Copyright Infringement

By Lesa Paredes

You’re cruising the ‘net checking out your rankings, or seeing what your competition is putting up on their websites when it happens. You notice something familiar on someone else’s web site. You look at it a bit more closely and lo and behold — someone has stolen your content and put it on their web site. They have posted your exact content on their web site without your permission, and what’s worse, they may be profiting from money that should be coming into your pocket. Stolen content that’s posted as duplicate content on someone else’s site can hurt you in a number of ways — stealing web site traffic, diverting sales — even get your web site banned from search engines for hosting duplicate content. How frustrating would it be to have your web site penalized for hosting your own content?
Stealing content from web sites, and sometimes entire web sites, is more common than most people suspect. It’s called copyright infringement, and there are steps that you can take to force the owner of the other web site to remove your content from their site.

1. Find duplicated content from your site on other people’s web site.

• Copyscape allows you to enter your site URL and will return other pages that contain content with significant matches of words.
• Enter a few sentences from the beginning of your page into a search engine in quotes. It will return your own pages, and any other sites where those sentences are copied.
• Use Google image search to locate stolen photographs or image files.

2. Determine who owns the website on which your content is posted.

• Get contact information from the website where your duplicate content is posted.
• Check the domain’s “whois” entry for contact information.

3. Contact the owner of the web site.
Your first contact with the owner of the web site that duplicates your content should be a polite but firm email informing them of the copyright infringement and requesting that they remove the infringing material from their site.

• Be specific and be sure to detail the infringements.
• Explain what you want done about the situation.
• Detail what steps you will take if they do not comply with your request.
• Be polite. Keep in mind that the owner of the web site may not know that the material was stolen, or that they were not aware they were doing anything wrong. Often, this letter from you will be enough for them to immediately remove the stolen content.

4. If the content is not removed, contact the web site’s hosting company.

Hosting companies are aware that they may also be held liable if one of their customers posts illegally obtained content on their web sites, and will often be cooperative in removing the offending content.
Provide the same details to the hosting company that you did to the web site owner and point to the violation in the Terms of Service agreement. In many cases, the hosting company will remove not only the offending content, but the entire web site.

5. File a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) infringement complaint with Google.

• Google penalizes copyright infringers by removing or blocking access to the material on the offending site — in other words, removing them from their listings. They may also share your complaint with a third party who posts about content thieves.
• You’ll find full details on how to file a DMCA complaint with Google on their DMCA page (http://www.google.com/dmca.html).