Comments on: Fight Website Content Theft by Filing a DMCA Complaint

By: SRH

SRH — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:34:52 +0000

I don’t have a problem with anyone linking to my blog, but cut n pasting content without consent is wrong. I my earlier days I may have done it, but only from sources that I help promote as an affiliate for a web store.
We have a website, not a blog that is the continual target of a competitor. Recently he went too far and ripped off our entire site concept and strategy. He now looks like an identical service. He was also bold & crafty enough to grab a bunch of text specific to our product s & service, but made minor alterations to avoid copyright infringement, however that is still defined as plagiarism and constitutes infringement (check with a lawyer). My site is my primary income and this guy is stealing from me.

I too filed a DMCA complaint against his host and they took the site down quickly. He replied back that he was going to sue me for taking his site down , HA! Good luck! his $5,000 legal services retainer and his alleged damages will be down the toilet. We are now considering spending about $10,000 in legal fees to file an injunction to stop this pirate.

Use the DMCA with care and be sure you have a good case before you wind up on the wrong side of the gun.

By: Melanie

Melanie — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:05:13 +0000

I have contacted dream host today showing them very clearly that a chinese site they host has taken a whole blog post of mine- original pics and words. All my emails to this site bounced back.

http://www.365we.com/index.php/group_thread/view/id-32373

They refuse to do a thing without a DMCA document. It is plain common sense that this is my info- the person has even linked to my original site.

They aren’t dream hosts at all- they are nightmare hosts who are exposing the whole of blogland to theft.

By: Vaskor

Vaskor — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:42:21 +0000

I just followed the same process with filing DMCA complain to Google and it worked fine. Posts which were stolen from my blog were promptly removed. So, yeah, the process works. The only thing that is nagging me is that I don’t see a way to prevent those splogs from stealing from others. Yes, my posts were deleted, but all other posts stolen from other people are still there.

By: pligg.com

pligg.com — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:20:15 +0000

Fight Website Content Theft by Filing a DMCA Complaint…

Last month I wrote a couple of posts titled When Has Content Theft Gone to Far? and Tips to Deal With Content Theft where I chronicled a website that was stealing a couple of our posts. A couple of days ago I actually noticed a website that has attempt…

By: Miriam Schwab

Miriam Schwab — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:29:49 +0000

He’s manually redoing the posts?! I missed that. That is seriously disgusting.

The web can be such a dark, cruel place. This is almost the least of the bad stuff going on out there. Oh well.

By: Kyle Eslick

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:26:51 +0000

@ Katy – Great detective work!

@ Miriam – Yes, that is a great post! Just to clarify though, this is not scraping. Scraping is where they use your RSS feed to steal your posts, leaving the post unchanged (including your internal links, etc.).

This loser is manually copying/pasting our posts into his text editor, then changing them to link internally on his website and representing them as his own while leaving everything identical except the links. He had over 100 posts 4 days after registering the domain name, 75% of which were from this site.

By: Miriam Schwab

Miriam Schwab — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:48:03 +0000

That sucks that someone is scraping your stuff like that. A few months ago, I discovered that someone was seriously scraping my stuff on WordPress Garage, and I wrote a post with a collection of things you can do to detect scraping, stop it, and protect yourself in the future. Check it out here.

By: Katy Castro

Katy Castro — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:59:26 +0000

Did anyone notice that the banner the guy is using in his sidebar to promote and link to his site is LinkWorth’s banner? It’s the purple and blue one. I thought it looked familiar so I hit up a couple of big sites real quick and sure enough same banner is displayed for LinkWorth’s Combo Account at ProBlogger.

Just goes to show you how far his theft extends…

By: Kyle Eslick

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:14:24 +0000

Update: It looks like the thread at DigitalPoint has since been removed and hopefully the user has been banned from there as well.

Hopefully the noose is tightening on this guy. He isn’t in Google’s index either.

By: Kyle Eslick

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:48:32 +0000

@ Tony – I will reiterate. Please remove this sites content from your site. You aren’t just stealing from me personally, but our other authors and everyone that has contributed to the growth of this site as a WordPress resource.

@ Ruchir – It doesn’t only work if hosted in the US, but you are more likely to find success if the hosting company is within the US borders. Most web hosts are good people and want to do the right thing, so there is no harm in trying.

@ Michael – I hope you never have to! If lazy people would instead honor copyrights, etc. it wouldn’t be needed.

@ Darren – I’m glad they were removed without you even needing to do this. Ironically, I just noticed this same scumbag is now illegally giving away the Revolution theme. I also noticed he is stealing from Daily Blog Tips (though I’m honored to be in the same company I guess).

The laziness of these people is incredible. It never seems to end…