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!

Updates: DMCA and my new Server...

Just thought I would post a few updates on some recent topics I've been working on.

1. DMCA Complaint: No update here yet. Yahoo did reply and confirm they will investigate and take appropriate action. That was about 5 days ago. I have not heard back from Google yet. From what I've read in other webmaster forums, it would appear unlikely that Google is going to do anything about it unless I send them hundreds of examples (I only sent 3 examples).

So it looks like I have some more work to do!

2. Server Upgrade: On a brighter note, my server upgrade is almost complete! I just moved my largest site to a brand new dual-processor server with 2GB RAM. My old server had an outdated single processor and 1GB RAM. I've already noticed the site is tons faster... which makes it well worth the extra bucks a I spent.

I opted for the "no downtime" approach. I dumped and reloaded a snapshot of the database on Saturday. Once it was loaded on the new server, I pointed the older server database connection to the new server. That whole process took about 10 minutes. So instead of being down, I simply had a few posts that got added to the old database during the move. I copied those over manually and from there on the new server database was live!

After that the rest was setting up CRON jobs, permissions, contacting affiliates I interface with to get my new IP on there firewall settings, setting up MY firewall, etc. I moved over all my old Awstats, which worked flawlessly on the new machine to my relief.

On Sunday (yesterday), I did the DNS cutover to have my domain(s) point to my new box. I say domain(s) as plural since I have a number of common "misspellings" as well that I setup to do a 301 redirect to my main site. Also things like redirecting the non-www version of the URL, and all that crap.

So as of today, the DNS settings should have propagated around most the internet... I'm quite relieved to have this task completed. Moving an 8 year old site is never an easy task... There is always something you miss... But so far so good! (knock on wood)

What to do if someone is copying your content

I knew the day would come when I had to deal with this sort of thing. I recently discovered a site that has been copying my content every day for the last few months. They were only recently registered in Aug. 2006 (my site is 8 years old). However they have quickly grown to 5000 pages of content, mostly copied from my site and a few others in my industry. Interestingly they copy the pages manually, since they change only the title when reposting.

They have somehow even achieved a PR4... which is scary considering all they have done is copy content and spam forums with links.

So I'm not sure what to do next. Here is what I've done so far:

1. I faxed a DMCA complaint to Google Adsense (they use adsense). In it I cited a few examples, but noted there are hundreds if not thousands of additional copied pages from both my site and other sites in my industry.

2. I found out they are hosted by Yahoo. I faxed a DMCA complaint to Yahoo using the same letter as above.

3. I sent an email to the person listed in whois regarding their site and informed them I was going to pursue legal action if they did not remove the stolen posts immediately.

4. I also filed a report with the Google Spam team from my Google Webmaster Central citing duplicate content stolen from my site.

What ticks me off is that they are actually starting to look like a legit site. They get mentions in newspaper articles along with my site and others, etc. They are a total scam just copying content from everywhere, and somehow achieving a level of legitimacy. Ridiculous. They even post bogus comments by copying more content from other sites and just adding it as "comments" to their already stolen pages.

One site they copy content from, they actually rank OVER the original site in SERPS. I've notified all the other sites they do this to, and advised them to also file DMCA complaints with the search engines. My hope is the more that join the fight, the soon the search engines will listen.

They seem to be based overseas, which doesn't help in regards to pursuing legal action. But I only hope the search engines take it seriously and do a little research. They will find a gem of a spam/scammer.

I'll post any updates as I learn more...