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 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?