Comments on: Protecting Your Site from Content Theft

By: atul chatterjee

atul chatterjee — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:24:34 +0000

I was told there is another recourse. You can complain to the domain registrar and the domain name of the copycat is deactivated.

By: Tualatin Web Design

Tualatin Web Design — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:44:41 +0000

Oh That is a great threat!! Thanks for the article for giving ideas on preventing our website content from theft.

By: Jamie Riddell

Jamie Riddell — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:16:32 +0000

This is a great article covering what you can do if you find your content elsewhere.

With regards copyrighting – do the Creative Commons offer any support in this arena if you have registered you content with them?

I am not sure if you have seen http://www.fairshare.cc which helps automatically track snippets of your content and flag the violation. After that you are on your own.

Thanks!

Jamie

By: Virginia Nussey

Virginia Nussey — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:14:00 +0000

@Maria, You’re absolutely right and I’m sorry to have irritated you with my word choice. Content is copyrighted regardless of whether or not it is registered. Like you said, unregistered content is much harder to defend.
As @James explains, this may be because the U.S. is the only country where you have the ability to manually copyright register your content. So, people who register their content have an extra weapon in the law.
@F. Seidl, Good point. RSS makes it that much easier for the slimies to get a hold of your content. Everyone keep your eyes peeled!
@Steve, I guess companies with affiliates face a whole other set of content problems.
@venkat, I agree with the “make nice first” approach, but people can’t be afraid to pull out the big guns in self defense.
@Jonathan, Thanks for adding that. I wasn’t aware. It’s good to hear that a DMCA notice will be respected by the hosting provider as well. People in content theft situations can use all the alliances they can get.
@Mal, Thanks for sharing your story. Actual experiences speak much louder than what plays out in theory. And I’m glad to hear about how seriously Yahoo takes these issues.

By: Mal

Mal — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:44:53 +0000

Excellent article Virginia. One thing I might ad is that it’s much easier to ask the SE to remove the stolen content from their index than to get an ISP to shut a rogue site down in my experience. Most of the time a pirate steals my content I find out because MY content starts outranking ME but on a rogue site. If you search for Yahoo Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy you get to a page that allows you to email Yahoo lawyers who handle infringement cases. They ask you a page worth of questions and ask you to digitally sign your statement and then in a couple days the bad guys are gone from their index.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:41:45 +0000

One thing you did leave out is that you can file a DMCA notice with the host if the site is hosted within the U.S. or the EU and get the content removed that way if the nice route doesn’t work. A nice alternative to going straight to the search engines in many cases.
If you need any stock letters, I’ve got some on my site you can use!
Best of luck and thank you for the great post.

By: Maria

Maria — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:21:41 +0000

You said:

Lisa Barone wrote a short and sweet guide to copyrighting your content, which you should definitely read if you haven’t you haven’t yet earned the little “c” next to your name.

But surely you must know that your work is copyrighted when you create it. Registration is not required to “earn” the copyright symbol. Just put it there. It applies.

I think it’s your use of the word “earn” that really bugs me in the above quote. You “earn” it by creating it. There’s no magical ritual to go through. PLEASE don’t make people think there is. It’ll just make everyone else think that content without the copyright symbol is up for grabs. It’s not.

I will agree that it could be harder to defend your claim of copyright ownership if a work is not registered, but it is possible. I have done it numerous times. I’ve also had scraping blogs taken down by Google and WordPress.com.

I’ve written extensively about copyright as it applies to authors. (I’ve been writing for a living since 1990.) You can find the first part of my series here: http://www.marialanger.com/2007/08/04/copyright-for-writers-and-bloggers-part-i-why-copyright-is-important/ The series explains how copyright works and what your options are.

By: James Finlayson

James Finlayson — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:19:42 +0000

Just a quick note in regards to copyrighting content. The US is one of a very very small number of countries in the world in which you need/are able to manually copyright work. In almost every other, work receives automatic copyright protection the moment it comes in to existence. A useful note for those not based in the US.

By: venkat

venkat — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:53:41 +0000

Copying content from blgos comon now a days even copygators and caopycats can’t identifiying them first thing when site content is copied is to contact him.

By: Steve Deerfield

Steve Deerfield — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:12:43 +0000

Excellent article Virginia, thank you, it’s nice to have a little backup plan when posting original content.
One other tactic I’ve seen quite often is in selling the private label rights, or the master resell, or rebranding rights and offering affiliate services alongside the free content or product. This way the author can benefit in more ways than one. To your continued success, Steve D