In some cases, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.
Especially when you discover that someone has copied your content and posted it in their blog, claiming it as their own work.
That’s theft. It’s copyright infringement. It’s plagiarism. It should not be tolerated.
An acquaintance of mine at Third Tribe Marketing discovered she had recently been a victim of such a crime and didn’t know how to deal with the situation. The plagiarizing scumbag took her content, word-for-word, and posted it on their new blog. What’s more stunning about this is the thief was a customer!
Someone copied my content. What should I do?
- Contact the person responsible for stealing your work and tell them (don’t ask them) to remove all instances of duplicate content immediately.
- Give them a maximum or 24 hours to remove the content. Notice I said to actually take the work offline, not just to respond to you.
- If they comply them go back to creating your unique content but keep a close eye on the offender. They stole from you once, they may steal from you again.
- If they don’t comply, then it’s time to get nasty. Send them a second note stating that if they don’t remove the duplicate content then you will report the situation to Big Bad Google. Google, as well as the United States legal system, takes copyright infringement issues quite seriously and they will act on your behalf to correct the problem.
How do I report copyright violations to Google?
Start by filing a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) report at http://www.google.com/dmca.html. If Google finds in your favor, the violation could result in the criminal paying costs and attorney fees as well as a stiff fine for damages. At minimum, their site will be removed from Google’s index. That’s death to any website. In some cases the URL is permanently set to a 503 service unavailable redirect. Gone forever. It’s serious business, folks! There’s a lot of detail to follow through on but it’s worth the effort.
It’s your valued content. It’s your brand. Don’t let anyone ever get away with stealing it from you!
*The phrase ” Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is attributed to Charles Caleb Colton.
**Image by ryancr.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
All true James – but I disagree with the approach because although you can of cause legitimately claim your legal rights – its a waste of your time – and time is very precious.
Instead I make sure that I link back to my blog’s url somewhere high up in most blog posts. If the site is just automatically scraped (which happens 99% of the time) – I get a free backlink – in the unlikely event that the offender even gets the blog indexed. Also I only offer partial RSS feeds (its an options under settings) – so they can’t take the whole post from my feed.
In the odd ocaision I get annoyed – if its a blogger blog or a is running Adsense I report the blog breaking the TOS of those services – that can see them shut down very fast
Lis Sowerbutts´s last blog ..What is a Long Tail Keyword? Keyword Identification for the New and Clueless
Those are great ideas, Lis.
Thanks for stopping by!