I know exactly how you feel.
I once had someone steal an article from me and create an entire site from my article. What's even more shocking is that these bastards used my article title for the domain name...letter for letter.
Austin
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