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 attempted to completely replicate our site, going as far as to buy the same theme and attempt to hack it similarly, was using each of our WordPress pages (even left references to Hack WordPress on accident in the pages), and has been going through and manually republishing our posts individually and adjusting links to their internal copied posts.

Obviously this not only goes well beyond the syndicated blogs that steal content or at least post excerpts, but it even goes well beyond stealing a couple of our posts. In this situation, this blogger is attempting to replicate the entire identity of this website.

I have to admit, when I first saw this, I was a little heartbroken. I can’t even describe the amount of work put into not only writing the posts you see, but researching and testing plugins, updating old posts so they stay current, etc. Is it even worth it when stuff like this can happen?

Fortunately, this blogger had a contact form, so after I cooled down, I contacted him and requested that all of our copyrighted content be removed. Here was his response:

I am the author of xxxxxxx.com. I think i don’t need a license to use your copyrighted work because the copied work is a factual work rather than a creative one.

However, I am planning to give credit to all authors whose works i copy, so i can give you a credit.

Please contact to me about credit you want!

Obviously this was not going anywhere, so I responded and asked again, but I also began researching because there has to be more we can do to protect ourselves from content theft.   That is when I ran across some posts explaining How to File a DMCA Complaint.

Unfortunately this requires a little work on our part because you have to draft a letter and send it to the blogs advertisers, web hosts, etc. to get their accounts banned.   Based on a few posts I’ve seen on it, it seems to be a fairly successful method, so I will be filing a few of these complaints here shortly.   I will also be notifying Google if the site becomes indexed to make sure they are banned from Google, and I hope to write a follow up post once I hopefully get some results.

Have any of you filed one of these complaints before?   Did it work?

Yesterday I wrote a post titled When Has Stealing Content Gone to Far?   At the time of publishing that post, I wasn’t really sure how it would be received because of the subject matter.   So far all feedback has been pretty positive, so I decided to write a quick follow up post talking about how to deal with getting your content stolen.  Thanks to Laurence for the idea.

As most people should know, when you publish content, pictures, or whatever else on the internet, there is always some risk that things will get scraped or stolen completely from your website/blog.  Despite everything falling under copyright protection, people sometimes get away with it because it is often difficult to enforce. 

So, what can do you to deal with content theft?  Here are two things readers suggested that may help:

1. Terms and Conditions – Create a clear terms and condition policy that is findable on your website.   It may not help, but it certainly can’t hurt anything.   Throw it in the footer of your blog or somewhere that it is accessible. 
2. Use Internal Links in your Posts - In addition to the SEO benefits of working on your internal linking structure, scraped and sometimes stolen content will often include these links back to your website.  

Hopefully those methods will help avoid this in the future, but what can you do when your content has already been stolen? 

1. Contact the Offender – Depending on the situation, some sites may have a contact form or some way to contact the thief.   You can also try checking the domain whois records.  This is a good way to request they delete your stolen content and stop stealing your content in the future.   Though most know they are doing so, a few might not be aware that this is illegal.
2. Take Action Against the Offender – If the first option doesn’t yield any results or there is no way to contact the owner, there are two ways to take action against the thief.   If they use Google AdSense to monetize the site (most do), you can report them to Google by clicking on the “Ads by Google” link in the lower right corner of the AdSense box and provide them feedback.  I believe stolen content is actually one of the default options you can check.   The other thing you can do is contact the hosting company and let them know they are hosting websites that are doing illegal practices.  I’ve heard of people have some success going this route, so it is a great last resort. 

So, that is what I have.   What do you do to deal with scrapers and content thiefs?

P.S.  Ironically enough, unless there is some sort of screening process that I’m not aware of, this post will be scraped at least 3 times shortly after publication.   Am I the only one that finds humor in that?

If your blog has over 100 subscribers on it, it is pretty likely that your blog is probably getting scraped, as they seem to be everywhere anymore.   Hack WordPress currently has 3 blogs scraping its content every time we publish a post, so we’ve become pretty familiar with them.   But that is not actually what I’m referring to when I came up with the title of this post.

What I’m talking about are people that manually reprint an entire post on their “legitimate” blogs.  One blog that has been doing this to me (and I assume others) is a blog called WordPress Collection dot com.  The link was intentionally left out.

The two most recent posts (as of publishing this post) are identical copies of two posts in our archives.  Here are our posts:

• How To: Display the Recent Posts of Specific Categories
• How To: Prevent Google from Indexing Your Images

Now, to be fair, I fully understand when dealing with code that it really doesn’t change, so I have no problem with someone taking one of our code hacks, or someone else’s posts, and publishing it on their blog.  We have done this on occasion, but we always have a fresh post where only the code is the same, and we link to the source.   Unfortunately with this site, it uses the exact same title and exact same content as our posts, word for word.   The only thing I could find changed is the permalink in the code, which was switched to the permalink of their blog.

So, when does content theft go to far?  I’ve never liked scrapers but I have learned to live with them.  They usually only reprint a excerpt of the post and link to the source.  This, however, is going to far in my opinion.   At least change the wording around the code and link to the source.  As a result, this website has been added to my blacklist of sites I don’t visit or link to, etc.

I’ve seen people mention contacting their web hosting as a good method to deal with content theft when something like this gets out of hand.   What methods have you used to deal with content theft?