I always say… You know you’ve made it when people begin copying your work.
And thanks to services like www.copyscape.com it’s much easier to spot offenders these days.
Plagiarizing used to really bother me, especially when the search engines weren’t as smart as they are today. It used to be much easier for thieves to steal your rankings.
However, since the engines value quality inbound links more these days, it’s a little harder for thieves to benefit from stealing your work.
Of course, that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try.
I normally don’t let copycatters bother me too much. They usually get what’s coming to them in the form of search engine penalties or simply lack of success. (I do believe in Karma!)
Besides, if I spent my time chasing these spineless people, it would be counterproductive for my business. So I usually ignore them.
But once and a while I’ll find a person who has gone too far.
The most recent offender not only stole my content word for word, but he stole my pictures (even the photos of me.)
And what angered me even more is the fact he’s an AdSense member and was attempting to make money off the content he stole from me.
Since he is an AdSense publisher, I figured Google would be more proactive about taking action. So I submitted a copyright infringement claim (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
After only 3 days of faxing the claim, his AdSense ads were disabled and the copyrighted content was deleted from the Web server.
Because I didn’t press charges, the offender was allowed back into AdSense after 7 days. But at least he knows I’m watching and was forced to remove the copyrighted content.
So I was somewhat pleased with the overall results. I have to admit, though, I was a little shocked Google didn’t remove him from AdSense completely. I’m pretty sure that was a violation of the AdSense T&C’s.
What Should You Do?
If you find an AdSense Publisher (or any site that appears in Google) copying your content, here’s what you do…
1. Immediately print out all pages from the offender’s site that contain plagiarized content.
2. Print out the pages on your site that contain the copyrighted content.
3. Try contacting the offender first and ask them to remove the content. In my case, there was no contact information on the site (imagine that?) so I wasn’t able to do this.
4. Complete the claim and mail (or fax) the claim to Google. (Faxing is much faster.)
You may have noticed I didn’t mention looking up their domain name records and contacting them and/or their web host.
In my experience, if the person does not have a contact form on their site, they usually have a bogus email in their domain records or never reply to my emails.
I’ve also had horrible luck with contacting Web hosts. After all, these are their customers so they are often reluctant to do anything. So I decided to go straight to Google.
It only took Google a few days to contact the offender and the AdSense ads were disabled immediately.
This procedure will probably work even if the person doesn’t belong to AdSense, but you better believe Google is especially interested in AdSense Publishers who steal content.
Their AdWords advertisers are their primary concern, so they want to make sure the AdSense program is as “clean” as possible.
A Note to Thieves…
It may be quick and easy to steal someone’s content, but I believe you’ll always get what’s coming to you in the end. So is it really worth it?
Copyright infringement is illegal, even if it’s online. And if you steal from the wrong person, you could end up in a world of trouble should they decide to take legal action against you.
Try publishing your own work for a change. Yes, I know… that requires you to do real work and use your brain. Life’s tough, huh?
Great Resource
Jessica Hupp wrote a very useful and comprehensive article on various ways to combat plagiarism. I’d highly recommend you bookmark this blog post.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post. though i had read similar kind of article before.
lisa..i did use copyscape for ur site to see..is there any duplicate content??? ouch i have found many…lol.
Oh yes, like I said… I’d go bonkers if I tried to go after everyone. It’s just not worth it. That just comes with the territory, unfortunately.
That is awful! I hope that you can get that taken care of soon. Even though my content may not be ” theft worthy”, I still may have to check out ” copyscape”. Best Wishes!
I recently found a scraper of my content. It is sad when people can’t write their own content and rely on the hardwork of others.
I hate it when business sites have no email as a contact form lol.
Any images that have a copyright notice I rightly stay away. Otherwise I couldn’t sleep at night if ya know what I mean.
As for content I’m totally original!:)
Follow on Twitter: @airsoftdome
Lisa, thank you for this! I’ve just had this happen to where someone used my information word-for-word on their Squiddo lens. And yep, she had no contact info anywhere on the page, nor on any of the OTHER websites she listed on her Squiddo page.
Gosh it’s infuriating, but you are right that when you take appropriate action, AND then leave the rest to Karma, you get a much better night’s sleep for sure.
It is harder to fight this if they aren’t using any Adsense or ads that can lead you to the owner(s) of those said ads.
Yea, we know we’ve come a long way when someone takes the ‘time’ to copy us, but indeed do I take this as any form of flattery.
And yes, rarely the webhosts do anything about it, shame.
Thank you again for the info on how to act when something happens.
I also plan to copyright my entire website, as well as including copies of my site(s) using the waybackmachine, which I believe is like $35 or so for the gov to give copyright. SO WORTH IT.
Follow on Twitter: @airsoftdome
Correction to my previous post: “ea, we know we’ve come a long way when someone takes the ‘time’ to copy us, but indeed do I take this as any form of flattery.”
I certainly meant to say “but indeed do I NOT take this as any form of flattery”.
The laziness and scummy-ness on parts of these types of people just really make me scratch and shake my head!
Im pretty surprised, I heard when google adsense boots you, they boot your butt for good. lol. I also HATE content theives. I have a ton of original content online, and nothing irks me more than dirtbags making money off of other peoples hard work!
Great advice here by the way.
Funny…this has been one of my major reasons for not starting. I once had a blog and someone was stealing my content and ideas, thus, I got discouraged. I felt like why spend years building up a website only to have someone stealing your stuff and getting credit. But after reading what you did, perhaps I can now move on. It really bothers me that someone used your picture as well. Seems like their should be some way to control that also.
Sandra, preventing theft 100% is pretty much impossible, especially when people see your site has some success. So rather than letting it deter you from starting, just know your options and understand the search engines are so savvy that most thieves realize that it’s no way to get traffic and they either get penalized or never get any traffic so they quit and give up. So I certainly wouldn’t let these thieves prevent you from starting. I believe in Karma and in my experience, most of my copycatters have gotten what’s comin’ to them in the end.
Thank you Lisa for taking time out to respond to my post. Inactivity and procrastination are not feelings I want to experience anymore…
Thank you so much for the info! This is what I need. Apparently somebody has stolen the content (copy past exactly the same post title, same picture and same content) from my one-month-old-blog. That’s annoying. And the thief’s site is putting up Google Adsense too.
I hope you don’t mind if I put a backlink to this blog page in my Group on eHow.com. Many of us writers on eHow have been finding our articles stolen, all over the web. I started the group to try to combat this crime and this blog post is exactly the information we need. Thank you for the clear instructions and the great links to forms and other resources.
Not a problem at all, Diane. Thanks for asking!
Follow on Twitter: @Tanhak
I wrote a blog post recently that I wrote a basic summary on a creditable author’s article, but I made sure to say it wasn’t mine and I put a link to the original post. Did I violate a copyright?
This is great information. I find my articles on the Internet all the time. At first I was excited that other people like my information enough to share. Once I learned that hosting articles without permission was wrong, I was no longer flattered. When I started to see my articles with my name removed and no link back to my site that really upset me. I am not a professional writer and I am just starting out. I wonder why people don’t try to write their own original content instead of stealing information from other people.
I will be signing up to receive your updates and I have shared your blog with several people already. Thanks!